to him to determine whether he had it or not.  If not, he was a castaway indeed, doomed to perish for ever.  So he determined to put it to the test.  The Bible told him that faith, “even as a grain of mustard seed,” would enable its possessor to work miracles.  So, as Mr. Froude says, “not understanding Oriental metaphors,” he thought he had here a simple test which would at once solve the question.  One day as he was walking along the miry road between Elstow and Bedford, which he had so often paced as a schoolboy, “the temptation came hot upon him” to put the matter to the proof, by saying to the puddles that were in the horse-pads “be dry,” and to the dry places, “be ye puddles.”  He was just about to utter the words when a sudden thought stopped him.  Would it not be better just to go under the hedge and pray that God would enable him?  This pause saved him from a rash venture, which might have landed him in despair.  For he concluded that if he tried after praying and nothing came of it, it would prove that he had no faith, but was a castaway.  “Nay, thought I, if it be so, I will never try yet, but will stay a little longer.”  “Then,” he continues, “I was so tossed betwixt the Devil and my own ignorance, and so perplexed, especially at sometimes, that I could not tell what to do.”  At another time his mind, as the minds of thousands have been and will be to the end, was greatly harassed by the insoluble problems of predestination and election.  The question was not now whether he had faith, but “whether he was one of the elect or not, and if not, what then?” “He might as well leave off and strive no further.”  And then the strange fancy occurred to him, that the good people at Bedford whose acquaintance he had recently made, were all that God meant to save in that part of the country, and that the day of grace was past and gone for him; that he had overstood the time of mercy.  “Oh that he had turned sooner!” was then his cry.  “Oh that he had turned seven years before!  What a fool he had been to trifle away his time till his soul and heaven were lost!” The text, “compel them to come in, and yet there is room,” came to his rescue when he was so harassed and faint that he was “scarce able to take one step more.”  He found them “sweet words,” for they showed him that there was “place enough in heaven for him,” and he verily believed that when Christ spoke them He was thinking of him, and had them recorded to help him to overcome the vile fear that there was no place left for him in His bosom.  But soon another fear succeeded the former.  Was he truly called of Christ?  “He called to them when He would, and they came to Him.”  But they could not come unless He called them.  Had He called him?  Would He call him?  If He did how gladly would he run after Him.  But oh, he feared that He had no liking to him; that He would not call him.  True conversion was what he longed for.  “Could it have been gotten for gold,” he said, “what could I have given for it!  Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state.”  All those whom he thought to be truly converted were now lovely in his eyes.  “They shone, they walked like people that carried the broad seal of heaven about them.  Oh that he were like them, and shared in their goodly heritage!”