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 the bench were country gentlemen hating Puritanism from their heart, and eager for retaliation for the wrongs it had wrought them.  From such a bench, even if Bunyan had been less uncompromising, no leniency was to be anticipated.  But Bunyan’s attitude forbade any leniency.  As the law stood he had indisputably broken it, and he expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take the first opportunity of breaking it again.  “I told them that if I was let out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the help of God.”  We may dislike the tone adopted by the magistrates towards the prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearing and contemptuous; we may smile at Keeling’s expositions of Scripture and his stock arguments against unauthorized prayer and preaching, though we may charitably believe that Bunyan misunderstood him when he makes him say that “the Book of Common Prayer had been ever since the apostles’ time”; we may think that the prisoner, in his “canting pedlar’s French,” as Keeling called it, had the better of his judges in knowledge of the Bible, in Christian charity, as well as in dignity and in common sense, and that they showed their wisdom in silencing him in court—­“Let him speak no further,” said one of them, “he will do harm,”—­since they could not answer him more convincingly:  but his legal offence was clear.  He confessed to the indictment, if not in express terms, yet virtually.  He and his friends had held “many meetings together, both to pray to God and to exhort one another.  I confessed myself guilty no otherwise.”  Such meetings were forbidden by the law, which it was the duty of the justices to administer, and they had no choice whether they would convict or no.  Perhaps they were not sorry they had no such choice.  Bunyan was a most “impracticable” prisoner, and as Mr. Froude says, the “magistrates being but unregenerate mortals may be pardoned if they found him provoking.”  The sentence necessarily followed.  It was pronounced, not, we are sure reluctantly, by Keeling, in the terms of the Act.  “He was to go back to prison for three months.  If at three months’ end he still refused to go to church to hear Divine service and leave his preaching, he was to be banished the realm,”—­in modern language “transported,” and if “he came back again without special royal license,” he must “stretch by the neck for it.”