A reply to Bunyan’s severe strictures was not slow to appear.  The book bears the title, characteristic of the tone and language of its contents, of “Dirt wip’t off; or, a manifest discovery of the Gross Ignorance, Erroneousness, and most Unchristian and Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan, Lay-preacher in Bedford.”  It professes to be written by a friend of Fowler’s, but Fowler was generally accredited with it.  Its violent tirades against one who, he says, had been “near these twenty years or longer very infamous in the Town and County of Bedford as a very Pestilent Schismatick,” and whom he suggests the authorities have done wrong in letting out of prison, and had better clap in gaol again as “an impudent and malicious Firebrand,” have long since been consigned to a merciful oblivion, where we may safely leave them.

CHAPTER VIII.

Bunyan’s protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672.  The exact date of his actual liberation is uncertain.  His pardon under the Great Seal bears date September 13th.  But we find from the church books that he had been appointed pastor of the congregation to which he belonged as early as the 21st of January of that year, and on the 9th of May his ministerial position was duly recognized by the Government, and a license was granted to him to act “as preacher in the house of Josias Roughead,” for those “of the Persuasion commonly called Congregational.”  His release would therefore seem to have anticipated the formal issue of his pardon by four months.  Bunyan was now half way through his forty-fourth year.  Sixteen years still remained to him before his career of indefatigable service in the Master’s work was brought to a close.  Of these sixteen years, as has already been remarked, we have only a very general knowledge.  Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known source from which they can be recovered.  If he kept any diary it has not been preserved.  If he wrote letters—­and one who was looked up to by so large a circle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose pen was so ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written many—­not one has come down to us.  The pages of the church books during his pastorate are also provokingly barren of record, and little that they contain is in Bunyan’s handwriting.  As Dr. Brown has said, “he seems to have been too busy to keep any records of his busy life.”  Nor can we fill up the blank from external authorities.  The references to Bunyan in contemporary biographies are far fewer than we might have expected; certainly far fewer than we could have desired.  But the little that is recorded is eminently characteristic.  We see him constantly engaged in the great work to which he felt God had called him, and for which, “with much content through grace,” he had suffered twelve years’ incarceration.  In addition to the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own congregation, he took a general oversight