ination that he draws. "A great
storm" at one time comes down upon him, "piece by piece," which "handled
him twenty times worse than all he had met with before," while "floods of
blasphemies were poured upon his spirit," and would "bolt out of his
heart." He felt himself driven to commit the unpardonable sin and
blaspheme the Holy Ghost, "whether he would or no." "No sin would serve
but that." He was ready to "clap his hand under his chin," to keep his
mouth shut, or to leap head-foremost "into some muckhill-hole," to
prevent his uttering the fatal words. At last he persuaded himself that
he had committed the sin, and a good but not overwise man, "an ancient
Christian," whom he consulted on his sad case, told him he thought so
too, "which was but cold comfort." He thought himself possessed by the
devil, and compared himself to a child "carried off under her apron by a
gipsy." "Kick sometimes I did, and also shriek and cry, but yet I was as
bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away."
He wished himself "a dog or a toad," for they "had no soul to be lost as
his was like to be;" and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle
upon him. "If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could
not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one." And yet he
was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought
himself singular. "This much sunk me. I thought my condition was alone;
but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not." Again
the very ground of his faith was shaken. "Was the Bible true, or was it
not rather a fable and cunning story?" All thought "their own religion
true. Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet
Saviour as Christians had for Christ? What if all we believed in should
be but 'a think-so' too?" So powerful and so real were his illusions
that he had hard work to keep himself from praying to things about him,
to "a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like," or even to Satan himself. He
heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desired to have him, and
that "so loud and plain that he would turn his head to see who was
calling him;" when on his knees in prayer he fancied he felt the foul
fiend pull his clothes from behind, bidding him "break off, make haste;
you have prayed enough."

This "horror of great darkness" was not always upon him. Bunyan had his
intervals of "sunshine-weather" when Gi