the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in all manner of vice.  But, when those who wished him ill accused him of licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his purity.  No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her.  Not only had he been strictly faithful to his wife, but he had, even before marriage, been perfectly spotless.  It does not appear from his own confessions, or from the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life.  One bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended again.  The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect.  The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tip-cat, and reading the “History of Sir Bevis of Southampton.”  A rector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model.  But Bunyan’s notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was interrupted by an event which gave a lasting color to his thoughts.  He enlisted in the Parliamentary army, and served during the decisive campaign of 1645.  All that we know of his military career is that, at the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was killed by a shot from the town.  Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.  It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war.  To the last he loved to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.  His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax’s army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married.  His wife had some pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.  And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began to be fearfully disordered.  In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee.  He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons.  His favorite amusements