Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.  It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from without.  He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the Dissenters; and, of all the Dissenters whose history is known to us, he was, perhaps, the most hardly treated.  In November, 1660, he was flung into Bedford jail; and there he remained, with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years.  His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness, and he was fully determined to obey God rather than man.  He was brought before several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain.  He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles.  He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith.  He was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly liberated.  He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he would be liable to banishment; and that if he were found in England after a certain time, his neck would be stretched.  His answer was, “If you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow.”  Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worst prison now to be found in the island is a palace.  His fortitude is the more extraordinary because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.  Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent.  He had several small children, and among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness.  He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she must suffer cold and hunger, she must beg, she must be beaten.  “Yet,” he added, “I must, I must do it.”  While he lay in prison, he could do nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family.  He determined, therefore, to take up a new trade.  He learned to make long tagged thread-laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers.  While his hands were thus busied, he had other employment for his mind and his lips.  He gave religious instruction to his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which he was himself the pastor.  He studied indefatigably the few books which he possessed.  His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox’s “Book of Martyrs.”  His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the “Book of Martyrs” are still legible the ill-spelled lines of doggerel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon.