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