from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder; his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance from death; the graphic account of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green—­these and other minor touches which give a life and colour to the story, which we should be very sorry to lose, are later additions.  It is impossible to over-estimate the value of the “Grace Abounding,” both for the facts of Bunyan’s earlier life and for the spiritual experience of which these facts were, in his eyes only the outward framework.  Beginning with his parentage and boyhood, it carries us down to his marriage and life in the wayside-cottage at Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford’s congregation at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and his subsequent call to the work of the ministry among them, and winds up with an account of his apprehension, examinations, and imprisonment in Bedford gaol.  The work concludes with a report of the conversation between his noble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes, narrated in a former chapter, “taken down,” he says, “from her own mouth.”  The whole story is of such sustained interest that our chief regret on finishing it is that it stops where it does, and does not go on much further.  Its importance for our knowledge of Bunyan as a man, as distinguished from an author, and of the circumstances of his life, is seen by a comparison of our acquaintance with his earlier and with his later years.  When he laid down his pen no one took it up, and beyond two or three facts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little or nothing of all that happened between his final release and his death.

The value of the “Grace Abounding,” however, as a work of experimental religion may be easily over-estimated.  It is not many who can study Bunyan’s minute history of the various stages of his spiritual life with real profit.  To some temperaments, especially among the young, the book is more likely to prove injurious than beneficial; it is calculated rather to nourish morbid imaginations, and a dangerous habit of introspection, than to foster the quiet growth of the inner life.  Bunyan’s unhappy mode of dealing with the Bible as a collection of texts, each of Divine authority and declaring a definite meaning entirely irrespective of its context, by which the words hide the Word, is also utterly destructive of the true purpose of the Holy Scriptures as a revelation of God’s loving and holy mind and will.  Few things are more touching than the eagerness with which, in his intense self-torture, Bunyan tried to evade the force of those “fearful and terrible Scriptures” which appeared to seal his condemnation, and to lay hold of the promises to the penitent sinner.  His tempest-tossed spirit could only find rest by doing violence to the dogma, then universally accepted and not quite extinct even in our own days, that the