to his Word, whether He would ever look upon me or save me at the last; Wherefore, thought I, the point being thus, I am for going on, and venturing my eternal state with Christ, whether I have comfort here or no. If God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity; sink or swim,-come Heaven, come hell;-Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do :—if not, I will venture for thy name!" John Bunyan did not ask himself how far the case of those martyrs whose example he was prepared to follow resembled the situation in which he was placed. Such a question, had he been cool enough to entertain it, might have shewn him that they had no other alternative than idolatry or the stake: but that he was neither called upon to renounce any thing that he did believe, nor to profess any thing that he did not; that the congregation to which he belonged held at that time their meetings unmolested; that he might have worshipped when he pleased, where he pleased, and how he pleased; that he was only required not to go about the country holding conventicles; and that the cause for that interdiction was not that persons were admonished in such conventicles to labour for salvation, but that they were exhorted there to regard with abhorrence that Protestant Church which is essentially part of the constitution of this kingdom, from the doctrines of which Church, except in the point of infant baptism, he did not differ a hair's breadth. This I am bound to observe, because Bunyan has been, and no doubt will continue to be, most wrongfully represented as having been the victim of intolerant laws, and prelatical oppression.

But greater strength of will and strength of heart could not have been manifested, if a plain duty wherewith there may be no compromise had called for that sacrifice which he was ready to have made. It would be wronging him here were the touching expression of his feelings under these circumstances to be withheld. "I found myself," he says, "a man encompassed with infirmities. The parting with my wife and poor children, hath often been to me in this place, as the pulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only because I am

somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries and wants that my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them; especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces!-Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten; must beg; suffer hunger, cold, nakedness and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee! But yet, recalling myself, thought I, I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you! Oh, I saw in this condition I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children: yet, thought I, I must do it, I must do it! And now I thought on those two milch-kine that were to carry the Ark of God into another country and to leave their calves behind them."

These fears past away when he found that no further proceedings were intended against him. But his worldly occupation was gone, for there was an end of tinkering as well as of his ministerial itinerancy; " he was as effectually called away from his pots and kettles," says Mr. Ivimey, "as the Apostles were from mending their nets;" he learnt therefore to make tagged thread-laces, and by this means supported his family. They lost the comfort of his presence; but in other respects their condition was not worsened by his imprisonment, which indeed was likely to render them objects of kindness as well as of compassion to their neighbours. In an age when the state of our prisons was disgraceful to a Christtian people, and the treatment of prisoners not unfrequently most inhuman, Bunyan was fortunate in the place of his confinement and in the disposition of his jailer, who is said to have committed the management of the prison to his care, knowing how entirely he might be trusted. He had the society there of some who were suffering for the same cause; he

* 1 Samuel vi. 10.

had his Bible and his Book of Martyrs; and he had leisure to brood over his own thoughts. The fever of his enthusiasm had spent itself; the asperity of his opinions was softened as his mind enlarged; and the Pilgrim's Progress was one of the fruits of his imprisonment. But before that work is spoken of more particularly, it will be convenient to pursue the story of his life to its close.

He remained a prisoner twelve years. But it appears that during the last four of those years he regularly attended the Baptist Meeting, his name being always in the records; and in the eleventh year the congregation chose him for their Pastor, "he at the same time accepted the invitation, and gave himself up to serve Christ and his Church in that charge, and received of the Elders the right hand of fellowship." The more recent historian of the Baptists says, "how he could exercise his pastoral office in preaching among them, while he continued a prisoner in the jail, we are at a loss to conceive:"-unquestionably only by being a prisoner at large, and having the liberty of the town while he lodged in the prison. There is a print in which he is represented as pursued by a rabble to his own door; but there is no allusion to any such outrage in any part of his works: in his own neighbourhood, where he had always lived, it is most unlikely to have happened; and if Bunyan had any enemies latterly, they were among the bigots of his own persuasion. His character had by this time obtained respect, his books had attracted notice, and Dr. Barlow then Bishop of Lincoln, and other Churchmen, are said to have pitied "his hard and unreasonable sufferings so far as to stand very much his friends in procuring his enlargement."* How this was effected is not

known.

This is the statement given in the continuation of his life, appended to his own account of himself, and supposed to have been written by Charles Doe, a Baptist Minister, who was intimately acquainted with him. Mr. Ivimey, however, to invalidate this produces a passage from the preface to one of Owen's sermons : this passage says "that Bunyan was confined upon an excommunication for nonconformity; that there was a law that if any two persons would go to the Bishop of the diocese, and offer a cautionary bond that the prisoner should conform in

From this time his life appears to have past smoothly. His congregation and his other friends bought ground and built a Meeting house for him, and there he continued to preach before large audiences. Every year he used to visit London, where his reputation was so great that if a day's notice were given, "the Meeting house in Southwark at which he generally preached, would not hold half the people that attended. Three thousand persons have been gathered together there; and not less than twelve hundred on week days, and dark winter's mornings at seven o'clock." He used also to preach in the surrounding counties. The Baptist congregation at Hitchin is supposed to have been founded by him. Their meetings were held at first about three miles from that town, in a wood near the village of Preston, Bunyan standing in a pit, or hollow, and the people round about on the sloping sides. "A chimney corner at a house in the same wood is still looked upon with veneration, as having been the place of his refreshment." About five miles from Hitchin was a famous Puritan preaching place called Bendish. It had been a malt house, was very low, and thatched, and ran in two directions, a large square pulpit standing in the angles; and adjoining the pulpit was a high pew, in which ministers sate out of sight of informers, and from which, in case of alarm they could escape into an adjacent lane. The building being much decayed, this Meeting was removed in 1787 to a place called Coleman Green; and the pulpit, which was there held to be the only remaining one in which Bunyan had preached, was with a commendable feeling carefully removed half a year, the Bishop might release him upon that bond; that Barlow was applied to, to do this, by Owen whose tutor he had been; that Barlow refused unless the Lord Chancellor would issue out an order to him to take the cautionary bond and release the prisoner: that this, though very chargeable, was done, and that Bunyan was then set at liberty," but little thanks to the Bishop." "From this account," says Mr. Ivimey," it should seem the honour given to Dr. Barlow has been ill bestowed." Upon this statement it will be sufficient to observe that Bunyan was not imprisoned upon a sentence of excommunication ; and that he would not have been imprisoned at all, if he would have allowed his friends to enter into a bond for him, far less objectionable on his part than the fraudulent one upon which, it is here pretended, he was released at last.

thither. But another "true pulpit," is shewn in London, in the Jewin Street Meeting. It is said that Owen greatly admired his preaching, and that being asked by Charles II. "how a learned man such as he was could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker;" he replied, "May it please your Majesty, could I possess that tinker's abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning."

This opinion would be discreditable to Owen's judgement, if he really entertained it, and the anecdote were entitled to belief. For great part of Bunyan's tracts are supposed to contain the substance of his sermons, which it is said he commonly committed to writing, after he had preached them; and certainly if he had left no other proofs of his genius, these would not have perpetuated his name. But the best sermons are not always those which produce most effect in delivery. A reader may be lulled to sleep by the dead letter of a printed discourse, who would have been roused and thrilled if the same discourse had come to him in a stream of living oratory, enforced by the tones, and eye, and countenance, and gestures of the preacher. One who is as much in earnest as he was, even if his matter should be worse, and his manner feebler, will seldom fail to move hearers, when they see that he is moved himself. But Bunyan may be supposed to have been always vehement and vigorous in delivery, as he frequently is in his language. One day when he had preached "with peculiar warmth and enlargement,” some of his friends came to shake hands with him after the service, and observed to him what "a sweet sermon" he had delivered. "Aye!" he replied, "you need not remind me of that; for the Devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit." This anecdote authenticates itself.

He became a voluminous writer, and published about three score tracts or books. They have been collected into two folio volumes, but indiscriminately arranged, and without any notice of their respective dates; and this is a great fault: for by a proper arrangement, or such notices, the progress of his mind might more satisfactorily be traced. Some passages