looked upon self-interest as the only motive of men's actions, and though soldiers had died and women had risked their lives for him, he "loved others as little as he thought they loved him." But if he felt no gratitude for benefits he felt no resentment for wrongs. He was incapable either of love or of hate. The only feeling he retained for his fellow-men was that of an amused contempt.

:

It was difficult for Englishmen to believe that any real danger to liberty could come from an idler and a voluptuary such as Charles the Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the king's strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism of the Stuarts who had gone before him. His shrewdness laughed his grandfather's theories of Divine Right down the wind. His indolence made such a personal administration as that which his father delighted in burthensome to him he was too humorous a man to care for the pomp and show of power, and too goodnatured a man to play the tyrant. He told Lord Essex "that he did not wish to be like a Grand Signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to strangle men ; but he did not think he was a king so long as a company of fellows were looking into his actions and examining his ministers as well as his accounts. A king," he thought, "who might be checked, and have his ministers called to account, was but a king in name.' In other words he had no settled plan of tyranny, but he meant to rule as independently as he could, and from the beginning to the end of his reign there never was a moment when he was not doing something to carry out his aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular fashion which it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there was any strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling demanded the dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them. If it protested against his Declaration of Indulgence he recalled it. If it called for

victims in the frenzy of the Popish Plot, he gave it victims till the frenzy was at an end.

3

It was easy for Charles to yield and to wait, and just as easy for him to take up the thread of his purpose again the moment the pressure was over. The one fixed resolve which overrode every other thought in the king's mind was a resolve "not to set out on his travels again." His father had fallen through a quarrel with the two Houses, and Charles was determined to remain on good terms with the Parliament till he was strong enough to pick a quarrel to his profit. He treated the Lords with an easy familiarity which robbed opposition of its seriousness. "Their debates amused him," he said, in his indolent way; and he stood chatting before the fire while peer after peer poured invectives on his ministers, and laughed louder than the rest when Shaftesbury directed his coarsest taunts at the barrenness of the queen. Courtiers were entrusted with the secret "management" of the Commons: obstinate country gentlemen were brought to the royal closet to kiss the king's hand, and listen to the king's pleasant stories of his escape after Worcester; and yet more obstinate country gentlemen were bribed. Where bribes, flattery, and management failed, Charles was content to yield and to wait till his time came again.

3 Charles the First.

III.

"THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS."

GREEN.

[One of the most fatal results of the Restoration of Charles to the throne was the loss of religious liberty. Laws were made which required all Englishmen to conform to the episcopal Church, and punished those who attended the worship of any other religious body with imprisonment. Among the ministers who were thus punished was John Bunyan, the writer of "The Pilgrim's Progress."]

JOHN BUNYAN was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire. Even in childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of heaven and hell. "When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these things did so distress my soul, that then in the midst of my merry sports and childish vanities, amidst my vain companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let go my sins." The sins he could not let go were a love of hockey and of dancing on the village green; for the only real fault which his bitter self-accusation discloses, that of a habit of swearing, was put an end to at once and for ever by a rebuke from an old woman. His passion for bell-ringing clung to him even after he had broken from it as a 66 vain practice;" and he would go to the steeple-house1 and look on, till the thought that a bell might fall and crush him in his sins drove him panic-stricken from the door. A sermon against dancing and games drew him for a time from these indulgences; but the temptation again overmastered his resolve. "I shook the sermon out of my mind, and to my old custom of sports and gaming I 1 The church.

returned with great delight. But the same day, as I was in the midst of a game of cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second time a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' At this I was put in an exceeding maze; wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground I looked up to heaven; and was as if I had with the eyes of my understanding seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those and other ungodly practices."

It was in this atmosphere of excited feeling that the youth of Bunyan was spent. From his childhood he heard heavenly voices, and saw visions of heaven; from his childhood, too, he had been wrestling with this overpowering sense of sin, which sickness and repeated escapes from death did much, as he grew up, to deepen. But in spite of his selfreproaches, his life was a religious one; and the purity and sobriety of his youth was shown by his admission at seventeen into the ranks of the "New Model." 2 Two years later the war 3 was over, and Bunyan found himself married before he was twenty to a "godly" wife, as young and as poor as himself. So poor were the young couple that they could hardly muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the poverty of their home deepened, perhaps, the gloom of the young tinker's restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to comfort him, teaching him again to read and write, for he had forgotten his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books, which formed his library. But the darkness only gathered the thicker round his imaginative soul. "I walked," he tells us of this time, "to a neighbouring town, and sate down 3 Against Charles the First.

2 The Puritan army.

upon a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep pause about the most fearful state my sin had brought me to; and after long musing I lifted up my head; but methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light; and as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon the houses did band themselves. against me. Methought that they all combined together to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and wept to dwell among them, because I had sinned against the Saviour. Oh, how happy now was every creature over I for they stood fast and kept their station. But I was gone and lost."

4

At last, after more than two years of this struggle, the darkness broke. Bunyan felt himself "converted," and freed from the burthen of his sin. He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few years later he became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal post of minister in the congregation his preaching even under the Protectorate was illegal, and "gave great offence " he tells us, to the doctors and priests of that county," but he persisted with little real molestation until the Restoration. Six months after the king's return he was committed to Bedford Gaol on a charge of preaching in unlicensed conventicles; and his refusal to promise to abstain from preaching, kept him there eleven. years. The gaol was crowded with prisoners like himself, and amongst them he continued his ministry, supporting himself by making tagged thread-laces and finding some comfort in the Bible, the "Book of Martyrs," and the writing materials which he was suffered to have with him in prison. But he was in the prime of life; his age was thirty-two when he was imprisoned, and the inactivity and severance from his wife and little children was hard to bear. "The parting with my wife and poor children," he says in words. 4 Of Cromwell.