He had sometimes to realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion, however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy members. Brother John Stanton had to be admonished "for abusing his wife and beating her often for very light matters" (if the matters had been less light, would the beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary Foskett, for "privately whispering of a horrid scandal, 'without culler of truth,' against Brother Honeylove." Evil-speaking and backbiting set brother against brother. Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan's spirit. He himself was not always spared. A letter had to be written to Sister Hawthorn "by way of reproof for her unseemly language against Brother Scot and the whole Church." John Wildman was had up before the Church and convicted of being "an abominable liar and slanderer," "extraordinary guilty" against "our beloved Brother Bunyan himself." And though Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by "humble acknowledgment of her miscariag,"the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by "a frothy letter,"which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion. But though Bunyan's flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as he desired, these were the exception. The congregation meeting in Josias Roughead's barn must have been, take them as a whole, a quiet, God-fearing, spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think with thankfulness and satisfaction as "his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing." From such he could not be severed lightly. Inducements which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his independent spirit. He was not "a man that preached by way of bargain for money," and, writes Doe, "more than once he refused a more plentiful income to keep his station." As Dr. Brown says: "He was too deeply rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings to think of striking his tent till the command came from the Master to come up to the higher service for which he had been ripening so long." At Bedford, therefore, he remained; quietly staying on in his cottage in St. Cuthbert's, and ministering to his humble flock, loving and beloved, as Mr. Froude writes, "through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of Popery was bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets, and confident that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforward could only bite his nails at the passing pilgrims."Bunyan's peace was not, however, altogether undisturbed. Once it received a shock in a renewal of his imprisonment, though only for a brief period, in 1675, to which we owe the world-famous "Pilgrim's Progress"; and it was again threatened, though not actually disturbed ten years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconformists induced him to make over all his property - little enough in good sooth - to his wife by deed of gift.
The former of these events demands our attention, not so much for itself as for its connection with Bishop Barlow's interference in Bunyan's behalf, and, still more, for its results in the production of "The Pilgrim's Progress." Until very recently the bare fact of this later imprisonment, briefly mentioned by Charles Doe and another of his early biographers, was all that was known to us.
They even leave the date to be gathered, though both agree in limiting its duration to six months or thereabouts. The recent discovery, among the Chauncey papers, by Mr. W. G. Thorpe, of the original warrant under which Bunyan was at this time sent to gaol, supplies the missing information. It has been already noticed that the Declaration of Indulgence, under which Bunyan was liberated in 1672, was very short-lived. Indeed it barely lasted in force a twelvemonth. Granted on the 15th of March of that year, it was withdrawn on the 9th of March of the following year, at the instance of the House of Commons, who had taken alarm at a suspension of the laws of the realm by the "inherent power" of the sovereign, without the advice or sanction of Parliament. The Declaration was cancelled by Charles II., the monarch, it is said, tearing off the Great Seal with his own hands, a subsidy being promised to the royal spendthrift as a reward for his complaisance.
The same year the Test Act became law. Bunyan therefore and his fellow Nonconformists were in a position of greater peril, as far as the letter of the law was concerned, than they had ever been.
But, as Dr. Stoughton has remarked, "the letter of the law is not to be taken as an accurate index of the Nonconformists' condition.
