common matters. Little
things became great things in the glare of religious zeal; and the godly
man learnt to shrink from a surplice, or a mince-pie at Christmas, as he
shrank from impurity or a lie. Nor was this all. The self-restraint and
sobriety which marked the Calvinist limited itself wholly to his outer
life. In his inner soul sense, reason, judgement, were too often
overborne by the terrible reality of invisible things. Our first
glimpse of Oliver Cromwell is as a young country squire and farmer in
the marsh-levels around Huntingdon and St. Ives, buried from time to
time in a deep melancholy, and haunted by fancies of coming death. "I
live in Meshac," he writes to a friend, "which they say signifies
Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifies Darkness; yet the Lord forsaketh
me not." The vivid sense of a Divine Purity close to such men made the
life of common men seem sin. "You know what my manner of life has been,"
Cromwell adds. "Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated light. I
hated godliness." Yet his worst sin was probably nothing more than an
enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper
earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like
that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan
was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in
childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell.
"When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these
things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry
sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often
much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let
go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of
dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter
self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end
to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for
bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a "vain
practice"; and he would go to the steeple-house and look on, till the
thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him
panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew
him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again
overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my
old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But the