“Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,
   And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy
   Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
   To force our consciences that Christ set free!”

How Bunyan came to escape we know not.  But the danger he was in was imminent enough for the church at Bedford to meet to pray “for counsail what to doe” in respect of it.

It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan made his first essay at authorship.  He was led to it by a long and tiresome controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to Bedford.  The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being undermined.  The Quakers’ teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal Christ.  He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, at “Paul’s Steeple-house in Bedford town,” and other places.  One of them, Anne Blackley by name, openly bade him throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, “No; for then the devil would be too hard for me.”  The same enthusiast charged him with “preaching up an idol, and using conjuration and witchcraft,” because of his assertion of the bodily presence of Christ in heaven.

The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author, cannot but be viewed with much interest.  It was a little volume in duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled “Some Gospel Truths Opened, by that unworthy servant of Christ, John Bunyan, of Bedford, by the Grace of God, preacher of the Gospel of His dear Son,” published in 1656.  The little book, which, as Dr. Brown says, was “evidently thrown off at a heat,” was printed in London and published at Newport Pagnel.  Bunyan being entirely unknown to the world, his first literary venture was introduced by a commendatory “Epistle” written by Gifford’s successor, John Burton.  In this Burton speaks of the young author—­Bunyan was only in his twenty-ninth year—­as one who had “neither the greatness nor the wisdom of the world to commend him,” “not being chosen out of an earthly but out of a heavenly university, the Church of Christ,” where “through grace he had taken three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experience of the temptations of Satan,” and as one of whose “soundness in the faith, godly conversation, and his ability to preach the Gospel, not by human aid, but by the Spirit of the Lord,” he “with many other saints had had experience.”  This book must be pronounced a very remarkable production for a young travelling tinker, under thirty, and without any literary or theological training but such as he had gained for himself after attaining to manhood.  Its arrangement is excellent, the arguments are ably