Bunyan was more than once urged to leave Bedford and settle in the metropolis.  But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear.  Bedford was the home of his deepest affections.  It was there the holy words of the poor women “sitting in the sun,” speaking “as if joy did make them speak,” had first “made his heart shake,” and shown him that he was still a stranger to vital godliness.  It was there he had been brought out of darkness into light himself, and there too he had been the means of imparting the same blessing to others.  The very fact of his long imprisonment had identified him with the town and its inhabitants.  There he had a large and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the ties of a common faith and common sufferings.  Many of these recognized in Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few “of the baser sort,” reverenced him as their teacher and guide.  No prospect of a wider field of usefulness, still less of a larger income, could tempt him to desert his “few sheep in the wilderness.”  Some of them, it is true, were wayward sheep, who wounded the heart of their pastor by breaking from the fold, and displaying very un-lamb-like behaviour.  He had sometimes to realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion, however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy members.  Brother John Stanton had to be admonished “for abusing his wife and beating her often for very light matters” (if the matters had been less light, would the beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary Foskett, for “privately whispering of a horrid scandal, ’without culler of truth,’ against Brother Honeylove.”  Evil-speaking and backbiting set brother against brother.  Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan’s spirit.  He himself was not always spared.  A letter had to be written to Sister Hawthorn “by way of reproof for her unseemly language against Brother Scot and the whole Church.”  John Wildman was had up before the Church and convicted of being “an abominable liar and slanderer,” “extraordinary guilty” against “our beloved Brother Bunyan himself.”  And though Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by “humble acknowledgment of her miscariag,” the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by “a frothy letter,” which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion.  But though Bunyan’s flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as he desired, these were the exception.  The congregation meeting in Josias Roughead’s barn must have been, take them as a whole, a quiet, God-fearing, spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think with thankfulness and satisfaction as “his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing.”  From such he could not be severed lightly.  Inducements which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his independent spirit.  He was not “a man that preached by way of bargain for money,”