authority of the Bible—­that “Divine Library”—­collectively taken, belongs to each and every sentence of the Bible taken for and by itself, and that, in Coleridge’s words, “detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes at a millenium from each other, under different dispensations and for different objects,” are to be brought together “into logical dependency.”  But “where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.”  The divinely given life in the soul of man snaps the bonds of humanly-constructed logical systems.  Only those, however, who have known by experience the force of Bunyan’s spiritual combat, can fully appreciate and profit by Bunyan’s narrative.  He tells us on the title-page that it was written “for the support of the weak and tempted people of God.”  For such the “Grace Abounding to the chief of sinners” will ever prove most valuable.  Those for whom it was intended will find in it a message—­of comfort and strength.

As has been said, Bunyan’s pen was almost idle during the last six years of his imprisonment.  Only two of his works were produced in this period:  his “Confession of Faith,” and his “Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith.”  Both were written very near the end of his prison life, and published in the same year, 1672, only a week or two before his release.  The object of the former work was, as Dr. Brown tells us, “to vindicate his teaching, and if possible, to secure his liberty.”  Writing as one “in bonds for the Gospel,” his professed principles, he asserts, are “faith, and holiness springing therefrom, with an endeavour so far as in him lies to be at peace with all men.”  He is ready to hold communion with all whose principles are the same; with all whom he can reckon as children of God.  With these he will not quarrel about “things that are circumstantial,” such as water baptism, which he regards as something quite indifferent, men being “neither the better for having it, nor the worse for having it not.”  “He will receive them in the Lord as becometh saints.  If they will not have communion with him, the neglect is theirs not his.  But with the openly profane and ungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the communion, he will have no communion.  It would be a strange community, he says, that consisted of men and beasts.  Men do not receive their horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room by themselves.”  As regards forms and ceremonies, he “cannot allow his soul to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of this world.  He is content to stay in prison even till the moss grows on his eyelids rather than thus make of his conscience a continual butchery and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes and committing himself to the blind to lead him.  Eleven years’ imprisonment was a weighty argument to pause and pause again over the foundation of the principles for which he had thus suffered.  Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them by the Word of God and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from or deny them on pain of eternal damnation.”