A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted, illustrates the power of his preaching even in the early days of his ministry.  “Being to preach in a church in a country village in Cambridgeshire”—­it was before the Restoration—­“and the public being gathered together in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear him.  But God met him there by His ministry, so that he came out much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country afterwards.”  “This story,” continues the anonymous biographer, “I know to be true, having many times discoursed with the man.”  To the same ante-Restoration period, Dr. Brown also assigns the anecdote of Bunyan’s encounter, on the road near Cambridge, with the university man who asked him how he dared to preach not having the original Scriptures.  With ready wit, Bunyan turned the tables on the scholar by asking whether he had the actual originals, the copies written by the apostles and prophets.  The scholar replied, “No,” but they had what they believed to be a true copy of the original.  “And I,” said Bunyan, “believe the English Bible to be a true copy, too.”  “Then away rid the scholar.”

The fame of such a preacher, naturally, soon spread far and wide; all the countryside flocked eagerly to hear him.  In some places, as at Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, and Yelden in his own county of Bedfordshire, the pulpits of the parish churches were opened to him.  At Yelden, the Rector, Dr. William Dell, the Puritan Master of Caius College, Cambridge, formerly Chaplain to the army under Fairfax, roused the indignation of his orthodox parishioners by allowing him—­“one Bunyon of Bedford, a tinker,” as he is ignominiously styled in the petition sent up to the House of Lords in 1660—­to preach in his parish church on Christmas Day.  But, generally, the parochial clergy were his bitterest enemies.  “When I first went to preach the word abroad,” he writes, “the Doctors and priests of the country did open wide against me.”  Many were envious of his success where they had so signally failed.  In the words of Mr. Henry Deane, when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith, Professor of Arabic and Keeper of the University Library at Cambridge, who had come upon Bunyan preaching in a barn at Toft, they were “angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans,” and proved himself more skilful in his craft than those who had graduated at a university.  Envy is ever the mother of detraction.  Slanders of the blackest dye against his moral character were freely circulated,