d such a young man up to the whole parish as a model.
But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very
different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his
tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was
interrupted by an event which gave a lasting color to his thoughts. He
enlisted in the Parliamentary army, and served during the decisive
campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at
the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was
killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as
having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.
It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to
draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from
guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under
its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain
Credence are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among
those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some
pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.
And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by
education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious
virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began to
be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict
Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His
favorite amusements were, one after another, relinquished, though not
without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tip-cat he
paused, and stood staring wildly upward with his stick in his hand. He
had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to
heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful
countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of
bell-ringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the
church-tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the
thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple
would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place.
To give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some
months elapsed be