Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Three or four poor women sat at a door in the sun in a Bedford street, talking about the new birth, and a tinker mending pots nearby overheard them and understood that he had no religion at all. What follows is one of the most harrowing accounts of a mind ever set down: years in which Bunyan believed he had sold Christ, hunted through scripture for a verse that might acquit him, envied the birds and beasts because they had no souls to lose, and could not ring the church bells at Elstow for terror that the steeple would fall on him.