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,