BY REV. EDWIN P. PARKER John Bunyan, son of Thomas Bunnionn Junior and Margaret Bentley, was born 1628, in the quaint old village of Elstow, one mile southwest of Bedford, near the spot where, three hundred years before, his ancestor William Boynon resided. His father was a poor tinker or "braseyer," and his mother's lineage is unknown. He says,--"I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen." He learned to read and write "according to the rate of other poor men's children"; but soon lost "almost utterly" the little he had learned. Shortly after his mother's death, when he was about seventeen years of age, he served as a soldier for several months, probably in the Parliamentary army. Not long afterward he married a woman as poor as himself, by whose gentle influence he was gradually led into the way of those severe spiritual conflicts and "painful exercises of mind" from which he finally came forth, at great cost, victorious. These religious experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to those who will but consider Bunyan's own explanations. From boyhood he had lived a roving and non-religious life, although possessing no little tenderness of conscience. He was neither intemperate nor dishonest; he was not a law-breaker; he explicitly and indignantly declares:--"If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would still be alive and well!" The particular sins of which he was guilty, so far as he specifies them, were profane swearing, from which he suddenly ceased at a woman's reproof, and certain sports, innocent enough in themselves, which the prevailing Puritan rigor severely condemned. What, then, of that vague and exceeding sinfulness of which he so bitterly accuses and repents himself? It was that vision of sin, however disproportionate, which a deeply wounded and graciously healed spirit often has, in looking back upon the past from that theological standpoint whence all want of conformity to the perfect law of God seems heinous and dreadful. "A sinner may be comparatively a little sinner, and sensibly a great one. There are two sorts of greatness in sin: greatness by reason of number; greatness by reason of the horrible nature of sin. In the last sense, he that has but one sin, if such an one could be found, may in his own eyes find himself the biggest sinner in the world." "Visions of God break the heart, because, by the sight the soul then has of His perfections, it sees its own infinite and unspeakable disproportion."