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Bunyan calls himself the "chief of sinners" and feels assured of "grace abounding" to him. But his autobiography rather shows until the very last only signs of the torments from which he could not extricate himself as the militant victim of a keen interior struggle between the real identity of the being he forcibly regards as god and his own natural notions regarding intrinsic god. Taking the cue hopelessly from the first being, he calls the struggles temptation: "Of all the temptations that I ever met with in my life, to question the being of god, and the truth of his gospel is the worst, and worst to be born; when this temptation comes, it takes away my girdle from me, and removeth the foundation from under me." He immediately imagines that he has "discovered grace," and yet concludes the work with a list of his "seven abominations" against that being. In fact, they are crimes against himself. The work is also interesting for another reason. This is the constant attempt by Beelzebub to redeem him from Lucifer and Bunyan’s determination to remain stonewalled by the latter. Bunyan uncritically calls these bonafide attempts "discouragements." "’You are very hot for mercy,’ " tells Beelzebub authentically, " ‘but I will cool you; this frame shall not last always... I will cool you insensibly, by degrees, by little and little: what care I’ saith he" (Beelzebub) " ‘though I be seven years in chilling your heart ... though you be burning hot at present, yet, if I can pull you from this fire, I shall have you cold before it be long.’ " Resuming from Bunyan at another point, "I once had this much upon my spirit, That my imprisonment might end at the gallows ... now, therefore, satan" (read Beelzebub) "suggested thus unto me: But how if when you come indeed to die, you should be in this condition; that is, as not to savour the things of god (read Lucifer), nor to have any evidence upon your soul for a better state hereafter? ... The tempter (read redeemer from Lucifer) followed me with, ‘but whither must you go when you die? What will become of you? Where will you be found in another world? What evidence have you for your heaven and glory,’ and (in Bunyan’s words) an inheritance among them that are sanctified?" Bunyan died unanticipatedly in London at the house of "one Mr. Straddocks, a grocer," of a "violent fever." He was caught by excessive rains while on his way back from a trip impatiently undertaken in behalf of a "prodigal son" to prepare his father’s mind for taking him back in his parental home. We are informed too that as far as the purpose of the trip was concerned, he had successfully "disposed all things to the best."–cited from Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, pp.35, 100, 173-74.