the religious controversies which were fashionable in those days.
We have noticed his encounter with the Ranters, and he soon had
to give battle to persons called Quakers. Before the Society of
Friends was formed, and their rules of discipline were published,
many Ranters and others, some of whom were bad characters and held
the wildest opinions, passed under the name of Quakers. Some of
these denied that the Bible was the Word of God; and asserted that
the death of Christ was not a full atonement for sin--that there
is no future resurrection, and other gross errors. The Quakers,
who were afterwards united to form the Society of Friends, from the
first denied all those errors. Their earliest apologist, Barclay,
in his theses on the Scriptures, says, 'They are the doctrines of
Christ, held forth in precious declarations, spoken and written
by the movings of God's Spirit.' Whoever it was that asserted the
heresies, to Bunyan the investigation of them, in the light of Divine
truth, was attended with great advantages. It was through 'this
narrow search of the Scriptures that he was not only enlightened,
but greatly confirmed and comforted in the truth.'[104]

He longed to compare his experience with that of some old and eminent
convert, and 'God did cast into his hand' Luther On the Galatians,
'so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece, if I did but
turn it over.'[105] The commentary of this enlightened man was
a counterpart to his own feelings. 'I found,' says Bunyan, 'my
condition, in his experience so largely and profoundly handled,
as if his book had been written out of my own heart. I prefer the
book before all others as most fit for a wounded conscience.' This
was the 'voice of a man' that Christian 'heard as going before him
in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,' and was glad that some who
feared God were in this valley as well as himself, who could say,