unchastity.  “In our days,” to quote Mr. Froude, “a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint.  If in Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious than Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth century must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleased to allow.”  How then, it may be asked, are we to explain the passionate language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which would hardly seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and licentious?  We are confident that Bunyan meant what he said.  So intensely honest a nature could not allow his words to go beyond his convictions.  When he speaks of “letting loose the reins to his lusts,” and sinning “with the greatest delight and ease,” we know that however exaggerated they may appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him overstrained.  Dr. Johnson marvelled that St. Paul could call himself “the chief of sinners,” and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly.  But a highly-strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in general.  It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others, as sins against infinite love—­a love unto death—­and in the light of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned.  The sinfulness of sin—­more especially their own sin—­is the intensest of all possible realities to them.  No language is too strong to describe it.  We may not unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may appear to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether a mistaken one?

The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan.  While still a child “but nine or ten years old,” he tells us he was racked with convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears.  He was scared with “fearful dreams,” and “dreadful visions,” and haunted in his sleep with “apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits” coming to carry him away, which made his bed a place of terrors.  The thought of the Day of Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble.  But though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted, they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased “as if they had never been,” and he gave himself up without restraint to the youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the ringleader.  The “thoughts of religion” became very grievous to him.  He could not endure even to see others read pious books; “it would be as a prison to me.”  The awful realities of eternity which had once been so crushing to his spirit were “both out of