e weak and
tempted people of God." For such the "Grace Abounding to the chief of
sinners" will ever prove most valuable. Those for whom it was intended
will find in it a message--of comfort and strength.

As has been said, Bunyan's pen was almost idle during the last six years
of his imprisonment. Only two of his works were produced in this period:
his "Confession of Faith," and his "Defence of the Doctrine of
Justification by Faith." Both were written very near the end of his
prison life, and published in the same year, 1672, only a week or two
before his release. The object of the former work was, as Dr. Brown
tells us, "to vindicate his teaching, and if possible, to secure his
liberty." Writing as one "in bonds for the Gospel," his professed
principles, he asserts, are "faith, and holiness springing therefrom,
with an endeavour so far as in him lies to be at peace with all men." He
is ready to hold communion with all whose principles are the same; with
all whom he can reckon as children of God. With these he will not
quarrel about "things that are circumstantial," such as water baptism,
which he regards as something quite indifferent, men being "neither the
better for having it, nor the worse for having it not." "He will receive
them in the Lord as becometh saints. If they will not have communion
with him, the neglect is theirs not his. But with the openly profane and
ungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the
communion, he will have no communion. It would be a strange community,
he says, that consisted of men and beasts. Men do not receive their
horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room by
themselves." As regards forms and ceremonies, he "cannot allow his soul
to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of
this world. He is content to stay in prison even till the moss grows on
his eyelids rather than thus make of his conscience a continual butchery
and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes and committing himself to the
blind to lead him. Eleven years' imprisonment was a weighty argument to
pause and pause again over the foundation of the principles for which he
had thus suffered. Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in
the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them
by the Word of God and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from
or deny them on pain of eternal damnation."

The second