of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunder to secure
and dead sinners. His memory was tenacious, it being customary with him
to commit his sermons to writing after he had preached them. A rich
anointing of the Spirit was upon him, yet this great saint was always in
his own eyes the chiefest of sinners and the least of saints."

An anecdote is told which, Southey says, "authenticates itself," that one
day when he had preached "with peculiar warmth and enlargement," one of
his hearers remarked "what a sweet sermon he had delivered." "Ay," was
Bunyan's reply, "you have no need to tell me that, for the devil
whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit." As an evidence
of the estimation in which Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it is
recorded that Charles the Second expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen that
"a learned man such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker."
"May it please your Majesty," Owen replied. "I would gladly give up all
my learning if I could preach like that tinker."

Although much of Bunyan's literary activity was devoted to controversy,
he had none of the narrowness or bitter spirit of a controversialist. It
is true that his zeal for what he deemed to be truth led him into
vehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as its
perverters. But this intensity of speech was coupled with the utmost
charity of spirit towards those who differed from him. Few ever had less
of the sectarian temper which lays greater stress on the infinitely small
points on which all true Christians differ than on the infinitely great
truths on which they are agreed. Bunyan inherited from his spiritual
father, John Gifford, a truly catholic spirit. External differences he
regarded as insignificant where he found real Christian faith and love.
"I would be," he writes, "as I hope I am, a Christian. But for those
factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I
conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from
Hell or from Babylon." "He was," writes one of his early biographers, "a
true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus, and did often bewail the
different and distinguishing appellations that are among the godly,
saying he did believe a time would come when they should be all buried."
The only persons he scrupled to hold communion with were those whose
lives were openly immoral. "Divisions about non-essentials," h