About this time Bunyan was greatly troubled, though at the same time encouraged in his endeavours after the blessedness he longed for so earnestly but could not yet attain to, by “a dream or vision” which presented itself to him, whether in his waking or sleeping hours he does not tell us.  He fancied he saw his four Bedford friends refreshing themselves on the sunny side of a high mountain while he was shivering with dark and cold on the other side, parted from them by a high wall with only one small gap in it, and that not found but after long searching, and so strait and narrow withal that it needed long and desperate efforts to force his way through.  At last he succeeded.  “Then,” he says, “I was exceeding glad, and went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their sun.”

But this sunshine shone but in illusion, and soon gave place to the old sad questioning, which filled his soul with darkness.  Was he already called, or should he be called some day?  He would give worlds to know.  Who could assure him?  At last some words of the prophet Joel (chap. iii, 21) encouraged him to hope that if not converted already, the time might come when he should be converted to Christ.  Despair began to give way to hopefulness.

At this crisis Bunyan took the step which he would have been wise if he had taken long before.  He sought the sympathy and counsel of others.  He began to speak his mind to the poor people in Bedford whose words of religious experiences had first revealed to him his true condition.  By them he was introduced to their pastor, “the godly Mr. Gifford,” who invited him to his house and gave him spiritual counsel.  He began to attend the meetings of his disciples.

The teaching he received here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan’s morbid sensitiveness.  For it was based upon a constant introspection and a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion of its motive, which made a man’s ever-varying spiritual feelings the standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to the Saviour.  It is not, therefore, at all surprising that a considerable period intervened before, in the language of his school, “he found peace.”  This period, which seems to have embraced two or three years, was marked by that tremendous inward struggle which he has described, “as with a pen of fire,” in that marvellous piece of religious autobiography, without a counterpart except in “The Confessions of St. Augustine,” his “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.”  Bunyan’s first experiences after his introduction to Mr. Gifford and the inner circle of his disciples were most discouraging.  What he heard of God’s dealings with their souls showed him something of “the vanity and inward wretchedness of his wicked heart,” and at the same time roused all its hostility to God’s will.  “It did work at that rate for wickedness as it never did before.”