ve
their calves behind them."

"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers
considerations: the first was, the consideration of those two
Scriptures, 'Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them
alive; and let thy widows trust in me;' and again, 'The Lord said,
Verily it shall go well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the
enemy to entreat them well in the time of evil.'"

He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
conventicles." At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
sentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was never
executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
for twelve years.

Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
Fox's "Martyrs," he penned that great work which has attained a wider
and more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue.
It is alike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many
experienced Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel
himself would not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with
delight, as in the main a truthful representation of the Christian
pilgrimage, without indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the
author puts in the mouth of his fighting sermonizer, Greatheart, or
which may be deduced from some other portions of his allegory. A
recollection of his fearful sufferings, from misapprehension of a
single text in the Scriptures, relative to the question of election,
we may suppose gave a milder tone to the theology of his Pilgrim than
was altogether consistent with the Calvinism of the seventeenth
century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has scarcely ever worn a form so
calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory." In composing it, he seems
never to have altogether lost sight of the fact, that, in his
life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed promise recorded by
the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally found on the Genevan
side of the argument.

Little did the short-sighted persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they
closed upon him the door of Bedford jail, that God would overrule
their poor spite and envy to His own glory and the world-wide renown
of their victim. In the solitude of his prison, the ideal forms of
beauty and sublimity which had long flitted before h