After he had
been some time a member of the congregation he began to preach; and his
sermons produced a powerful effect. He was, indeed, illiterate; but he
spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed
had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of
religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his
vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him
not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to
extort the half-contemptuous admiration of scholars. Yet it was long
before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter
words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.
Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.
It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal
sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from
without. He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it
in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the
country to oppress the Dissenters; and, of all the Dissenters whose
history is known to us, he was, perhaps, the most hardly treated. In
November, 1660, he was flung into Bedford jail; and there he remained,
with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve
years. His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would
abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set
apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness, and he was
fully determined to obey God rather than man.
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