condemnation. He needs a higher righteousness than his own; a firmer
standing-ground than the shifting quicksand of his own good deeds. "All
this while," he writes, "poor wretch as I was, I was ignorant of Jesus
Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had
perished therein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by
nature."

This revolution was nearer than he imagined. Bunyan's self-satisfaction
was rudely shaken, and his need of something deeper in the way of
religion than he had yet experienced was shown him by the conversation of
three or four poor women whom, one day, when pursuing his tinker's
calling at Bedford, he came upon "sitting at a door in the sun, and
talking of the things of God." These women were members of the
congregation of "the holy Mr. John Gifford," who, at that time of
ecclesiastical confusion, subsequently became rector of St. John's
Church, in Bedford, and master of the hospital attached to it. Gifford's
career had been a strange one. We hear of him first as a young major in
the king's army at the outset of the Civil War, notorious for his loose
and debauched life, taken by Fairfax at Maidstone in 1648, and condemned
to the gallows. By his sister's help he eluded his keepers' vigilance,
escaped from prison, and ultimately found his way to Bedford, where for a
time he practised as a physician, though without any change of his loose
habits. The loss of a large sum of money at gaming awoke a disgust at
his dissolute life. A few sentences of a pious book deepened the
impression. He became a converted man, and joined himself to a handful
of earnest Christians in Bedford, who becoming, in the language of the
day, "a church," he was appointed its first minister. Gifford exercised
a deep and vital though narrow influence, leaving behind him at his
death, in 1655, the character of a "wise, tolerant, and truly Christian
man." The conversation of the poor women who were destined to exercise