like many hearers before and since, he imagined that it was aimed
expressly at him. Sermon ended, he went home "with a great burden upon
his spirit," "sermon-stricken" and "sermon sick" as he expresses it
elsewhere. But his Sunday's dinner speedily drove away his
self-condemning thoughts. He "shook the sermon out of his mind," and
went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as
"great delight" as ever. But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or
"sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to
give it a second blow--the minuteness of the detail shows the
unforgetable reality of the crisis--he seemed to hear a voice from heaven
asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his
sins and go to hell." He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking
down on him with threatening countenance. But like his own Hopeful he
"shut his eyes against the light," and silenced the condemning voice with
the feeling that repentance was hopeless. "It was too late for him to
look after heaven; he was past pardon." If his condemnation was already
sealed and he was eternally lost, it would not matter whether he was
condemned for many sins or for few. Heaven was gone already. The only
happiness he could look for was what he could get out of his sins--his
morbidly sensitive conscience perversely identifying sports with sin--so
he returned desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to "take my fill
of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might
taste the sweetness of it."

This desperate recklessness lasted with him "about a month or more," till
"one day as he was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, cursing and
swearing and playing the madman after his wonted manner, the woman of the
house, though a very loose and ungodly wretch," rebuked him so severely
as "the ungodliest fellow for swearing that ever she heard, able to spoil
all the youth in a whole town," that, self-convicted, he hung down his