as they sat at the door of their cottages conversing of their religious experiences, he was led to mistrust his own state, as knowing nothing of what he heard them so pleasantly describe. He often afterwards frequented their society; his heart failed him under their applications of scripture, and he went from their company to meditate incessantly on what he had heard. He shook off a swearing comrade, to whom his heart had before been knit; betook himself to prayer for divine direction, and began to have a new relish for the word of God, still crying, as he pored over its pages, for light from heaven. With that vividness of conception which projected all his thoughts into the region of the visible and audible, making them voices and sights, he now in a kind of vision saw the poor women of Bedford up on a sunny mountain-side, basking in radiant warmth, while he himself shivered aloof amid frost and snow. A wall girdled the happy region round, which he found could only be passed by a little doorway, very strait and narrow; through which, however, after long struggling, he was able to force his way, and went and sat down in the midst of the company, comforted with light and heat, and "exceeding glad." The vision and its interpretation dwelt on his spirit, and vehement prayer rose from his heart wherever he was, at home or abroad, in the house or the field. But then came the dark questions—Was he among the elected? and what if his day of grace were gone? and through long and grievous buffetings he struggled onwards to the light, his help coming still from the word of God. It was now the dullness, insensibility, and unbelief of his soul that grieved him: his conscience as to outward sinning was tender and scrupulous, but he thought inward vileness like his could never be cleansed. Still he fought the battle, and still helpful texts of scripture came to him, as voices from the skies. On one occasion, after a hand had in this way been stretched to him with healing leaves, he describes his happiness as so intense that he felt as if he could talk of God's love to him to the "very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands" before him. The clouds, however, returned again; a voice seemed to sound in his ears—"Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you," so loudly sometimes that he turned his head to see who stood behind him, and once so startlingly that it seemed to come to him from half a mile's distance. Troops of blasphemous suggestions anon entered his mind; gloomy questionings as to the being of God and of the Saviour, doubts of the truth of the scriptures, temptations to utter some horrible curse against God, to blaspheme the Holy Ghost, and fall down to worship the devil, till he began to think himself possessed, and in his agony would hold his mouth with his hand, lest it should open to utter the unpardonable blasphemy. This lasted for about a year, at the end of which time he became somewhat composed in mind, through the reading of Luther's Commentary on the Galatians, and yet more through the counsels of Mr. Gilford, a baptist clergyman of Bedford. The darkest wave of all in this billowy sea of trial, however, was yet behind. He began to be haunted with an inward suggestion to sell the Saviour. "Sell him, sell him," said the horrid voice, "sell him for this, for that, for anything;" till, like miserable patients in cases of optical derangement, who cannot look in any direction without seeing the hideous or fantastic shape which haunts them, he could not pick up a pin, or chop a stick, but the hateful whisper was in his ear. "Sell him, sell him," it went on; till one day he felt as if he were answering—"Let him go if he will;" and then came blank despair. He was in the iron cage now. He was Judas; he was Cain, with a brand on him; he was Esau, shut out, as he interpreted the text, from repentance; he was worse than all the great sinners of the Bible who had found mercy—David, Solomon, Manasseh, Peter; he was a new Francis Spira, whose miserable groanings he re-echoed as he read. At length, however, after months of agony, the tempest began to pass away; the thunder, as he says, got beyond him, and only some small drops remained; with many a scripture text as his staff he had struggled through the deep waters, and now stood on dry ground. By such stormy conflicts, in which the strength of the ideal faculty gave body and action to vivid thoughts, was Bunyan being prepared to serve his Lord as a preacher and an author.
In the year 1653, the year in which Cromwell was made lord-protector of England, Bunyan became a member of Mr. Gilford's church. His doubts and fears, after a season, returned upon him, aggravated by failure of his health; but he again battled through them triumphantly. Within two years of his baptism, he was formally invited to engage in the work of the ministry. He consented, and officiated as a preacher, at first somewhat privately, then with all publicity. For two years, preaching from the smart of his own spirit, he cried out against sin and proclaimed its perils, but ultimately taught the way of God more perfectly; he "altered," as he says, his mode, and laboured "to hold forth the Lord Jesus Christ." His services—as was to be expected from the ministrations of one who tells us that he preached with such conviction of the truth, that he felt as if he could say he was more than sure of it—proved singularly acceptable and powerful. The interest occasioned by his preaching is attested by the persecution it excited; "the doctors and priests of the country did open against" him, and he was indicted to appear at the Bedford assizes, within a year of his beginning his labours. The process somehow failing, his enemies appear to have had recourse to all sorts of absurd calumny, which Bunyan, strong in innocence, accepted as a badge of true christian discipleship.
On the 12th of November, 1660, five months after the Restoration, Bunyan had undertaken to preach at a place named Sawsel, near Harlington, in Bedfordshire. Though warned that a warrant had been issued for his apprehension, the intrepid preacher would not be held back from fulfilling his engagement. He was accordingly arrested, and committed to Bedford jail, where he remained, with intervals of partial liberation, for a period of twelve years. Seven weeks after his incarceration he was brought up at the quarter sessions in Bedford, with a bill of indictment preferred against him, as "a common upholder of unlawful meetings and conventicles;" and as neither arguments, nor threats, nor cajolery, nor ridicule, which were all tried, could prevail on him to promise that he would desist from preaching, he was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment, with certification that if he would not conform, he should be banished the kingdom. At the coronation of Charles II. in 1661, a proclamation was issued, allowing convicts twelve months to sue out a pardon; and had Bunyan, at that time, felt it consistent with his views of duty to petition for freedom, he might probably have been discharged. At the assizes of that year, his wife—a true heroine—after having travelled to London with a petition to the house of lords, appeared several times before the judges to plead her husband's cause. This she did with such a weight of argument, such prudence and modest intrepidity, as touched the heart of the upright Hale, but could not move his coarse and bigoted fellow-justices. "I am sorry, woman," said the kindly judge, "that I can do thee no good."
In prison Bunyan had to do something to provide for his family. He had four children—one of them blind and dearly loved—by his first wife (for his heroic advocate before the justices was a second spouse, but a true mother to his little ones); and these were looking to him for bread. So he set himself to work for them as he might, making tagged bootlaces, an art which he acquired in jail. Meanwhile he was laying the foundations of an imperishable fame. His "Pilgrim's Progress" was, at least, planned in jail, and probably the first part was written there. His "Grace Abounding," "Holy City," "Resurrection of the Dead," together with other treatises and tracts, were also composed in "the den." Persecution had filled the jail with many prisoners of congenial character, with whom he enjoyed many pleasant hours of religious conversation. He was in favour from the first with the jailor, who nearly lost his place for permitting him on one occasion to go as far as London. Years of stricter confinement followed, but at last he was often allowed to visit his family, and remain with them over night. A remarkable incident in connection with this indulgence is related. Bunyan had received the usual liberty, but at a very late hour felt resistlessly impressed with the propriety of returning to the prison. He arrived after the keeper had shut up for the night, much to the official's surprise. But his impatience at being untimeously disturbed was changed to thankfulness, when a little after a messenger came from a neighbouring clerical magistrate to see that the prisoner was safe, and the custodier was able to produce him. "You may go out now when you will," said the jailor; "for you know better than I can tell you when to come in again." In the later years of his incarceration he was allowed to attend the meetings of the church, and to officiate as a preacher. He was still nominally a prisoner, although subject to little restraint, when he was elected pastor of the church in
