within me, suddenly this sentence bolted upon me, 'The blood of Christ
cleanseth from all sin,'" and gave me "good encouragement." But in two
or three hours all was gone. The terrible words concerning Esau's
selling his birthright took possession of his mind, and "held him down."
This "stuck with him." Though he "sought it carefully with tears," there
was no restoration for him. His agony received a terrible aggravation
from a highly coloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira,
an Italian lawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having
embraced the Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to
return to the Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and
despair, from which Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of "the man
in the Iron Cage" at "the Interpreter's house." The reading of this book
was to his "troubled spirit" as "salt when rubbed into a fresh wound,"
"as knives and daggers in his soul." We cannot wonder that his health
began to give way under so protracted a struggle. His naturally sturdy
frame was "shaken by a continual trembling." He would "wind and twine
and shrink under his burden," the weight of which so crushed him that he
"could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet." His
digestion became disordered, and a pain, "as if his breastbone would have
split asunder," made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas' sin,
so he was to perish by Judas' end, and "burst asunder in the midst." In
the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain's mark set upon him; God had
marked him out for his curse. No one was ever so bad as he. No one had
ever sinned so flagrantly. When he compared his sins with those of David
and Solomon and Manasseh and others which had been pardoned, he found his
sin so much exceeded theirs that he could have no hope of pardon. Theirs,
"it was true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour. But none of them
were of the nature of his. He had sold his Saviour. His sin was point
blank against Christ." "Oh, methought this sin was bigger than the sins
of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world; not all of them