worse than playing at tip-cat, bell-ringing, and dancing on the village green. Innocent as these amusements seem to us to-day, to the Puritan mind of that time they were the snares of the devil, stretched alluringly to destroy the souls of men. Upon Bunyan's sensitive nature the awful im- agery of Calvin's theology laid an irresistible spell, even in early childhood. When only nine or ten years old, he tells us, he was continually tormented with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, and often so shaken by dreams of devils that he trembled for whole days afterward. Still he could not bring himself to give up his " sports and childish vanities," or desert the " vain companions " of whom he was the ringleader.
In his seventeenth year he enlisted as a soldier. We do not know in which army he served, nor precisely for how long. The experience is noteworthy chiefly for the effect which it exercised upon his writings in mature life. The pomp and splendor of war continued to furnish him with images of the battle waged by the soul with sin. The Pilgrim's Progress, and more particularly The Holy War, are crowded with vivid passages the material for which he gathered during this year of soldiering ; and the famous figures of Great Heart and Captain Boanerges are perhaps, as Macaulay confidently asserts, portrait studies of praying captains under whom Bunyan had served in Fairfax's army.
On his return he married a poor but godly wife, who brought with her as dowry " neither a dish nor a spoon," but two pious books the titles of which are drolly signifi- cant of the kind of literature that prevailed in Puritan households of the time, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety. It was now that Bunyan's real spiritual agony began. He has left us a record of it in a work entitled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Shiners, which is the most startlingly vivid and minute transcript of the workings of an overwrought con- science ever put on paper. One day as he was in the
