ing to his own figure, in the village of Morality, and acting the part of Mr Worldly Wiseman. Yet his religious education was advancing more than he afterwards thought. He had not found the true spring of spiritual life; but he was groping towards it rather than turning out of the way when he felt conscientiously concerned about keeping the divine commandments, and found some peace of conscience in doing so.

The full blessing of grace was about to visit him; and it came, as God's blessings often come, in what might seem the most accidental manner. Bunyan had listened to many sermons, and not without profit, not without severe excitement of conscience in one case that we have seen. But "the word fitly spoken," and which dropped as good seed into the good and honest heart, did not come to him from any sermon, but from the chance talk of "three or four poor women sitting at a door of one of the streets of Bedford. Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God in their hearts, as also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature; they talked how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against the temptations of the devil. And methought," he adds, "they spake with such pleasantness of scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world. At this I felt my own heart begin to shake, for I saw that in all my thoughts about religion and salvation, the new birth did never enter into my mind."

The conversation of these poor women in the streets of Bedford marks the turning-point in Bunyan's life.

Their words about the new birth sank deeply into his heart. When he left them, and went about his employment, his thoughts still "tarried with them," and he returned again and again to their society, till the spark kindled by their words burned into a living and warming flame. For the first time, his spiritual emotions were not merely agitated but soothed. The feeling not merely of his own wickedness, but of God's method of saving him from his wickedness, came home to him, and he was seized with a "very great softness and tenderness of heart," and also with "a continual meditating" on what these poor women had asserted to him from Scripture. He passed, for a time, into a highly ecstatic frame of mind. He was lifted, as it were, out of the earthly and formal life that he had been living, and brought near to the very gates of heaven. He could not get his spiritual aspirations satisfied; and in his intense desires after the things of heaven, this world and all its good seemed to him poor and unprofitable. "Though I speak it with shame," he says, "yet it is a certain truth: it would then have been as difficult for me to have taken my mind from heaven to earth, as I have often found it since to get again from earth to heaven."

He now finally parted from all his old companions; and he gives us a mournfully affecting glimpse of one of them who madly resolved to go on in his evil ways. There is a wild strange pathos in the contrast between the old companions parting on the road of life-the affectionate tenderness of Bunyan, and the dare-devil recklessness of his friend. << There was a young man in our town to whom my heart before was bent more than to any other; but he, being a most wicked creature, I now shook him off and forsook his company;

but about a quarter of a year after I had left him, I met him in a certain lane, and asked him how he did. He, after his old swearing and mad way, answered 'he was well.' 'But, Harry,' said I, 'why do you curse and swear thus? What will become of you, if you die in this condition?' He answered me in a great chafe, 'What would the devil do for company, if it were not for such as I am!'"

But a new trial awaited him in the course upon which he had entered. The spirit of Antinomianism, which spread so widely in the wake of the religious excitement which had long been moving England, was extending among the religious professors at Bedford. The "Ranters' books" were eagerly read, and held in high esteem by many. The poor man who had first by his conversation led Bunyan to the study of the Holy Scriptures, and with whom he had ever since maintained a religious intimacy, fell under the influence of these books. The doctrines of grace were exaggerated by him into doctrines of license, and he abandoned himself to his new impulses with all the vehemency of an enthusiastic nature. "He turned," says Bunyan, "a most devilish Ranter, and gave himself up to all manner of filthiness, especially uncleanness; he would deny that there was a God, angel, or spirit, and would laugh at all exhortations to sobriety. When I laboured to rebuke his wickedness, he would laugh the more, and pretend that he had gone through all religions, and could never hit upon the right till now."

Startling as such contrasts appear, and inconsistent with all sanity of judgment, they were not uncommon in this age. Men's minds in such a storm of religious fervour as prevailed passed rapidly from one extreme

to another. There was no principle too fixed or sacred for discussion: all landmarks in religious doctrines and experience had been torn up, and the spirit of inquiry, once set in motion, ran in many such cases as this "poor man," from indifference to earnestness and the study of the Bible, and from these again, under some new and irrepressible stimulus, to contempt, and libertinism both of thought and practice. In this respect Puritanism was merely repeating the history of every great religious revival. It seems impossible for multitudes to be moved by the doctrines of grace and the sweeping and contagious fervour that comes from a revived interest in these doctrines, without many yielding, as the wave of religious feeling begins to ebb, to a certain licence of feeling. With the thoughts continually lifted above the practical duties of morality into that higher region where the Divine comes into immediate contact with the human,-transported beyond the lower levels of religion to the prime source whence it issues—in which are all its springs— it is no wonder if ignorant and unbalanced minds should try to make the original spiritual element everything, and turn the act of grace into a cover of their lawlessness. Certainly there have been those who in all such times have done so,-whose principle has been that "God does not and can not see any sin in any of his justified children."* The act of grace is held to be not only primary and absolute, but also adequate in itself-apart from all moral result; and inflamed with this dominant idea, they turn religion into a frenzy, and piety into a barren ecstasy or a mischievous unreality.

This spirit had been now spreading in England for * Quoted from the works of Antinomian leaders.-See Marsden, p. 224.

some years; and we have already, in our sketch of Baxter, seen the fruits of it. During the two preceding Stuart reigns there had been hanging on the verge of Puritanism various sects with a tendency to doctrinal latitudinarianism, such as the Anabaptists, Brownists, and Familists. These had risen into new prominence with the dissolution of the old ecclesiastical bonds; and along with them had sprung up the other and wilder sects of which we have spokenSeekers, Behmenists, and Perfectionists, one and all seeking the ideal of religion in an arbitrary mysticism transcending the common duties and responsibilities of life. The Ranters were the last and extreme offshoot of this spirit, many of whom, like Bunyan's poor friend, seem to have been carried from excess to excess till they denied the very existence of God; while others conceived of Him as a bodily shape, and others as a mere pervading Principle in the universe. The same spirit readily took the most different shapes of temporary belief or of no-belief. Ignorance and vanity, once unbridled, knew no limit to the vagaries of fantastic spiritualism into which they ran.

Bunyan was in some respects not unlikely to have fallen under the influence of this spirit. The almost diseased activity of his spiritual imagination, and his ignorance of Christian truth, combined with his susceptibility to its broadest and most mysterious representations, might have proved a fitting soil for the reception of this extravagant mysticism. But with all his religious excitability, he possessed a healthy natural sense and manliness which saved him from such wild opinions. He does not deny that they presented something congenial to him,-that they were "suitable to his flesh;" but God, who had designed better things