preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and
strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the
congregation." Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his
spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the
Devil. Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations
for the soul. No sentence in _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is more suggestive
of Bunyan's view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair
is described as including "delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives,
husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls,
silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not." It is no wonder
that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil's
traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and
applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday
sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong
if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard. He himself,
indeed, seems to have become alarmed when--probably as a result of his own
confessions--it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable
past. He now demanded that "any woman in heaven, earth or hell" should be
produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage. "My
foes," he declared, "have missed their mark in this shooting at me. I am
not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the
fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they
be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and
well." Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack
himself. The verses he prefixed to _The Holy War_ are an indignant reply
to those who accused him of not being the real author of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_. He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by
pointing out the fact that his name, if "anagrammed," made the words: "NU
HONY IN A B." Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of
theologians.