bog, that shook if I did but stir, and was as those left both of God, and
Christ, and the Spirit, and all good things." All the misdoings of his
earlier years rose up against him. There they were, and he could not rid
himself of them. He thought that no one could be so bad as he was; "not
even the Devil could be his equal: he was more loathsome in his own eyes
than a toad." What then must God think of him? Despair seized fast hold
of him. He thought he was "forsaken of God and given up to the Devil,
and to a reprobate mind." Nor was this a transient fit of despondency.
"Thus," he writes, "I continued a long while, even for some years
together."

This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan's religious history
through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fierce
temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated
scraps of Bible language--texts torn from their context--the harassing
doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the
elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic
power. It is a picture of fearful fascination that he draws. "A great
storm" at one time comes down upon him, "piece by piece," which "handled
him twenty times worse than all he had met with before," while "floods of
blasphemies were poured upon his spirit," and would "bolt out of his
heart." He felt himself driven to commit the unpardonable sin and
blaspheme the Holy Ghost, "whether he would or no." "No sin would serve
but that." He was ready to "clap his hand under his chin," to keep his
mouth shut, or to leap head-foremost "into some muckhill-hole," to
prevent his uttering the fatal words. At last he persuaded himself that
he had committed the sin, and a good but not overwise man, "an ancient
Christian," whom he consulted on his sad case, told him he thought so
too, "which was but cold comfort." He thought himself possessed by the
devil, and compared himself to a child "carried off under her apron by a