before the people,” that he “scarce knew or remembered what he had been about,” and felt “as if his head had been in a bag all the time of the exercise.”  He feared that he would not be able to “speak sense to the hearers,” or he would be “seized with such faintness and strengthlessness that his legs were hardly able to carry him to his place of preaching.”  Old temptations too came back.  Blasphemous thoughts formed themselves into words, which he had hard work to keep himself from uttering from the pulpit.  Or the tempter tried to silence him by telling him that what he was going to say would condemn himself, and he would go “full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit door.” “‘What,’ the devil would say, ’will you preach this?  Of this your own soul is guilty.  Preach not of it at all, or if you do, yet so mince it as to make way for your own escape.’” All, however, was in vain.  Necessity was laid upon him.  “Woe,” he cried, “is me, if I preach not the gospel.”  His heart was “so wrapped up in the glory of this excellent work, that he counted himself more blessed and honoured of God than if he had made him emperor of the Christian world.”  Bunyan was no preacher of vague generalities.  He knew that sermons miss their mark if they hit no one.  Self-application is their object.  “Wherefore,” he says, “I laboured so to speak the word, as that the sin and person guilty might be particularized by it.”  And what he preached he knew and felt to be true.  It was not what he read in books, but what he had himself experienced.  Like Dante he had been in hell himself, and could speak as one who knew its terrors, and could tell also of the blessedness of deliverance by the person and work of Christ.  And this consciousness gave him confidence and courage in declaring his message.  It was “as if an angel of God had stood at my back.”  “Oh it hath been with such power and heavenly evidence upon my own soul while I have been labouring to fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could not be contented with saying, ‘I believe and am sure.’  Methought I was more than sure, if it be lawful so to express myself, that the things I asserted were true.”

Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointments which wrung his heart.  He could be satisfied with nothing less than the conversion and sanctification of his hearers.  “If I were fruitless, it mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who did condemn.”  And the result of a sermon was often very different from what he anticipated:  “When I thought I had done no good, then I did the most; and when I thought I should catch them, I fished for nothing.”  “A word cast in by-the-bye sometimes did more execution than all the Sermon besides.”  The tie between him and his spiritual children was very close.  The backsliding of any of his converts caused him the most extreme grief; “it was more to me than if one of my own children were going to the grave.  Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of the loss of the salvation of my own soul.”