“When I was a soldier,” he says, “I, with others, were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it.  But when I was just ready to go one of the company desired to go in my room.  To which, when I had consented, he took my place.  And coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket bullet, and died.

“Here, as I said, were judgments and mercy, but neither of them did awaken my soul to righteousness.  Wherefore I sinned still, and grew more and more rebellious against God.”

So whether Bunyan served in the Royal army, where he might have heard oaths, or in the Parliamentarian, where he might have heard godly songs and prayers, he still went on his way as before.

Some time after Bunyan left the army, and while he was still very young, he married.  Both he and his wife were, he says, “as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both.  Yet this she had for her part, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, which her father had left her when he died.”

These two books Bunyan read with his wife, picking up again the art of reading, which he had been taught at school, and which he had since almost forgotten.  He began now to go a great deal to church, and one of his chief pleasures was helping to ring the bells.  To him the services were a joy.  He loved the singing, the altar with its candles, the rich robes, the white surplices, and everything that made the service beautiful.  Yet the terrible struggle between good and evil in his soul went on.  He seemed to hear voices in the air, good voices and bad voices, voices that accused him, voices that tempted.  He was a most miserable man, and seemed to himself to be one of the most wicked, and yet perhaps the worst thing he could accuse himself of doing was playing games on Sunday, and pleasing himself by bell-ringing.  He gave up his bell-ringing because it was a temptation to vanity.  “Yet my mind hankered, therefore I would go to the steeple house and look on, though I durst not ring.”  One by one he gave up all the things he loved, things that even if we think them wrong do not seem to us to merit everlasting punishment.  But at last the long struggle ended and his tortured mind found rest in the love of Christ.

Bunyan himself tells us the story of this long fight in a book called Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.  As we read we cannot help but see that Bunyan was never a very wicked man, but merely a man with a very tender conscience.  Things which seemed to other men trifles were to him deadly sins; and although he was so stern to himself, to others he shows a fatherly tenderness which makes us feel that this rough tinker was no narrow Puritan, but a broad-minded, large-hearted Christian.  And now that Bunyan had found peace he became a Baptist, and joined the church of a man whom he calls “the holy Mr. Gifford.”  Gifford had been an officer in the Royal army.  He had been wild and drunken, but repenting of his evil ways had become a preacher.  Now, until he died some years later, he was Bunyan’s fast friend.