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 sat out of 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 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.

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 thither. But another "true pulpit" is shewn in London, in the Jewin Street Meeting. It is sain 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 judgment, 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 threescore 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 mindmight more satisfactorily be traced. Some passages occur in them which may make us shudder; these are very few, and in what may probably be deemed his earlier works, because such passages are found in them. A very few also there are in which the smut of his old occupation has been left upon the paper. The strongest prejudice which he retained, and precisely for this reason, that it was the most unreasonable, was his dislike of the Liturgy, the book of Common Prayer being, like "the common salutation of women," "what he could not away with." But the general tenor of his writings is mild, and tolerant, and charitable; and if Calvinism had never worn a blacker appearance than in Bunyan's works, it could never have become a term of reproach; nor have driven so many pious minds, in horror of it, to an opposite extreme.

Bunyan looked for a Millennium, though he did not partake the madness of the Fifth-monarchy men, nor dream of living to see it. He agreed with the Particular or stricter Baptists, that Church communion was to be held with those only who are "visible Saints by calling;" that is, with those who make a profession of faith, and repentance, and holiness, and who are now called Professors in their own circle, but in those days took to themselves complacently the appellation of Saints. He dared not hold communion with others, he said, because the scriptures so often command that all the congregation should be holy; and because so to do, would be ploughing with an ox and an ass together; and because God has threatened to plague the "mingled people" with dreadful punishments. "It is all one," he says, "to communicate with the profane, and to sacrifice to the Devil." But he held that difference of opinion concerning baptism should be no bar to communion; and for this he was attacked by Kiffin and Jessey, two of the most eminent among the Baptists. The more particular Particulars had long been displeased with his tolerance upon this point, and had drawn away some of his congregation; and Bunyan complained of this "Church-rending" spirit. "Yourself," he says to Kiffin, "could you but get the opportunity, under pretence of this innocent ordinance, as you term

it, of water-baptism, would not stick to make inroads, and outroads too, in all the Churches that suit not your fancy in the land. For you have already been bold to affirm, that all those that have baptized infants, ought to be ashamed and repent, before they be shewed the pattern of the House: and what is this but to threaten that, could you have your will of them, you would quickly take from them their present Church privileges?" He complains of "brethren of the baptized way, who would not pray with men as good themselves, because they were not baptized, (that is, rebaptized,)—but would either like Quakers stand with their hats on their heads, or else withdraw till they had done.". One of his opponents had said upon this subject, that “if it be preposterous and wicked for a man and woman to cohabit together, and to enjoy the privileges of a married estate" without the solemnity of public marriage, “so it is no less disorderly upon a spiritual account, for any one to claim the privileges of a Church, or to be admitted to the same, till they had been under the solemnity of rebaptism." "These words," said Bunyan,

are very black ;—I wot that through ignorance and a preposterous zeal he said it. God give him repentance!" They neither judged nor spoke so charitably of him; they called him a Machiavelian, a man devilish, proud, insolent, and presumptuous;-some compared him to the Devil, others to a Bedlamite, others to a sot; and they sneered at his low origin, and the base occupation from which he had risen: "such insults," said he, "I freely bind unto me, as an ornament among the rest of my reproaches, till the Lord shall wipe them off at his coming." They reproached him for declining a public conference with them in London upon the matter in dispute. To this he answered thus: "The reason why I came not amongst you, was partly because I consulted mine own weakness, and counted not myself, being a dull-headed man, able to engage so many of the chief of you as I was then informed intended to meet me. I also feared in personal disputes, heats and bitter contentions might arise, a thing my spirit hath not pleasure in. I feared also that both myself and words would be misrepresented; for if they that answer a book will alter and screw arguments out of their places, and make my sentences stand in their own words, not

mine, when, I say, my words are in a book to be seen; what would you have done had I in the least, either in matter or manner, though but seemingly, miscarried among you?"

Throughout this controversy Bunyan appears to great advantage as a meek, good man, beyond the general spirit of his age in toleration, and far beyond that of his fellow sectarians. His was indeed so Catholic a spirit, that though circumstances had made him a sectarian, he liked not to be called by the denomination of his sect. "I know none," says he, "to whom that title is so proper as to the disciples of John. And since you would know by what name I would be distinguished from others, I tell you, I would be, and hope I am, a Christian; and choose, if God should count me worthy, to be called a Christian, a Believer, or other such name which is approved by the Holy Ghost. And as for those factious titles of Anabaptists, Independents, Presbyterians, or the like, I conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but rather from Hell and Babylon; for they naturally tend to divisions. You may know them by their fruits."

In another of his treatises he says, "jars and divisions, wranglings and prejudices, eat out the growth, if not the life, of religion. These are those waters of Marah that imbitter our spirits, and quench the Spirit of God. Unity and peace is said to be like the dew of Hermon,* and as a dew that descended upon Sion, when the Lord promised his blessing. Divisions run religion into briers and thorns, contentions and parties. Divisions are to Churches, like wars in countries; where war is, the ground lieth waste and untilled; none takes care of it. It is love that edifieth, but division pulleth down. Divisions are as the north-east wind to the fruits, which causeth them to dwindle away to nothing; but when the storms are over, every thing begins to grow. When men are divided, they seldom speak the truth in love; and then no marvel they grow not up to Him in all things which is the Head.-It is a sad presage of an approaching famine, (as one well observes,)—not of bread, nor water, but of hearing the word of God, when the thin ears of corn devour the plump full ones; when our controversies about

*Psal. cxxxiii. 3.