s appearance at the Quarter
Sessions. The magistrate was at first disposed to accept the bail; but
being a young man, new in his office, and thinking it possible that there
might be more against Bunyan than the "mittimus" expressed, he was afraid
of compromising himself by letting him go at large. His refusal, though
it sent him back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm
trust in God's overruling providence. "I was not at all daunted, but
rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heard me." Before he
set out for the justice's house, he tells us he had committed the whole
event to God's ordering, with the prayer that "if he might do more good
by being at liberty than in prison," the bail might be accepted, "but if
not, that His will might be done." In the failure of his friends' good
offices he saw an answer to his prayer, encouraging the hope that the
untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations, "might
be an awaking to the saints in the country," and while "the slender
answer of the justice," which sent him back to his prison, stirred
something akin to contempt, his soul was full of gladness. "Verily I did
meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that
it was His will and mind that I should be there." The sense that he was
being conformed to the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul.
"This word," he continues, "did drop in upon my heart with some life, for
he knew that 'for envy they had delivered him.'"

Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the Quarter
Sessions came on, and "John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,"
was indicted in the customary form for having "devilishly and
perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine Service," and
as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to
the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the
kingdom." The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir
John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan's Lord Hategood in Faithful's trial
at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous
government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice's seat, over the head of
Sir Matthew Hale. Keeling had suffered much from the Puritans during the
great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon, he was "always in gaol,"
and was by no means disposed to deal leniently with an offender of that
persuasion. His brethren of