o be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter
words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.
It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal
sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from
without. He had been five years a preacher, when the Restoration put
it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the
country to oppress the Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose
history is known to us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated. In
November 1660, he was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained,
with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve
years. His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would
abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set
apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness; and he was
fully determined to obey God rather than man. He was brought before
several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain.
He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that
he ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in
repairing old kettles. He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith.
He was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly
liberated. He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law,
he would be liable to banishment, and that, if he were found in England
after a certain time his neck would be stretched. His answer was, "If
you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." Year after year
he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worse prison
now to be found in the island is a palace. His fortitude is the more
extraordinary, because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.
Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond
and indulgent a parent. He had several small children, and among them a
daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness. He
could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she
must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten; "yet,"
he added, "I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison he could do
nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family. He
determined, therefore, to take up a new trade. He learned to make long
tagged thread laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished
by h