whom pinching want and grief have worn down to the gate of
death. Ten summer suns have rolled over the mansion of his misery
whose reviving rays have never once penetrated his sad abode,' &c. &c.

If this description resembles or approaches the truth, I can but say
that to have thus abandoned to want their most distinguished pastor
and his family was intensely discreditable to the Baptist community.
English prisons in the seventeenth century were not models of good
management. But prisoners, whose friends could pay for them, were not
consigned to damp and dreary cells; and in default of evidence of
which not a particle exists, I cannot charge so reputable a community
with a neglect so scandalous. The entire story is in itself
incredible. Bunyan was prosperous in his business. He was respected
and looked up to by a large and growing body of citizens, including
persons of wealth and position in London. He was a representative
sufferer fighting the battle of all the Nonconformists in England. He
had active supporters in the town of Bedford and among the gentlemen
of the county. The authorities, so far as can be inferred from their
actions, tried from the first to deal as gently with him as he would
allow them to do. Is it conceivable that the Baptists would have left
his family to starve; or that his own confinement would have been made
so absurdly and needlessly cruel? Is it not far more likely that he
found all the indulgences which money could buy and the rules of the
prison would allow? Bunyan is not himself responsible for these wild
legends. Their real character appears more clearly when we observe how
he was occupied during these years.

Friends, in the first place, had free access to him, and strangers who
were drawn to him by reputation; while the gaol was considered a
private place, and he was allowed to preach there, at least
occasionally, to his fellow-prisoners. Charles Doe, a distinguished
Nonconformist, visited him in his confinement, and has left an account
of what he saw. 'When I was there,' he writes, 'there were about sixty
dissenters besides himself, taken but a little before at a religious
meeting at Kaistor, in the county of Bedford, besides two eminent
dissenting ministers, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Dun, by which means the
prison was much crowded. Yet, in the midst of all that hurry, I heard
Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of faith and
plerophory of Divine assistance, that he made