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 this too was at last renounced, and finally.  The power of Bunyan’s indomitable will was bracing itself for severe trials yet to come.