It was, he tells us, "first with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine;books which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.
Bunyan's prison life when the first bitterness of it was past, and habit had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it would seem, not an unhappy one. A manly self-respect bore him up and forbade his dwelling on the darker features of his position, or thinking or speaking harshly of the authors of his durance. "He was," writes one who saw him at this time, "mild and affable in conversation; not given to loquacity or to much discourse unless some urgent occasion required. It was observed he never spoke of himself or his parents, but seemed low in his own eyes. He was never heard to reproach or revile, whatever injury he received, but rather rebuked those who did so. He managed all things with such exactness as if he had made it his study not to give offence."According to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe, in 1666, the year of the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol, "by the intercession of some interest or power that took pity on his sufferings," he enjoyed a short interval of liberty. Who these friends and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it would be vain to conjecture. This period of freedom, however, was very short. He at once resumed his old work of preaching, against which the laws had become even more stringent during his imprisonment, and was apprehended at a meeting just as he was about to preach a sermon. He had given out his text, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" (John ix. 35), and was standing with his open Bible in his hand, when the constable came in to take him. Bunyan fixed his eyes on the man, who turned pale, let go his hold, and drew back, while Bunyan exclaimed, "See how this man trembles at the word of God!" This is all we know of his second arrest, and even this little is somewhat doubtful. The time, the place, the circumstances, are as provokingly vague as much else of Bunyan's life. The fact, however, is certain. Bunyan returned to Bedford gaol, where he spent another six years, until the issuing of the "Declaration of Indulgence" early in 1672 opened the long-closed doors, and he walked out a free man, and with what he valued far more than personal liberty, freedom to deliver Christ's message as he understood it himself, none making him afraid, and to declare to his brother sinners what their Saviour had done for them, and what he expected them to do that they might obtain the salvation He died to win.
From some unknown cause, perhaps the depressing effect of protracted confinement, during this second six years Bunyan's pen was far less prolific than during the former period. Only two of his books are dated in these years. The last of these, "A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith," a reply to a work of Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, the rector of Northill, was written in hot haste immediately before his release, and issued from the press contemporaneously with it, the prospect of liberty apparently breathing new life into his wearied soul.
When once Bunyan became a free man again, his pen recovered its former copiousness of production, and the works by which he has been immortalized, "The Pilgrim's Progress" - which has been erroneously ascribed to Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment - and its sequel, "The Holy War," and the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman,"and a host of more strictly theological works, followed one another in rapid succession.
