70 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS " But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations : the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, * Leave thy fatherless chil- dren, 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 pil- grimage, 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. " Re- ligion," 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 soli- tude of his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity which had long fitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape and coloring ; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace, expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display of its wonders. Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old Eng- lish confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled, and in the end overcame, the tyranny of the Established Church in the reign of Charles II. What Milton and Penn and Locke wrote in defence of liberty, Bunyan lived out and acted. He made no concessions to worldly rank. Dissolute lords and proud bishops he counted less than the humblest and poorest of his disciples at Bedford. When first arrested and thrown into prison, he supposed he should
