together was able to equal mine; mine outwent them every one."

It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of his self-
torturing illusions. Fierce as the storm was, and long in its
duration--for it was more than two years before the storm became a
calm--the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossings which
threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong on the rocks
of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the "haven where he
would be." His vivid imagination, as we have seen, surrounded him with
audible voices. He had heard, as he thought, the tempter bidding him
"Sell Christ;" now he thought he heard God "with a great voice, as it
were, over his shoulder behind him," saying, "Return unto Me, for I have
redeemed thee;" and though he felt that the voice mocked him, for he
could not return, there was "no place of repentance" for him, and fled
from it, it still pursued him, "holloaing after him, 'Return, return!'"
And return he did, but not all at once, or without many a fresh struggle.
With his usual graphic power he describes the zigzag path by which he
made his way. His hot and cold fits alternated with fearful suddenness.
"As Esau beat him down, Christ raised him up." "His life hung in doubt,
not knowing which way he should tip." More sensible evidence came. "One
day," he tells us, "as I walked to and fro in a good man's shop"--we can
hardly be wrong in placing it in Bedford--"bemoaning myself for this hard
hap of mine, for that I should commit so great a sin, greatly fearing
that I should not be pardoned, and ready to sink with fear, suddenly
there was as if there had rushed in at the window the noise of wind upon
me, but very pleasant, and I heard a voice speaking, 'Did'st ever refuse
to be justified by the Blood of Christ?'" Whether the voice were
supernatural or not, he was not, "in twenty years' time," able to
determine. At the time he thought it was. It was "as if an angel had
come upon me." "It commanded a great calm upon me. It persuaded me