Page:The Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy War, Grace Abounding Chunk3.djvu/57

Rh been in my view! But methinks I see by this that Satan will use any means to keep the soul from Christ, He loveth not an awakened frame of spirit; security, blindness, darkness, and error is the very kingdom and habitation of the wicked one.

163. I found it a hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up. I thought I was, as with a tempest, driven away from God; for always, when I cried to God for mercy, this would come in, 'Tis too late; I am lost; God hath let me fall—not to my correction, but to my condemnation: my sin is unpardonable. And I know concerning Esau how that, after he had sold his birthright, he would have received the blessing, but was rejected. About this time I did light on that dreadful story of that miserable mortal Francis Spira—a book that was to my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound. Every sentence in that book, every groan of that man, with all the rest of his actions in his dolours—as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, his twisting, and languishing and pining away under that mighty hand of God that was upon him—was as knives and daggers in my soul; especially that sentence of his was frightful to me, "Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the issues thereof?" Then would the former sentence, as the conclusion of all, fall like an hot thunderbolt again upon my conscience: "For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears."

164. Then should I be struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that I could a for whole, days together feel my very body as well as my mind to shake and totter under sense of this dreadful judgment of God, I felt also such a clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially at some times, as if my