a strict and holy life he lived in his days both in word and deed.”  Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of the “little he had learnt” at school, he had not lost it “utterly.”  He was still able to read intelligently.  His wife’s gentle influence prevailed on him to begin “sometimes to read” her father’s legacy “with her.”  This must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly at first not much to his taste.  What his favourite reading had been up to this time, his own nervous words tell us, “Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables.”  But as he and his young wife read these books together at their fireside, a higher taste was gradually awakened in Bunyan’s mind; “some things” in them he “found somewhat pleasing” to him, and they “begot” within him “some desires to religion,” producing a degree of outward reformation.  The spiritual instinct was aroused.  He would be a godly man like his wife’s father.  He began to “go to church twice a day, and that too with the foremost.”  Nor was it a mere formal attendance, for when there he tells us he took his part with all outward devotion in the service, “both singing and saying as others did; yet,” as he penitently confesses, “retaining his wicked life,” the wickedness of which, however, did not amount to more than a liking for the sports and games of the lads of the village, bell-ringing, dancing, and the like.  The prohibition of all liturgical forms issued in 1645, the observance of which varied with the strictness or laxity of the local authorities, would not seem to have been put in force very rigidly at Elstow.  The vicar, Christopher Hall, was an Episcopalian, who, like Bishop Sanderson, retained his benefice unchallenged all through the Protectorate, and held it some years after the Restoration and the passing of the Act of Uniformity.  He seems, like Sanderson, to have kept himself within the letter of the law by making trifling variations in the Prayer Book formularies, consistent with a general conformity to the old order of the Church, “without persisting to his own destruction in the usage of the entire liturgy.”  The decent dignity of the ceremonial of his parish church had a powerful effect on Bunyan’s freshly awakened religious susceptibility—­a “spirit of superstition” he called it afterwards—­and helped to its fuller development.  “I adored,” he says, “with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place”—­altars then had not been entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire—­“Priest, Clerk, Vestment, Service, and what else belonging to the church, counting all things holy that were therein contained, and especially the Priest and Clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed because they were the servants of God and were principal in the Holy Temple, to do His work therein, . . . their name, their garb, and work, did so intoxicate and bewitch me.”  If