it is questionable whether the Act forbidding the use of the Book of Common Prayer was strictly observed at Elstow, it is certain that the prohibition of Sunday sports was not.  Bunyan’s narrative shows that the aspect of a village green in Bedfordshire during the Protectorate did not differ much from what Baxter tells us it had been in Shropshire before the civil troubles began, where, “after the Common Prayer had been read briefly, the rest of the day even till dark night almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a great tree, when all the town did meet together.”  These Sunday sports proved the battle-ground of Bunyan’s spiritual experience, the scene of the fierce inward struggles which he has described so vividly, through which he ultimately reached the firm ground of solid peace and hope.  As a high-spirited healthy athletic young fellow, all kinds of manly sports were Bunyan’s delight.  On week days his tinker’s business, which he evidently pursued industriously, left him small leisure for such amusements.  Sunday therefore was the day on which he “did especially solace himself” with them.  He had yet to learn the identification of diversions with “all manner of vice.”  The teaching came in this way.  One Sunday, Vicar Hall preached a sermon on the sin of Sabbath-breaking, and like many hearers before and since, he imagined that it was aimed expressly at him.  Sermon ended, he went home “with a great burden upon his spirit,” “sermon-stricken” and “sermon sick” as he expresses it elsewhere.  But his Sunday’s dinner speedily drove away his self-condemning thoughts.  He “shook the sermon out of his mind,” and went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as “great delight” as ever.  But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or “sly,” just as he had struck the “cat” from its hole, and was going to give it a second blow—­the minuteness of the detail shows the unforgetable reality of the crisis—­he seemed to hear a voice from heaven asking him whether “he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell.”  He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking down on him with threatening countenance.  But like his own Hopeful 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.”