Nothing was too bad for him. He was "a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman, and the like." It was reported that he had "his misses and his bastards; that he had two wives at once," &c. Such charges roused all the man in Bunyan. Few passages in his writings show more passion than that in "Grace Abounding," in which he defends himself from the "fools or knaves" who were their authors. He "begs belief of no man, and if they believe him or disbelieve him it is all one to him. But he would have them know how utterly baseless their accusations are." "My foes," he writes, "have missed their mark in their open shooting at me. I am not the man.
If all the fornicators and *****erers in England were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would be still alive. I know not whether there is such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife." He calls not only men, but angels, nay, even God Himself, to bear testimony to his innocence in this respect. But though they were so absolutely baseless, nay, the rather because they were so baseless, the grossness of these charges evidently stung Bunyan very deeply.
So bitter was the feeling aroused against him by the marvellous success of his irregular ministry, that his enemies, even before the restoration of the Church and Crown, endeavoured to put the arm of the law in motion to restrain him. We learn from the church books that in March, 1658, the little Bedford church was in trouble for "Brother Bunyan," against whom an indictment had been laid at the Assizes for "preaching at Eaton Socon." Of this indictment we hear no more; so it was probably dropped. But it is an instructive fact that, even during the boasted religious liberty of the Protectorate, irregular preaching, especially that of the much dreaded Anabaptists, was an indictable offence. But, as Dr. Brown observes, "religious liberty had not yet come to mean liberty all round, but only liberty for a certain recognized section of Christians." That there was no lack of persecution during the Commonwealth is clear from the cruel treatment to which Quakers were subjected, to say nothing of the intolerance shown to Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. In Bunyan's own county of Bedford, Quakeresses were sentenced to be whipped and sent to Bridewell for reproving a parish priest, perhaps well deserving of it, and exhorting the folks on a market day to repentance and amendment of life. "The ****** truth is," writes Robert Southey, "all parties were agreed on the one catholic opinion that certain doctrines were not to be tolerated:" the only points of difference between them were "what those doctrines were," and how far intolerance might be carried. The withering lines are familiar to us, in which Milton denounces the "New Forcers of Conscience," who by their intolerance and "super-metropolitan and hyperarchiepiscopal tyranny," proved that in his proverbial words, "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large" -"Because you have thrown off your prelate lord, And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword To force our consciences that Christ set free!"How Bunyan came to escape we know not. But the danger he was in was imminent enough for the church at Bedford to meet to pray "for counsail what to doe" in respect of it.
It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan made his first essay at authorship. He was led to it by a long and tiresome controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to Bedford. The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being undermined. The Quakers' teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal Christ. He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, at "Paul's Steeple-house in Bedford town,"and other places. One of them, Anne Blackley by name, openly bade him throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, "No; for then the devil would be too hard for me." The same enthusiast charged him with "preaching up an idol, and using conjuration and witchcraft," because of his assertion of the bodily presence of Christ in heaven.
The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author, cannot but be viewed with much interest. It was a little volume in duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled "Some Gospel Truths Opened, by that unworthy servant of Christ, John Bunyan, of Bedford, by the Grace of God, preacher of the Gospel of His dear Son," published in 1656. The little book, which, as Dr.
