nteen into the
ranks of the "New Model." Two years later the war was over, and Bunyan,
though hardly twenty, found himself married in 1645 to a "godly" wife
as young and penniless as himself. So poor were the young couple that
they could scarce muster a spoon and a plate between them; and the
poverty of their home deepened perhaps the gloom of the young tinker's
restlessness and religious depression. His wife did what she could to
comfort him, teaching him again to read and write for he had forgotten
his school-learning, and reading with him in two little "godly" books
which formed his library. But darkness only gathered the thicker round
his imaginative soul. "I walked," he tells us of this time, "to a
neighbouring town; and sate down upon a settle in the street, and fell
into a very deep pause about the most fearful state my sin had brought
me to; and after long musing I lifted up my head; but methought I saw as
if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light and
as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon the houses did band
themselves against me. Methought that they all combined together to
banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and wept to dwell
among them, because I had sinned against the Saviour. Oh, how happy now
was every creature over I; for they stood fast and kept their station.
But I was gone and lost."

[Sidenote: Bunyan in prison.]

At last in 1653 after more than two years of this struggle the darkness
broke. Bunyan felt himself "converted" and freed from the burthen of
his sin. He joined a Baptist church at Bedford, and a few years later he
became famous as a preacher. As he held no formal post of minister in
the congregation, his preaching even under the Protectorate was illegal
and "gave great offence," he tells us, "to the doctors and priests of
that county." He persisted, however, with little real molestation until
the Restoration, but only six months had passed after the king's return
when he was committed to Bedford Gaol on a charge of preaching in
unlicensed conventicles. His refusal to promise to abstain from
preaching kept him there eleven years. The gaol was crowded with
prisoners like himself, and amongst them he continued his ministry,
supporting himself by making tagged thread laces, and finding some
comfort in the Bible, the "Book of Martyrs," and the writing materials
which he was suffered to have with him in his prison. But he was in the
prime of