The Life of John Bunyan [9]
he "shut his eyes against the light," and silenced the condemning
voice with the feeling that repentance was hopeless. "It was too
late for him to look after heaven; he was past pardon." If his
condemnation was already sealed and he was eternally lost, it would
not matter whether he was condemned for many sins or for few.
Heaven was gone already. The only happiness he could look for was
what he could get out of his sins - his morbidly sensitive
conscience perversely identifying sports with sin - so he returned
desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to "take my fill of
sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might
taste the sweetness of it."
This desperate recklessness lasted with him "about a month or
more," till "one day as he was standing at a neighbour's shop-
window, cursing and swearing and playing the madman after his
wonted manner, the woman of the house, though a very loose and
ungodly wretch," rebuked him so severely as "the ungodliest fellow
for swearing that ever she heard, able to spoil all the youth in a
whole town," that, self-convicted, he hung down his head in silent
shame, wishing himself a little child again that he might unlearn
the wicked habit of which he thought it impossible to break
himself. Hopeless as the effort seemed to him, it proved
effectual. He did "leave off his swearing" to his own "great
wonder," and found that he "could speak better and with more
pleasantness" than when he "put an oath before and another behind,
to give his words authority." Thus was one step in his reformation
taken, and never retraced; but, he adds sorrowfully, "all this
while I knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave my sports and
plays." We might be inclined to ask, why should he leave them?
But indifferent and innocent in themselves, an overstrained
spirituality had taught him to regard them as sinful. To indulge
in them wounded his morbidly sensitive conscience, and so they were
sin to him.
The next step onward in this religious progress was the study of
the Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly
neighbour. Naturally he first betook himself to the historical
books, which, he tells us, he read "with great pleasure;" but, like
Baxter who, beginning his Bible reading in the same course, writes,
"I neither understood nor relished much the doctrinal part," he
frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles and such like Scriptures I
could not away with." His Bible reading helped forward the outward
reformation he had begun. He set the keeping the Ten Commandments
before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted "sometimes" when,
as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled in
conscience when "now and then he broke one." "But then," he says,
"I should repent and say I was sorry for it, and promise God to do
better next time, and then get help again; for then I thought I
pleased God as well as any man in England." His progress was slow,
for each step involved a battle, but it was steadily onwards. He
had a very hard struggle in relinquishing his favourite amusements.
But though he had much yet to learn, his feet were set on the
upward way, and he had no mind to go back, great as the temptation
often was. He had once delighted in bell-ringing, but "his
conscience beginning to be tender" - morbid we should rather say -
"he thought such practise to be vain, and therefore forced himself
to leave it." But "hankering after it still," he continued to go
while his old companions rang, and look on at what he "durst not"
join in, until the fear that if he thus winked at what his
conscience condemned, a bell, or even the tower itself, might fall
and kill him, put a stop even to that compromise. Dancing, which
from his boyhood he had practised on the village green, or in the
old Moot Hall, was still harder to give up. "It was a full year
before I could quite leave that." But