Sunday therefore was the day on which he "did especially solace himself" with them. He had yet to learn the identification of diversions with "all manner of vice." The teaching came in this way. One Sunday, Vicar Hall preached a sermon on the sin of Sabbath-breaking, and like many hearers before and since, he imagined that it was aimed expressly at him. Sermon ended, he went home "with a great burden upon his spirit," "sermon-stricken" and "sermon sick" as he expresses it elsewhere. But his Sunday's dinner speedily drove away his self-condemning thoughts. He "shook the sermon out of his mind," and went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as "great delight" as ever.
But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or "sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to give it a second blow - the minuteness of the detail shows the unforgetable reality of the crisis - he seemed to hear a voice from heaven asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell." He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking down on him with threatening countenance. But like his own Hopeful he "shut his eyes against the light," and silenced the condemning voice with the feeling that repentance was hopeless. "It was too late for him to look after heaven; he was past pardon." If his condemnation was already sealed and he was eternally lost, it would not matter whether he was condemned for many sins or for few.
Heaven was gone already. The only happiness he could look for was what he could get out of his sins - his morbidly sensitive conscience perversely identifying sports with sin - so he returned desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to "take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might taste the sweetness of it."This desperate recklessness lasted with him "about a month or more," till "one day as he was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, cursing and swearing and playing the madman after his wonted manner, the woman of the house, though a very loose and ungodly wretch," rebuked him so severely as "the ungodliest fellow for swearing that ever she heard, able to spoil all the youth in a whole town," that, self-convicted, he hung down his head in silent shame, wishing himself a little child again that he might unlearn the wicked habit of which he thought it impossible to break himself. Hopeless as the effort seemed to him, it proved effectual. He did "leave off his swearing" to his own "great wonder," and found that he "could speak better and with more pleasantness" than when he "put an oath before and another behind, to give his words authority." Thus was one step in his reformation taken, and never retraced; but, he adds sorrowfully, "all this while I knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave my sports and plays." We might be inclined to ask, why should he leave them?
But indifferent and innocent in themselves, an overstrained spirituality had taught him to regard them as sinful. To indulge in them wounded his morbidly sensitive conscience, and so they were sin to him.
The next step onward in this religious progress was the study of the Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly neighbour. Naturally he first betook himself to the historical books, which, he tells us, he read "with great pleasure;" but, like Baxter who, beginning his Bible reading in the same course, writes, "I neither understood nor relished much the doctrinal part," he frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles and such like Scriptures Icould not away with." His Bible reading helped forward the outward reformation he had begun. He set the keeping the Ten Commandments before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted "sometimes" when, as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled in conscience when "now and then he broke one." "But then," he says, "I should repent and say I was sorry for it, and promise God to do better next time, and then get help again; for then I thought Ipleased God as well as any man in England." His progress was slow, for each step involved a battle, but it was steadily onwards. He had a very hard struggle in relinquishing his favourite amusements.
But though he had much yet to learn, his feet were set on the upward way, and he had no mind to go back, great as the temptation often was. He had once delighted in bell-ringing, but "his conscience beginning to be tender" - morbid we should rather say -"he thought such practise to be vain, and therefore forced himself to leave it." But "hankering after it still," he continued to go while his old companions rang, and look on at what he "durst not"join in, until the fear 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.
