same cause; he 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 pas toral 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 prison. There is a print in which he is represented as pursued by arabble 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.

[* From 12 Nov. 1660 to June 1672, when a pardon was granted under the Great Seal for the release of John Fenn, John Bunyan, and others, pri sonariis in Communi Gaola pro Comitatu nostræ Bedfordiæ. (Life of Bunyan, by George Godwin, p. ix.)

The King's Declaration of Indulgence was published on the 25th of the preceding March," Papists and swarms of sectaries now boldly showing themselves in their public meetings."-Evelyn's Memoirs, i. 450, 4to. ed.]

[† Re-engraved for Ivimey's Life of Bunyan "From a scarce print in the possession of Mr. George, Greek Street, Soho." The whole print has the appearance of a forgery. In one corner is inscribed " Drawn on the spot by Samuel Ireland." A name very little in favour of its authenticity.]

This is the statement given in the continuation of his Life, appended to

From this time his life appears to have passed smoothly. His congregation and his other friends bought ground and built a meetinghouse 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 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 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 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.

[* In Zoar Street, leading from Gravel Lane to Essex Street. See Wilkinson's' Londina Illustrata.']

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 shown 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 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, 66 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

[ Toplady's Works, vol. iv. p. 11, as quoted in Ivimey's Life of Bunyan, ed. 1825, p. 188.]

[† On his portrait by Sturt prefixed to the first and only volume of his works printed in 1692, it is said that he "died at London, August 31st, 1688,

e 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 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 aged 60, having written sixty books." "Books," as Granger observes, "equal to the number of his years."]

[2 vols. fol. 1736, and 2 vols. fol. 1767.

No one has as yet told us when John Bunyan first became an author, and his Grace Abounding' is silent on the subject. There is, however, every reason to believe that no book or tract of Bunyan's appeared before 1658, when in the September of that year he published 'A Few Sighs from Hell; or the Groans of a damned Soul. By that poor and contemptible servant of Jesus Christ, John Bunyan;' of which a copy is preserved in that curiously complete collection of books, tracts, half-sheets, and single sheets relating to the Great Rebellion," collected at the time, and presented by King George III. to the British Museum.

The same collection contains a second publication of Bunyan's, entitled The Doctrine of the Law and Grace unfolded. Published by that poor and contemptible creature, John Bunyan of Bedford.' Printed in 1659, and endorsed by the collector as published in the May of that year.]

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 bap tism should be no bar to communion; and for this he was at tacked by Kiffin and Jessey, two of the most eminent among the Baptists. The more particular Particulars had long been dis pleased 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 showed the pattern of the house for 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 as 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." I

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 prepos terous 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 presump tuous;-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