Bunyan, which he could have gained by
abandoning his religious profession, the words would have had a
meaning; but there is no hint or trace of any prospect of the kind;
nor in Bunyan's position could there have been. The temptation, as he
called it, was a freak of fancy: fancy resenting the minuteness with
which he watched his own emotions. And yet he says, 'It lay upon me
for a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it
one day in a month, sometimes not an hour in many days together,
unless when I was asleep. I could neither eat my food, stoop for a
pin, chop a stick, or cast my eye to look on this or that, but still
the temptation would come, "Sell Christ for this, sell Him for that!
Sell Him! Sell Him!"'

He had been haunted before with a notion that he was under a spell;
that he had been fated to commit the unpardonable sin; and he was now
thinking of Judas, who had been admitted to Christ's intimacy, and had
then betrayed him. Here it was before him--the very thing which he had
so long dreaded. If his heart did but consent for a moment, the deed
was done. His doom had overtaken him. He wrestled with the thought as
it rose, thrust it from him 'with his hands and elbows,' body and mind
convulsed together in a common agony. As fast as the destroyer said,
'Sell Him,' Bunyan said, 'I will not; I will not; I will not, not for
thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds!' One morning as he lay in
his bed, the voice came again, and would not be driven away. Bunyan
fought against it, till he was out of breath. He fell back exhausted,
and without conscious action of his will, the fatal sentence passed
through his brain, 'Let Him go if He will.'

That the 'selling Christ' was a bargain in which he was to lose all
and receive nothing is evident from the form in which he was overcome.
Yet if he had gained a fortune by fraud or forgery, he could not have
been more certain that he had destroyed himself.

Satan had won the battle, and he, 'as a bird shot from a tree, had
fallen into guilt and despair.' He got out of bed, 'and went moping
into the fields,' where he wandered for two hours, 'as a man bereft of
life, and now past recovering,' 'bound over to eternal punishment.' He
shrank under the hedges, 'in guilt and sorrow, bemoaning the hardness
of his fate.' In vain the words now came back that had so comforted
him, 'The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin.' They had no
application to him. He had acquir