第13章 CHAPTER II.(7)

The agony was so intense, while, for hours together, he struggled with the temptation, that his whole body was convulsed by it. It was no metaphorical, but an actual, wrestling with a tangible enemy. He "pushed and thrust with his hands and elbows," and kept still answering, as fast as the destroyer said "sell Him," "No, Iwill not, I will not, I will not! not for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds!" at least twenty times together. But the fatal moment at last came, and the weakened will yielded, against itself. One morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came again with redoubled force, and would not be silenced. He fought against it as long as he could, "even until I was almost out of breath,"when "without any conscious action of his will" the suicidal words shaped themselves in his heart, "Let Him go if He will."Now all was over. He had spoken the words and they could not be recalled. Satan had "won the battle," and "as a bird that is shot from the top of a tree, down fell he into great guilt and fearful despair." He left his bed, dressed, and went "moping into the field," where for the next two hours he was "like a man bereft of life, and as one past all recovery and bound to eternal punishment." The most terrible examples in the Bible came trooping before him. He had sold his birthright like Esau. He a betrayed his Master like Judas - "I was ashamed that I should be like such an ugly man as Judas." There was no longer any place for repentance. He was past all recovery; shut up unto the judgment to come. He dared hardly pray. When he tried to do so, he was "as with a tempest driven away from God," while something within said, "'Tis too late; I am lost; God hath let me fall." The texts which once had comforted him gave him no comfort now; or, if they did, it was but for a brief space. "About ten or eleven o'clock one day, as I was walking under a hedge and bemoaning myself for this hard hap that such a thought should arise within me, suddenly this sentence bolted upon me, 'The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin,'" and gave me "good encouragement." But in two or three hours all was gone. The terrible words concerning Esau's selling his birthright took possession of his mind, and "held him down." This "stuck with him." Though he "sought it carefully with tears,"there was no restoration for him. His agony received a terrible aggravation from a highly coloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira, an Italian lawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having embraced the Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to return to the Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and despair, from which Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of "the man in the Iron Cage" at "the Interpreter's house." The reading of this book was to his "troubled spirit" as "salt when rubbed into a fresh wound," "as knives and daggers in his soul." We cannot wonder that his health began to give way under so protracted a struggle. His naturally sturdy frame was "shaken by a continual trembling." He would "wind and twine and shrink under his burden," the weight of which so crushed him that he "could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet."His digestion became disordered, and a pain, "as if his breastbone would have split asunder," made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas' sin, so he was to perish by Judas' end, and "burst asunder in the midst." In the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain's mark set upon him; God had marked him out for his curse. No one was ever so bad as he. No one had ever sinned so flagrantly. When he compared his sins with those of David and Solomon and Manasseh and others which had been pardoned, he found his sin so much exceeded theirs that he could have no hope of pardon. Theirs, "it was true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour. But none of them were of the nature of his. He had sold his Saviour. His sin was point blank against Christ." "Oh, methought this sin was bigger than the sins of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world; not all of them together was able to equal mine; mine outwent them every one."It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of his self-torturing illusions. Fierce as the storm was, and long in its duration - for it was more than two years before the storm became a calm - the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossings which threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong on the rocks of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the "haven where he would be." His vivid imagination, as we have seen, surrounded him with audible voices. He had heard, as he thought, the tempter bidding him "Sell Christ;" now he thought he heard God "with a great voice, as it were, over his shoulder behind him,"saying, "Return unto Me, for I have redeemed thee;" and though he felt that the voice mocked him, for he could not return, there was "no place of repentance" for him, and fled from it, it still pursued him, "holloaing after him, 'Return, return!'" And return he did, but not all at once, or without many a fresh struggle.