sad to say, was begun by listening to his father cursing some obstinate kettle which refused to be tinkered, and it was perfected in the Parliamentary army.  One day his terrible swearing scared a woman, “a very loose and ungodly wretch,” as he tells us, who reprimanded him for his profanity.  The reproach of the poor woman went straight home, like the voice of a prophet.  All his profanity left him; he hung down his head with shame.  “I wished with all my heart,” he says, “that I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing.”  With characteristic vehemence Bunyan hurls himself upon a promise of Scripture, and instantly the reformation begins to work in his soul.  He casts out the habit, root and branch, and finds to his astonishment that he can speak more freely and vigorously than before.  Nothing is more characteristic of the man than this sudden seizing upon a text, which he had doubtless heard many times before, and being suddenly raised up or cast down by its influence.

With Bunyan’s marriage to a good woman the real reformation in his life began.  While still in his teens he married a girl as poor as himself.  “We came together,” he says, “as poor as might be, having not so much household stuff as a dish or spoon between us both.”  The only dowry which the girl brought to her new home was two old, threadbare books, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, and The Practice of Piety[168] Bunyan read these books, which instantly gave fire to his imagination.  He saw new visions and dreamed terrible new dreams of lost souls; his attendance at church grew exemplary; he began slowly and painfully to read the Bible for himself, but because of his own ignorance and the contradictory interpretations of Scripture which he heard on every side, he was tossed about like a feather by all the winds of doctrine.

The record of the next few years is like a nightmare, so terrible is Bunyan’s spiritual struggle.  One day he feels himself an outcast; the next the companion of angels; the third he tries experiments with the Almighty in order to put his salvation to the proof.  As he goes along the road to Bedford he thinks he will work a miracle, like Gideon with his fleece.  He will say to the little puddles of water in the horses’ tracks, “Be ye dry”; and to all the dry tracks he will say, “Be ye puddles.”  As he is about to perform the miracle a thought occurs to him:  “But go first under yonder hedge and pray that the Lord will make you able to perform a miracle.”  He goes promptly and prays.  Then he is afraid of the test, and goes on his way more troubled than before.