was probably in 1655 that Bunyan removed to Bedford. Here he soon lost the wife to whose piety he had owed so much, and about the same time his pastor and friend, the ‘holy Mr. Gifford.' His own health also suffered; he was threatened with consumption, but his naturally robust constitution carried him safely through what at one time he expected would have been a fatal illness. In 1655 Bunyan, who had been chosen one of the deacons, began to exercise his gift of exhortation, at first privately, and as he gained courage and his ministry proved acceptable 'in a more publick way.' In 1657 his calling as a preacher was formally recognised, and he was set apart to that office, ‘after solemn prayer and fasting,' another member being appointed deacon in his room, 'brother Bunyan being taken off by preaching the gospel.' His fame as a preacher soon spread. When it was known that the once blaspheming tinker had turned preacher, they flocked by hundreds, and that from all parts,' to hear him, though, as he says, 'upon sundry and divers accounts' some to marvel, some to mock, but some with an earnest desire to profit by his words. After his ordination Bunyan continued to pursue his trade as a brazier, combining with it the exercise of his preaching gifts as occasion served in the various villages visited by him, 'in woods, in barns, on village greens, or in town chapels.' Opposition was naturally aroused among the settled ministry by such remarkable popularity. 'All the midland counties,' writes Mr. Froude, 'heard of his fame and demanded to hear him.' In some places, as at Meldreth and Yelden, at the latter of which he had preached on Christmas day by the permission of the rector, Dr. William Dell, master of Gonville and Caius, the pulpits of the churches were opened to him; in other places the incumbents of the parishes were his bitterest enemies. They, in the words of Mr. Henry Deane when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith, keeper of the university library at Cambridge, were 'angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans.' 'When I went first to preach the word abroad,' he writes, 'the doctors and priests of the country did open wide against me.'

In 1658 he was indicted at the assizes for preaching at Eaton Socon, but with what result is unrecorded. He was called 'a witch, a jesuit, a highwayman;' he was charged with keeping

'his misses,' with 'having two wives at once,' and other equally absurd and groundless accusations. His career as an author now began. His earliest work, 'Some Gospel Truths opened,' published at Newport Pagnel in 1656, with a commendatory letter by his pastor, John Burton, was a protest against the mysticism of the teaching of the quakers. Having been answered by Edward Burrough [q. v.], an ardent and somewhat foul-mouthed member of that sect, Bunyan replied the next year in 'A Vindication of Gospel Truths,' in which he repays his antagonist in his own coin, calling him 'a gross railing Rabshakeh,' who 'befools himself,' and proves his complete ignorance of the gospel. Like the former work it is written in a very nervous style, showing a great command of plain English, as well as a thorough acquaintance with Holy Scripture. A third book was published by Bunyan in 1658 on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, under the horror-striking title of 'Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul.' It issued from the press a few days before Cromwell's death. In this work, as its title would suggest, Bunyan gives full scope to his vivid imagination in describing the condition of the lost. It contains many touches of racy humour, especially in his similes, and the whole is written in the nervous, forcible English of which he was master.

On the Restoration the old acts against nonconformists were speedily revived. The meeting-houses were closed. All persons were required under severe penalties to attend their parish church. The ejected clergy were reinstated. It became an illegal act to conduct divine service except in accordance with the ritual of the church, or for one not in episcopal orders to address a congregation. Bunyan continued his ministrations in barns, in private houses, under the trees, wherever he found brethren ready to pray and hear. So daring and notorious an offender was not likely to go long unpunished. Within six months of Charles's landing he was arrested, on 12 Nov. 1660, at the little hamlet of Lower Samsell by Harlington, about thirteen miles from Bedford to the south, where he was going to hold a religious service in a private house. The issuing of the warrant had become known, and Bunyan might have escaped if he had been so minded, but he was not the man to play the coward. If he fled, it would 'make an ill-savour in the

county' and dishearten the weaker brethren. If he ran before a warrant, others might run before 'great words.' While he was conducting the service he was arrested and taken before Mr. Justice Wingate, who, though really desirous to release him, was compelled by his obstinate refusal to forbear preaching to commit him for trial to the county gaol, which, with perhaps a brief interval of enlargement in 1666, was to be his 'close and uncomfortable' place of abode for the next twelve years. The prison to which Bunyan was committed was not, as an obstinate and widespread error has represented, the 'town gaol,' or rather lock-up house, which occupied one of the piers of the many-arched Ouse bridge, for the temporary incarceration of petty offenders against municipal law, but the county gaol, a much less confined and comfortless abode. A few weeks after his committal the quarter sessions for January 1661 were held at Bedford, and Bunyan was indicted for his offence. The proceedings seem to have been irregular. There was no desire on the part of the justices to deal hardly with the prisoner; but he confessed the indictment, and declared his determination to repeat the offence on the first opportunity. The justices had therefore no choice in the matter. They were bound to administer the law as it stood. So he was sentenced to a further three months' term of imprisonment, and if then he persisted in his contumacy he would be 'banished the realm,' and if he returned without royal license he would 'stretch by the neck for it.' Towards the end of the three months, with an evident desire to avoid proceeding to extremities, the clerk of the peace was sent to him by the justices to endeavour to induce him to conform. But, as might have been anticipated, all attempts to bend Bunyan's sturdy nature were vain. Every kind of compromise, however kindly and sensibly urged, was steadily refused. He would not substitute private exhortation, which might have been allowed him, for public preaching. The law,' he replied, 'had provided two ways of obeying one to obey actively, and if he could not bring his conscience to that, then to suffer whatever penalty the law enacted.'

Three weeks later, 23 April 1661, the coronation of Charles II afforded an opportunity of enlargement. All prisoners for every offence short of felony were to be released. Those who were waiting their trials might be dismissed at once.

Those convicted

and under sentence might sue out a pardon under the great seal at any time within the year. Bunyan failed to profit by the royal clemency. Although he had not been legally convicted, for no witnesses had been heard against him, nor had he pleaded to the indictment, his trial having been little more than a conversation between him and the court, the authorities chose to regard it as a legal conviction, rendering it necessary that a pardon should be sued for.

About a year before his apprehension at Samsell, Bunyan had taken a second wife, Elizabeth, to watch over his four little motherless children. This noble-hearted woman showed undaunted courage in seeking her husband's release. She travelled to London with a petition to the House of Peers, from some of whom she met with kindly sympathy but little encouragement. 'The matter was one for the judges, not for them.' At the next midsummer assize, therefore, the poor woman on three several occasions presented her husband's formal request that he might be legally put on his trial and his case fully heard. Sir Matthew Hale, who was one of the judges of that assize, listened to her pitiful tale, and manifested much kind feeling. But he was powerless. 'Her husband had been duly convicted. She must either sue out his pardon, or obtain a writ of error.' Neither of these courses was adopted; and wisely so, for, as Mr. Froude remarks, 'a pardon would have been of no use to Bunyan because he was determined to persevere in disobeying a law which he considered to be unjust. The most real kindness which could be shown him was to leave him where he was.' At the next spring assizes, in 1662, a strenuous effort was again made to get his case brought into court. This again failed. After this he seems to have desisted from any further attempt, and, with a slight interval in 1666, he remained in prison, not altogether unhappily, till 1672, twelve years from his first committal. The character of his imprisonment varied with the disposition of his gaolers. During the earlier part of the time he was allowed to follow his wonted course of preaching, 'taking all occasions to visit the people of God,' and even going to 'see christians in London.' The Bedford church books show that he was frequently present at church meetings during some periods of his imprisonment. Such indulgence, however, was plainly irregular. Its

discovery nearly cost the gaoler his place, and brought on Bunyan a much more rigorous confinement. He was forbidden ‘even to look out at the door.' For seven years out of the twelve, 1661–8, his name never occurs in the records of the church. In 1666, after six years of prison life, ‘by the intercession of some in trust and power that took pity upon his suffering,' Bunyan was released. But in a few weeks he was arrested once more for his former offence, at a meeting, and returned to his former quarters for another six years. Being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his trade, he betook himself, for the support of his family, to making long tagged laces, many hundred gross of which he sold to the hawkers. Nor was 'the word of God bound.' The gaol afforded him the opportunity of exercising his ministerial gifts forbidden outside its walls. Many of his co-religionists from time to time were his fellow-prisoners, at one time as many as sixty. He gave religious instruction and preached to his fellowprisoners, and furnished spiritual counsel to persons who were allowed to visit him. Some of his prison sermons were the rough drafts of subsequent more elaborate publications. His two chief companions were the Bible and Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs.' Bunyan, as we have seen, had ventured on authorship before his imprisonment. The enforced leisure of a gaol gave him abundant opportunity for its pursuit. Books and tracts, some in prose, some in verse, were produced by his fertile pen with great rapidity. His first prison book was in metre we can hardly call it poetry entitled 'Profitable Meditations,' in the form of dialogue, and has 'small literary merit of any sort' (BROWN, p. 172). This was followed by 'Praying in the Spirit,' written in 1662 and published in 1663; 'Christian Behaviour,' written and published in the same year; the 'Four Last Things' and 'Ebal and Gerizim,' both in verse, the 'Holy City,' the 'Resurrection of the Dead,' and 'Prison Meditations,' a reply in verse to a friend who had written to him in prison, which all appeared between 1663 and 1665. These minor productions were succeeded by his 'Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners,' one of the three books by which Bunyan's name is chiefly known, which will ever hold a high place among records of spiritual experience. This appeared in 1666. About this time took place the few months' release from prison previously