as he imagined, were repeating close to his ear the words, “Sell him! sell him!” He struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his side.  He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour, “Never, never! not for thousands of worlds—­not for thousands!” At length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to escape him, “Let him go, if he will.”  Then his misery became more fearful than ever.  He had done what could not be forgiven.  He had forfeited his part of the great sacrifice.  Like Esau, he had sold his birthright, and there was no longer any place for repentance.  “None,” he afterward wrote, “knows the terrors of those days but myself.”  He has described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos.  He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and the tiles on the houses.  The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth from him.  His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in the highest vigor of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear of death and judgment.  He fancied that this trembling was the sign set on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain.  The unhappy man’s emotion destroyed his power of digestion.  He had such pains that he expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read nor the advisers whom he consulted were likely to do much good in a case like his.  His small library had received a most unseasonable addition—­the account of the lamentable end of Francis Spira.  One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer consulted gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal consequences.  “I am afraid,” said Bunyan, “that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost.”  “Indeed,” said the old fanatic, “I am afraid that you have.”

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer, and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch-traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of God.  Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone.  When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand.  After he had been some time a member of the congregation he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect.  He was, indeed, illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men.  The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort the half-contemptuous admiration of scholars.  Yet it was long before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.