were, one after another, relinquished, though not without many painful struggles.  In the middle of a game at tip-cat he paused, and stood staring wildly upward with his stick in his hand.  He had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the sky.  The odious vice of bell-ringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the church-tower and look on while others pulled the ropes.  But soon the thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place.  To give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling sin.  When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of that austere time, faultless.  All Elstow talked of him as an eminently pious youth.  But his own mind was more unquiet than ever.  Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.

At another time, Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma:  “If I have not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles.”  He was tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, “Be ye dry,” and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the neighboring villages was passed; that all who were to be saved in that part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray and strive some months too late.

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right, and the Christians in the wrong.  Then he was troubled by a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to the parish bull.  As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Soon the darkness grew thicker.  Hideous forms floated before him.  Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears.  His way ran through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit.  He began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and by a morbid longing to commit it.  But the most frightful of all the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.  Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits,