“He was altogether in favour of extempore preaching, and was unwilling to listen to the delivery of a written sermon.” (Indeed, if we had more people like him in this day, we would hear far more of the gospel and far less of politics and jokes which so demoralize the pulpit and take away all sacredness.  The King was right, as all mankind will agree, in his idea of preaching.) “Patrick excused himself from a chaplaincy, ‘finding it very difficult to get a sermon without book.’  On one occasion the King asked the famous Stillingfleet ’how it was that he always reads his sermons before him, when he was informed that he always preached without book elsewhere?’ Stillingfleet answered something about the awe of so noble a congregation, the presence of so great and wise a prince, with which the King himself was very well contented,—­’But, pray,’ continued Stillingfleet, ’will your Majesty give me leave to ask you a question?  Why do you read your speeches when you can have none of the same reasons?’ ‘Why truly, doctor,’ replied the King, ’your question is a very pertinent one, and so will be my answer.  I have asked the two Houses so often and for so much money, that I am ashamed to look them in the face.’”

“This ‘slothful way of preaching,’ for so the King called it, had arisen during the civil wars; and Monmouth, when Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, in compliance with the order of the King, directed a letter to the University that the practice of reading sermons should be wholly laid aside.”

There was much ignorance in the seventeenth century; but ’twas of the people’s own choosing; ’twas not of necessity.  Lewdness was preferable to purity; it was easier had.  And when the King led the pace, why not they of lesser rank and fortunes?  But was there ever a thing created in all the world without its right and wrong sides?  It seemed there was no room in Charles’ time for aught but evil.  “The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of the head of the church, while the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress languished in a dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor.”

As time waxed, even the vigilant persecutors became passive, relaxed themselves into indifference; but before immorality was aware the still, small voice was heard.  The seed that was twelve years in planting had taken root and Pilgrim’s Progress became known and John Bunyan stood without the prison gates to preach and pray at will, to keep on extending that influence that lives to-day.  And for once the King did not go to sleep when, through caprice or curiosity, he went to hear him preach.

“When Bunyan went to preach in London, if there was but one day’s notice, the meeting house was crowded to overflowing.  Twelve hundred people would be found collected before seven o’clock on a dark winter’s morning to hear a lecture from him.  In Zoar St. Southwark, his church was sometimes so crowded that he had to be lifted to the pulpit stairs over the congregation’s heads.”  He strove not for popularity, as could be seen in the one little circumstance when “a friend complimented him, after service, on ‘the sweet sermon’ which he had delivered.  ‘You need not remind me of that,’ he said.  ’The devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit.’”