the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away.”  He wished himself “a dog or a toad,” for they “had no soul to be lost as his was like to be;” and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle upon him.  “If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one.”  And yet he was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought himself singular.  “This much sunk me.  I thought my condition was alone; but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not.”  Again the very ground of his faith was shaken.  “Was the Bible true, or was it not rather a fable and cunning story?” All thought “their own religion true.  Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet Saviour as Christians had for Christ?  What if all we believed in should be but ‘a think-so’ too?” So powerful and so real were his illusions that he had hard work to keep himself from praying to things about him, to “a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like,” or even to Satan himself.  He heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desired to have him, and that “so loud and plain that he would turn his head to see who was calling him;” when on his knees in prayer he fancied he felt the foul fiend pull his clothes from behind, bidding him “break off, make haste; you have prayed enough.”

This “horror of great darkness” was not always upon him.  Bunyan had his intervals of “sunshine-weather” when Giant Despair’s fits came on him, and the giant “lost the use of his hand.”  Texts of Scripture would give him a “sweet glance,” and flood his soul with comfort.  But these intervals of happiness were but short-lived.  They were but “hints, touches, and short visits,” sweet when present, but “like Peter’s sheet, suddenly caught up again into heaven.”  But, though transient, they helped the burdened Pilgrim onward.  So vivid was the impression sometimes made, that years after he could specify the place where these beams of sunlight fell on him—­“sitting in a neighbour’s house,”—­“travelling into the country,”—­as he was “going home from sermon.”  And the joy was real while it lasted.  The words of the preacher’s text, “Behold, thou art fair, my love,” kindling his spirit, he felt his “heart filled with comfort and hope.”  “Now I could believe that my sins would be forgiven.”  He was almost beside himself with ecstasy.  “I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God that I thought I could have spoken of it even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood me.”  “Surely,” he cried with gladness, “I will not forget this forty years hence.”  “But, alas! within less than forty days I began to question all again.”  It was the Valley of the Shadow of Death which Bunyan, like his own Pilgrim, was travelling through.  But, as in his allegory, “by and by the day broke,” and “the Lord did more fully and