These miseries had no real relation to the social or political conditions amid which their phrases and hymns were born, but to a burden of debts to a jealous and vindictive omnipotence; a burden not of actions really wrong, but of mysterious offences, related to incomprehensible ordinances and heavenly etiquette. No human vices are so malignant as inhuman virtues. Bunyan, in depicting Christian's burden, has, with a felicity perhaps unconscious, made it a pack strapped on. It is not a hunch, not any part of the pilgrim, and had he possessed the courage to examine it there must have been found many spiritual nightmares of the race, and many robust English virtues turned to sins when the merry and honest tinker turned retrospective Rip Van Winkle, and dreamed himself back into the year One. The burden of sins on the poor Israelites had been gradually getting lighter under the scepticism of the Wisdom school, in view of the failure of Jahveh to fulfil the menaces and sentences of the priesthood. Conformity was secured mainly for actual advantages bestowed by the synagogue, or its terrors. But the discovery of the doctrine of a future life and a day of judgment, when all the mysterious "sins" were to be settled for, while smiled at by the Saducees, made the burden of the ignorant poor intolerable. Life was passed under suspended swords. The priesthood had a cowering vassal in every ignorant human being. The time, the labour, the flocks of the peasantry were devoted, but it was all a "sweating" process,--the debts were never paid, and there was always that "certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which shall devour the adversaries." No doubt even the learned supposed these superstitions useful to keep the "masses" in order. But one day a scholarly gentleman, a man of genius, was moved with compassion for these poor lost and priest-harried sheep: he turned aside from his college and his rank, and became their shepherd; he declared they owed no duties to any deity, and that the heavenly despot they so dreaded had no existence. A modern gentleman in a fine mansion and estate may be amused at Bunyan's quaint pilgrim, reading in a book and discovering that he was in a City of Destruction, fleeing with a burden on his back, and rejoicing when it rolls off at the cross. But if this gentleman should suddenly receive from some distant personage papers showing that his estate had been entirely mortgaged by his father, that it would soon be claimed and his family reduced to beggary, he might understand the City of Destruction. And if, soon after, some visitor arrived to state that the holder of the mortgages was dead; that those claims had all legally fallen into his own hands, and that he had burnt them, the rolling off of Christian's burden might be appreciated,--also the enthusiasm of the personal followers of Jesus.