was to preach
gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking
from them the word of life. His fame grew the more he was known and
reached its climax when his work was nearest its end. His biographer
Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, "when Mr. Bunyan
preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would
be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold. I have
seen, by my computation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by
seven o'clock on a working day, in the dark winter time. I also computed
about three thousand that came to hear him one Lord's Day in London, at a
town's-end meeting-house, so that half were fain to go back again for
want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled
almost over people to get upstairs to his pulpit." This "town's-end
meeting house" has been identified by some with a quaint straggling long
building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is
an engraving in Wilkinson's "Londina Illustrata." Doe's account,
however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street meeting-
house was not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan's
death, and then for Presbyterian service. Other places in London
connected with his preaching are Pinners' Hall in Old Broad Street,
where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon
on "The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss
thereof," first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen's meeting-house in
White's Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place for titled folk,
city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position and degree. At
earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformists were in
vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealth in private
houses and other places where he might hope to escape the lynx-eyed
informer. It was at one of these furtive meetings that his earliest
biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of London Bridge, Charles
Doe, first heard him preach. His choice of an Old Testament text at
first offended Doe, who had lately come into New Testament light and had
had enough of the "historical and doing-for-favour of the Old Testament."
But as he went on he preached "so New Testament like" that his hearer's
prejudices vanished, and he could only "admire, weep for joy, and give
the preacher his affections."

Bunyan was more than o