He seemed to
hear voices in the air, good voices and bad voices, voices that
accused him, voices that tempted. He was a most miserable man,
and seemed to himself to be one of the most wicked, and yet
perhaps the worst thing he could accuse himself of doing was
playing games on Sunday, and pleasing himself by bell-ringing.
He gave up his bell-ringing because it was a temptation to
vanity. "Yet my mind hankered, therefore I would go to the
steeple house and look on, though I durst not ring." One by one
he gave up all the things he loved, things that even if we think
them wrong do not seem to us to merit everlasting punishment.
But at last the long struggle ended and his tortured mind found
rest in the love of Christ.
Bunyan himself tells us the story of this long fight in a book
called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. As we read we
cannot help but see that Bunyan was never a very wicked man, but
merely a man with a very tender conscience. Things which seemed
to other men trifles were to him deadly sins; and although he was
so stern to himself, to others he shows a fatherly tenderness
which makes us feel that this rough tinker was no narrow Puritan,
but a broad-minded, large-hearted Christian.
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