The years of John’s boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit was in the highest vigor all over England; and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire.  It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors.  Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.  As he grew older, his mental conflicts became still more violent.  The strong language in which he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr. Southey.  It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness.  He is called in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand plucked from the burning.  He is designated in Mr. Ivimey’s “History of the Baptists” as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow.  Mr. Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhapsody:  “No man of common sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless, contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of the earth.  Now, be astonished, O heavens, to eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures!  Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love.”  But whoever takes the trouble to examine the evidence, will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their lives, they ought to have understood better.  There can not be a greater mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his neighbors.  Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs. Brownrigg.  It is quite certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely Puritan circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and innocence.  Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to have been the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defense whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others.  He declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against