bts whether the
Turks were not in the right and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was
troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to
a broomstick, to the parish bull.

As yet, however, he was only entering the valley of the shadow of death.
Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated before him. Sounds of
cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran through stench and fire,
close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He began to be haunted by a
strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to
commit it. But the most frightful of all the forms which [v.04 p.0804] his
disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to
renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption. Night and day, in
bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close
to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him." He struck at the hobgoblins; he
pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his side. He cried out in
answer to them, hour after hour, "Never, never; not for thousands of
worlds; not for thousands." At length, worn out by this long agony, he
suffered the fatal words to escape him, "Let him go if he will." Then his
misery became more fearful than ever. He had done what could not be
forgiven. He had forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he
had sold his birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance.
"None," he afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself."
He has described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity and
pathos. He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones on the street, and
the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth
from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in the
highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear of
death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set on the
worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy man's
emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains that he
expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted,
were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had
received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable end of
Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer
con