“as knives and daggers in his soul.”  We cannot wonder that his health began to give way under so protracted a struggle.  His naturally sturdy frame was “shaken by a continual trembling.”  He would “wind and twine and shrink under his burden,” the weight of which so crushed him that he “could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.”  His digestion became disordered, and a pain, “as if his breastbone would have split asunder,” made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas’ sin, so he was to perish by Judas’ end, and “burst asunder in the midst.”  In the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain’s mark set upon him; God had marked him out for his curse.  No one was ever so bad as he.  No one had ever sinned so flagrantly.  When he compared his sins with those of David and Solomon and Manasseh and others which had been pardoned, he found his sin so much exceeded theirs that he could have no hope of pardon.  Theirs, “it was true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour.  But none of them were of the nature of his.  He had sold his Saviour.  His sin was point blank against Christ.”  “Oh, methought this sin was bigger than the sins of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world; not all of them together was able to equal mine; mine outwent them every one.”

It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of his self-torturing illusions.  Fierce as the storm was, and long in its duration—­for it was more than two years before the storm became a calm—­the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossings which threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong on the rocks of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the “haven where he would be.”  His vivid imagination, as we have seen, surrounded him with audible voices.  He had heard, as he thought, the tempter bidding him “Sell Christ;” now he thought he heard God “with a great voice, as it were, over his shoulder behind him,” saying, “Return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee;” and though he felt that the voice mocked him, for he could not return, there was “no place of repentance” for him, and fled from it, it still pursued him, “holloaing after him, ‘Return, return!’” And return he did, but not all at once, or without many a fresh struggle.  With his usual graphic power he describes the zigzag path by which he made his way.  His hot and cold fits alternated with fearful suddenness.  “As Esau beat him down, Christ raised him up.”  “His life hung in doubt, not knowing which way he should tip.”  More sensible evidence came.  “One day,” he tells us, “as I walked to and fro in a good man’s shop”—­we can hardly be wrong in placing it in Bedford—­“bemoaning myself for this hard hap of mine, for that I should commit so great a sin, greatly fearing that I should not be pardoned, and ready to sink with fear, suddenly there was as if there had rushed in at the window the noise of wind upon me, but very pleasant, and I heard a voice speaking, ’Did’st ever refuse