The Pilgrim, having now floundered through the Slough of Despond, passed through the Wicket Gate, climbed the Hill Difficulty, and got safe by the Lions, entered the Palace Beautiful, and was “had in to the family.” In plain words, Bunyan united himself to the little Christian brotherhood at Bedford, of which the former loose-living royalist major, Mr. Gifford, was the pastor, and was formally admitted into their society. In Gifford we recognize the prototype of the Evangelist of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” while the Prudence, Piety, and Charity of Bunyan’s immortal narrative had their human representatives in devout female members of the congregation, known in their little Bedford world as Sister Bosworth, Sister Munnes, and Sister Fenne, three of the poor women whose pleasant words on the things of God, as they sat at a doorway in the sun, “as if joy did make them speak,” had first opened Bunyan’s eyes to his spiritual ignorance. He was received into the church by baptism, which, according to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe “the Struggler,” was performed publicly by Mr. Gifford, in the river Ouse, the “Bedford river” into which Bunyan tells us he once fell out of a boat, and barely escaped drowning. This was about the year 1653. The exact date is uncertain. Bunyan never mentions his baptism himself, and the church books of Gifford’s congregation do not commence till May, 1656, the year after Gifford’s death. He was also admitted to the Holy Communion, which for want, as he deemed, of due reverence in his first approach to it, became the occasion of a temporary revival of his old temptations. While actually at the Lord’s Table he was “forced to bend himself to pray” to be kept from uttering blasphemies against the ordinance itself, and cursing his fellow communicants. For three-quarters of a year he could “never have rest or ease” from this shocking perversity. The constant strain of beating off this persistent temptation seriously affected his health. “Captain Consumption,” who carried off his own “Mr. Badman,” threatened his life. But his naturally robust constitution “routed his forces,” and brought him through what at one time he anticipated would prove a fatal illness. Again and again, during his period of indisposition, the Tempter took advantage of his bodily weakness to ply him with his former despairing questionings as to his spiritual state. That seemed as bad as bad could be. “Live he must not; die he dare not.” He was repeatedly near giving up all for lost. But a few words of Scripture brought to his mind would revive his drooping spirits, with a natural reaction on his physical health, and he became “well both in body and mind at once.” “My sickness did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again.” At another time, after three or four days of deep dejection, some words from the Epistle to the Hebrews “came bolting in upon him,” and sealed his sense of acceptance with an assurance he never afterwards entirely lost. “Then with joy I told my wife, ‘Now I know, I know.’ That night was a good night to me; I never had but few better. I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.”

During this time Bunyan, though a member of the Bedford congregation, continued to reside at Elstow, in the little thatched wayside tenement, with its lean-to forge at one end, already mentioned, which is still pointed out as “Bunyan’s Cottage.” There his two children, Mary, his passionately loved blind daughter, and Elizabeth were born; the one in 1650, and the other in 1654. It was probably in the next year, 1655, that he finally quitted his native village and took up his residence in Bedford, and became a deacon of the congregation. About this time also he must have lost the wife to whom he owed so much. Bunyan does not mention the event, and our only knowledge of it is from the conversation of his second wife, Elizabeth, with Sir Matthew Hale. He sustained also an even greater loss in the death of his friend and comrade, Mr. Gifford, who died in September, 1655. The latter was succeeded by a young man named John Burton, of very delicate health, who was taken by death from his congregation, by whom he was much beloved, in September, 1660, four months after the restoration of the Monarchy and the Church. Burton thoroughly appreciated Bunyan’s gifts, and stood sponsor for him on the publication of his first printed work. This was a momentous year for Bunyan, for in it Dr. Brown has shown, by a “comparison of dates,” that we may probably place the beginning of Bunyan’s ministerial life. Bunyan was now in his twenty-seventh year, in the prime of his manly vigour, with a vivid imagination, ready speech, minute textual knowledge of the Bible, and an experience of temptation and the wiles of the evil one, such as few Christians of double his years have ever reached. “His gifts could not long be hid.” The beginnings of that which was to prove the great work of his life were slender enough. As Mr. Froude says, “he was modest, humble, shrinking.” The members of his congregation, recognizing that he had “the gift of utterance” asked him to speak “a word of exhortation” to them. The request scared him. The most truly gifted are usually the least conscious of their gifts. At first it did much “dash and abash his spirit.” But after earnest entreaty he gave way, and made one or two trials of his gift in private meetings, “though with much weakness and infirmity.” The result proved the correctness of his brethren’s estimate. The young tinker showed himself no common preacher. His words came home with power to the souls of his hearers, who “protested solemnly, as in the sight of God, that they were both affected and comforted by them, and gave thanks to the Father of mercies for the grace bestowed on him.” After this, as the brethren went out on their itinerating rounds to the villages about, they began to ask Bunyan to accompany them, and though he “durst not make use of his gift in an open way,” he would sometimes, “yet more privately still, speak a word of admonition, with which his hearers professed their souls edified.” That he had a real Divine call to the ministry became increasingly evident, both to himself and to others. His engagements of this kind multiplied. An entry in the Church book records “that Brother Bunyan being taken off by the preaching of the gospel” from his duties as deacon, another member was appointed in his room. His appointment to the ministry was not long delayed. After “some solemn prayer with fasting,” he was “called forth and appointed a preacher of the word,” not, however, so much for the Bedford congregation as for the neighbouring villages. He did not however, like some, neglect his business, or forget to “show piety at home.” He still continued his craft as a tinker, and that with industry and success. “God,” writes an early biographer, “had increased his stores so that he lived in great credit among his neighbours.” He speedily became famous as a preacher. People “came in by hundreds to hear the word, and that from all parts, though upon sundry and divers accounts,” “some,” as Southey writes, “to marvel, and some perhaps to mock.” Curiosity to hear the once profane tinker preach was not one of the least prevalent motives. But his word proved a word of power to many. Those “who came to scoff remained to pray.” “I had not preached long,” he says, “before some began to be touched and to be greatly afflicted in their minds.” His success humbled and amazed him, as it must every true man who compares the work with the worker. “At first,” he says, “I could not believe that God should speak by me to the heart of any man, still counting myself unworthy; and though I did put it from me that they should be awakened by me, still they would confess it and affirm it before the saints of God. They would also bless God for me unworthy wretch that I am and count me God’s instrument that showed to them the way of salvation.” He preached wherever he found opportunity, in woods, in barns, on village greens, or even in churches. But he liked best to preach “in the darkest places of the country, where people were the furthest off from profession,” where he could give the fullest scope to “the awakening and converting power” he possessed. His success as a preacher might have tempted him to vanity. But the conviction that he was but an instrument in the hand of a higher power kept it down. He saw that if he had gifts and wanted grace he was but as a “tinkling cymbal.” “What, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a sounding brass? Is it so much to be a fiddle?” This thought was, “as it were, a maul on the head of the pride and vainglory” which he found “easily blown up at the applause and commendation of every unadvised christian.” His experiences, like those of every public speaker, especially the most eloquent, were very varied, even in the course of the same sermon. Sometimes, he tells us, he would begin “with much clearness, evidence, and liberty of speech,” but, before he had done, he found himself “so straitened in his speech before the people,” that he “scarce knew or remembered what he had been about,” and felt “as if his head had been in a bag all the time of the exercise.” He feared that he would not be able to “speak sense to the hearers,” or he would be “seized with such faintness and strengthlessness that his legs were hardly able to carry him to his place of preaching.” Old temptations too came back. Blasphemous thoughts formed themselves into words, which he had hard work to keep himself from uttering from the pulpit. Or the tempter tried to silence him by telling him that what he was going to say would condemn himself, and he would go “full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit door.” “‘What,’ the devil would say, ’will you preach this? Of this your own soul is guilty. Preach not of it at all, or if you do, yet so mince it as to make way for your own escape.’” All, however, was in vain. Necessity was laid upon him. “Woe,” he cried, “is me, if I preach not the gospel.” His heart was “so wrapped up in the glory of this excellent work, that he counted himself more blessed and honoured of God than if he had made him emperor of the Christian world.” Bunyan was no preacher of vague generalities. He knew that sermons miss their mark if they hit no one. Self-application is their object. “Wherefore,” he says, “I laboured so to speak the word, as that the sin and person guilty might be particularized by it.” And what he preached he knew and felt to be true. It was not what he read in books, but what he had himself experienced. Like Dante he had been in hell himself, and could speak as one who knew its terrors, and could tell also of the blessedness of deliverance by the person and work of Christ. And this consciousness gave him confidence and courage in declaring his message. It was “as if an angel of God had stood at my back.” “Oh it hath been with such power and heavenly evidence upon my own soul while I have been labouring to fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could not be contented with saying, ‘I believe and am sure.’ Methought I was more than sure, if it be lawful so to express myself, that the things I asserted were true.”

Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointments which wrung his heart. He could be satisfied with nothing less than the conversion and sanctification of his hearers. “If I were fruitless, it mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who did condemn.” And the result of a sermon was often very different from what he anticipated: “When I thought I had done no good, then I did the most; and when I thought I should catch them, I fished for nothing.” “A word cast in by-the-bye sometimes did more execution than all the Sermon besides.” The tie between him and his spiritual children was very close. The backsliding of any of his converts caused him the most extreme grief; “it was more to me than if one of my own children were going to the grave. Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of the loss of the salvation of my own soul.”

A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted, illustrates the power of his preaching even in the early days of his ministry. “Being to preach in a church in a country village in Cambridgeshire” it was before the Restoration “and the public being gathered together in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear him. But God met him there by His ministry, so that he came out much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country afterwards.” “This story,” continues the anonymous biographer, “I know to be true, having many times discoursed with the man.” To the same ante-Restoration period, Dr. Brown also assigns the anecdote of Bunyan’s encounter, on the road near Cambridge, with the university man who asked him how he dared to preach not having the original Scriptures. With ready wit, Bunyan turned the tables on the scholar by asking whether he had the actual originals, the copies written by the apostles and prophets. The scholar replied, “No,” but they had what they believed to be a true copy of the original. “And I,” said Bunyan, “believe the English Bible to be a true copy, too.” “Then away rid the scholar.”

The fame of such a preacher, naturally, soon spread far and wide; all the countryside flocked eagerly to hear him. In some places, as at Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, and Yelden in his own county of Bedfordshire, the pulpits of the parish churches were opened to him. At Yelden, the Rector, Dr. William Dell, the Puritan Master of Caius College, Cambridge, formerly Chaplain to the army under Fairfax, roused the indignation of his orthodox parishioners by allowing him “one Bunyon of Bedford, a tinker,” as he is ignominiously styled in the petition sent up to the House of Lords in 1660 to preach in his parish church on Christmas Day. But, generally, the parochial clergy were his bitterest enemies. “When I first went to preach the word abroad,” he writes, “the Doctors and priests of the country did open wide against me.” Many were envious of his success where they had so signally failed. In the words of Mr. Henry Deane, when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith, Professor of Arabic and Keeper of the University Library at Cambridge, who had come upon Bunyan preaching in a barn at Toft, they were “angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans,” and proved himself more skilful in his craft than those who had graduated at a university. Envy is ever the mother of detraction. Slanders of the blackest dye against his moral character were freely circulated, and as readily believed. It was the common talk that he was a thorough reprobate. Nothing was too bad for him. He was “a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman, and the like.” It was reported that he had “his misses and his bastards; that he had two wives at once,” &c. Such charges roused all the man in Bunyan. Few passages in his writings show more passion than that in “Grace Abounding,” in which he defends himself from the “fools or knaves” who were their authors. He “begs belief of no man, and if they believe him or disbelieve him it is all one to him. But he would have them know how utterly baseless their accusations are.” “My foes,” he writes, “have missed their mark in their open shooting at me. I am not the man. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would be still alive. I know not whether there is such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife.” He calls not only men, but angels, nay, even God Himself, to bear testimony to his innocence in this respect. But though they were so absolutely baseless, nay, the rather because they were so baseless, the grossness of these charges evidently stung Bunyan very deeply.

So bitter was the feeling aroused against him by the marvellous success of his irregular ministry, that his enemies, even before the restoration of the Church and Crown, endeavoured to put the arm of the law in motion to restrain him. We learn from the church books that in March, 1658, the little Bedford church was in trouble for “Brother Bunyan,” against whom an indictment had been laid at the Assizes for “preaching at Eaton Socon.” Of this indictment we hear no more; so it was probably dropped. But it is an instructive fact that, even during the boasted religious liberty of the Protectorate, irregular preaching, especially that of the much dreaded Anabaptists, was an indictable offence. But, as Dr. Brown observes, “religious liberty had not yet come to mean liberty all round, but only liberty for a certain recognized section of Christians.” That there was no lack of persecution during the Commonwealth is clear from the cruel treatment to which Quakers were subjected, to say nothing of the intolerance shown to Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. In Bunyan’s own county of Bedford, Quakeresses were sentenced to be whipped and sent to Bridewell for reproving a parish priest, perhaps well deserving of it, and exhorting the folks on a market day to repentance and amendment of life. The simple truth is, writes Robert Southey, all parties were agreed on the one catholic opinion that certain doctrines were not to be tolerated: the only points of difference between them were what those doctrines were, and how far intolerance might be carried. The withering lines are familiar to us, in which Milton denounces the New Forcers of Conscience, who by their intolerance and super-metropolitan and hyperarchiepiscopal tyranny, proved that in his proverbial words, New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large

“Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free!”

How Bunyan came to escape we know not. But the danger he was in was imminent enough for the church at Bedford to meet to pray “for counsail what to doe” in respect of it.

It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan made his first essay at authorship. He was led to it by a long and tiresome controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to Bedford. The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being undermined. The Quakers’ teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal Christ. He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, at “Paul’s Steeple-house in Bedford town,” and other places. One of them, Anne Blackley by name, openly bade him throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, “No; for then the devil would be too hard for me.” The same enthusiast charged him with “preaching up an idol, and using conjuration and witchcraft,” because of his assertion of the bodily presence of Christ in heaven.

The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author, cannot but be viewed with much interest. It was a little volume in duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled “Some Gospel Truths Opened, by that unworthy servant of Christ, John Bunyan, of Bedford, by the Grace of God, preacher of the Gospel of His dear Son,” published in 1656. The little book, which, as Dr. Brown says, was “evidently thrown off at a heat,” was printed in London and published at Newport Pagnel. Bunyan being entirely unknown to the world, his first literary venture was introduced by a commendatory “Epistle” written by Gifford’s successor, John Burton. In this Burton speaks of the young author Bunyan was only in his twenty-ninth year as one who had “neither the greatness nor the wisdom of the world to commend him,” “not being chosen out of an earthly but out of a heavenly university, the Church of Christ,” where “through grace he had taken three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experience of the temptations of Satan,” and as one of whose “soundness in the faith, godly conversation, and his ability to preach the Gospel, not by human aid, but by the Spirit of the Lord,” he “with many other saints had had experience.” This book must be pronounced a very remarkable production for a young travelling tinker, under thirty, and without any literary or theological training but such as he had gained for himself after attaining to manhood. Its arrangement is excellent, the arguments are ably marshalled, the style is clear, the language pure and well chosen. It is, in the main, a well-reasoned defence of the historical truth of the Articles of the Creed relating to the Second Person of the Trinity, against the mystical teaching of the followers of George Fox, who, by a false spiritualism, sublimated the whole Gospel narrative into a vehicle for the representation of truths relating to the inner life of the believer. No one ever had a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the facts of the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men. But he would not suffer their “subjectivity” to adopt modern terms to destroy their “objectivity.” If the Son of God was not actually born of the Virgin Mary, if He did not live in a real human body, and in that body die, lie in the grave, rise again, and ascend up into heaven, whence He would return and that Bunyan believed shortly in the same Body He took of His mortal mother, His preaching was vain; their faith was vain; they were yet in their sins. Those who “cried up a Christ within, in opposition to a Christ without,” who asserted that Christ had no other Body but the Church, that the only Crucifixion, rising again, and ascension of Christ was that within the believer, and that every man had, as an inner light, a measure of Christ’s Spirit within him sufficient to guide him to salvation, he asserted were “possessed with a spirit of delusion;” deceived themselves, they were deceiving others to their eternal ruin. To the refutation of such fundamental errors, substituting a mystical for an historical faith, Bunyan’s little treatise is addressed; and it may be truly said the work is done effectually. To adopt Coleridge’s expression concerning Bunyan’s greater and world-famous work, it is an admirable “Summa Theologiae Evangelicae,” which, notwithstanding its obsolete style and old-fashioned arrangement, may be read even now with advantage.

Bunyan’s denunciation of the tenets of the Quakers speedily elicited a reply. This was written by a certain Edward Burrough, a young man of three and twenty, fearless, devoted, and ardent in the propagation of the tenets of his sect. Being subsequently thrown into Newgate with hundreds of his co-religionists, at the same time that his former antagonist was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, Burrough met the fate Bunyan’s stronger constitution enabled him to escape; and in the language of the times, “rotted in prison,” a victim to the loathsome foulness of his place of incarceration, in the year of the “Bartholomew Act,” 1662.

Burrough entitled his reply, “The Gospel of Peace, contended for in the Spirit of Meekness and Love against the secret opposition of John Bunyan, a professed minister in Bedfordshire.” His opening words, too characteristic of the entire treatise, display but little of the meekness professed. “How long, ye crafty fowlers, will ye prey upon the innocent? How long shall the righteous be a prey to your teeth, ye subtle foxes! Your dens are in darkness, and your mischief is hatched upon your beds of secret whoredoms?” Of John Burton and the others who recommended Bunyan’s treatise, he says, “They have joined themselves with the broken army of Magog, and have showed themselves in the defence of the dragon against the Lamb in the day of war betwixt them.” We may well echo Dr. Brown’s wish that “these two good men could have had a little free and friendly talk face to face. There would probably have been better understanding, and fewer hard words, for they were really not so far apart as they thought. Bunyan believed in the inward light, and Burrough surely accepted an objective Christ. But failing to see each other’s exact point of view, Burrough thunders at Bunyan, and Bunyan swiftly returns the shot.”

The rapidity of Bunyan’s literary work is amazing, especially when we take his antecedents into account. Within a few weeks he published his rejoinder to Friend Burrough, under the title of “A Vindication of Gospel Truths Opened.” In this work, which appeared in 1667, Bunyan repays Burrough in his own coin, styling him “a proved enemy to the truth,” a “grossly railing Rabshakeh, who breaks out with a taunt and a jeer,” is very “censorious and utters many words without knowledge.” In vigorous, nervous language, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself from Burrough’s charges, and proves that the Quakers are “deceivers.” “As for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbands is not walking after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do make a religion out of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walking after their own lusts, and not after the Spirit of God.” Burrough had most unwarrantably stigmatized Bunyan as one of “the false prophets, who love the wages of unrighteousness, and through covetousness make merchandise of souls.” Bunyan calmly replies, “Friend, dost thou speak this as from thy own knowledge, or did any other tell thee so? However that spirit that led thee out this way is a lying spirit. For though I be poor and of no repute in the world as to outward things, yet through grace I have learned by the example of the Apostle to preach the truth, and also to work with my hands both for mine own living, and for those that are with me, when I have opportunity. And I trust that the Lord Jesus who hath helped me to reject the wages of unrighteousness hitherto, will also help me still so that I shall distribute that which God hath given me freely, and not for filthy lucre’s sake.” The fruitfulness of his ministry which Burrough had called in question, charging him with having “run before he was sent,” he refuses to discuss. Bunyan says, “I shall leave it to be taken notice of by the people of God and the country where I dwell, who will testify the contrary for me, setting aside the carnal ministry with their retinue who are so mad against me as thyself.”

In his third book, published in 1658, at “the King’s Head, in the Old Bailey,” a few days before Oliver Cromwell’s death, Bunyan left the thorny domain of polemics, for that of Christian exhortation, in which his chief work was to be done. This work was an exposition of the parable of “the Rich Man and Lazarus,” bearing the horror-striking title, “A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul.” In this work, as its title would suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the parable as a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave, gives full scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of the lost. It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in the similes, and is written in the nervous homespun English of which he was master. Its popularity is shown by its having gone through nine editions in the author’s lifetime. To take an example or two of its style: dealing with the excuses people make for not hearing the Gospel, “O, saith one, I dare not for my master, my brother, my landlord; I shall lose his favour, his house of work, and so decay my calling. O, saith another, I would willingly go in this way but for my father; he chides me and tells me he will not stand my friend when I come to want; I shall never enjoy a pennyworth of his goods; he will disinherit me And I dare not, saith another, for my husband, for he will be a-railing, and tells me he will turn me out of doors, he will beat me and cut off my legs;” and then turning from the hindered to the hinderers: “Oh, what red lines will there be against all those rich ungodly landlords that so keep under their poor tenants that they dare not go out to hear the word for fear that their rent should be raised or they turned out of their houses. Think on this, you drunken proud rich, and scornful landlords; think on this, you madbrained blasphemous husbands, that are against the godly and chaste conversation of your wives; also you that hold your servants so hard to it that you will not spare them time to hear the Word, unless it will be where and when your lusts will let you.” He bids the ungodly consider that “the profits, pleasures, and vanities of the world” will one day “give thee the slip, and leave thee in the sands and the brambles of all that thou hast done.” The careless man lies “like the smith’s dog at the foot of the anvil, though the fire sparks flee in his face.” The rich man remembers how he once despised Lazarus, “scrubbed beggarly Lazarus. What, shall I dishonour my fair sumptuous and gay house with such a scabbed creephedge as he? The Lazaruses are not allowed to warn them of the wrath to come, because they are not gentlemen, because they cannot with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Nay, they must not, shall not, speak to them, and all because of this.”

The fourth production of Bunyan’s pen, his last book before his twelve years of prison life began, is entitled, “The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded.” With a somewhat overstrained humility which is hardly worthy of him, he describes himself in the title-page as “that poor contemptible creature John Bunyan, of Bedford.” It was given to the world in May, 1659, and issued from the same press in the Old Bailey as his last work. It cannot be said that this is one of Bunyan’s most attractive writings. It is as he describes it, “a parcel of plain yet sound, true, and home sayings,” in which with that clearness of thought and accuracy of arrangement which belongs to him, and that marvellous acquaintance with Scripture language which he had gained by his constant study of the Bible, he sets forth the two covenants the covenant of works, and the covenant of Grace “in their natures, ends, bounds, together with the state and condition of them that are under the one, and of them that are under the other.” Dr. Brown describes the book as “marked by a firm grasp of faith and a strong view of the reality of Christ’s person and work as the one Priest and Mediator for a sinful world.” To quote a passage, “Is there righteousness in Christ? that is mine. Is there perfection in that righteousness? that is mine. Did He bleed for sin? It was for mine. Hath He overcome the law, the devil, and hell? The victory is mine, and I am come forth conqueror, nay, more than a conqueror through Him that hath loved me. . . Lord, show me continually in the light of Thy Spirit, through Thy word, that Jesus that was born in the days of Cæsar Augustus, when Mary, a daughter of Judah, went with Joseph to be taxed in Bethlehem, that He is the very Christ. Let me not rest contented without such a faith that is so wrought even by the discovery of His Birth, Crucifying Death, Blood, Resurrection, Ascension, and Second which is His Personal Coming again, that the very faith of it may fill my soul with comfort and holiness.” Up and down its pages we meet with vivid reminiscences of his own career, of which he can only speak with wonder and thankfulness. In the “Epistle to the Reader,” which introduces it, occurs the passage already referred to describing his education. “I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father’s house in a very mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen.” Of his own religious state before his conversion he thus speaks: “When it pleased the Lord to begin to instruct my soul, He found me one of the black sinners of the world. He found me making a sport of oaths, and also of lies; and many a soul-poisoning meal did I make out of divers lusts, such as drinking, dancing, playing, pleasure with the wicked ones of the world; and so wedded was I to my sins, that thought I to myself, ‘I will have them though I lose my soul.’” And then, after narrating the struggles he had had with his conscience, the alternations of hope and fear which he passed through, which are more fully described in his “Grace Abounding,” he thus vividly depicts the full assurance of faith he had attained to: “I saw through grace that it was the Blood shed on Mount Calvary that did save and redeem sinners, as clearly and as really with the eyes of my soul as ever, methought, I had seen a penny loaf bought with a penny. . . O let the saints know that unless the devil can pluck Christ out of heaven he cannot pull a true believer out of Christ.” In a striking passage he shows how, by turning Satan’s temptations against himself, Christians may “Get the art as to outrun him in his own shoes, and make his own darts pierce himself.” “What! didst thou never learn to outshoot the devil in his own bow, and cut off his head with his own sword as David served Goliath?” The whole treatise is somewhat wearisome, but the pious reader will find much in it for spiritual edification.