ear that if he thus winked at
what his conscience condemned, a bell, or even the tower itself, might
fall and kill him, put a stop even to that compromise. Dancing, which
from his boyhood he had practised on the village green, or in the old
Moot Hall, was still harder to give up. "It was a full year before I
could quite leave that." But this too was at last renounced, and
finally. The power of Bunyan's indomitable will was bracing itself for
severe trials yet to come.

Meanwhile Bunyan's neighbours regarded with amazement the changed life of
the profane young tinker. "And truly," he honestly confesses, "so they
well might for this my conversion was as great as for Tom of Bedlam to
become a sober man." Bunyan's reformation was soon the town's talk; he
had "become godly," "become a right honest man." These commendations
flattered is vanity, and he laid himself out for them. He was then but a
"poor painted hypocrite," he says, "proud of his godliness, and doing all
he did either to be seen of, or well spoken of by man." This state of
self-satisfaction, he tells us, lasted "for about a twelvemonth or more."
During this deceitful calm he says, "I had great peace of conscience, and
should think with myself, 'God cannot choose but now be pleased with me,'
yea, to relate it in mine own way, I thought no man in England could
please God better than I." But no outward reformation can bring lasting
inward peace. When a man is honest with himself, the more earnestly he
struggles after complete obedience, the more faulty does his obedience
appear. The good opinion of others will not silence his own inward
condemnation. He needs a higher righteousness than his own; a firmer
standing-ground than the shifting quicksand of his own good deeds. "All
this while," he writes, "poor wretch as I was, I was ignorant of Jesus
Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had
perished therein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by
nature."

This revolution was nearer than he imagined. Bunyan's self-satisfaction
was rudely shaken, and his need of something deeper in the way of
religion than he had yet experienced was shown him by the conversation of
three or four poor women whom, one day, when pursuing his tinker's
calling at Bedford, he came upon "sitting at a door in the sun, and
talking of the things of God." These women were members of the
congregation of "the holy Mr. John Gifford," who, at that ti