of the Cabal.  Our national honour was at its lowest ebb.  Charles had just concluded the profligate Treaty of Dover, by which, in return for the “protection” he sought from the French king, he declared himself a Roman Catholic at heart, and bound himself to take the first opportunity of “changing the present state of religion in England for a better,” and restoring the authority of the Pope.  The announcement of his conversion Charles found it convenient to postpone.  Nor could the other part of his engagement be safely carried into effect at once.  It called for secret and cautious preparation.  But to pave the way for it, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative he issued a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended all penal laws against “whatever sort of Nonconformists or Recusants.”  The latter were evidently the real object of the indulgence; the former class were only introduced the better to cloke his infamous design.  Toleration, however, was thus at last secured, and the long-oppressed Nonconformists hastened to profit by it.  “Ministers returned,” writes Mr. J. R. Green, “after years of banishment, to their homes and their flocks.  Chapels were re-opened.  The gaols were emptied.  Men were set free to worship God after their own fashion.  John Bunyan left the prison which had for twelve years been his home.”  More than three thousand licenses to preach were at once issued.  One of the earliest of these, dated May 9, 1672, four months before his formal pardon under the Great Seal, was granted to Bunyan, who in the preceding January had been chosen their minister by the little congregation at Bedford, and “giving himself up to serve Christ and His Church in that charge, had received of the elders the right hand of fellowship.”  The place licensed for the exercise of Bunyan’s ministry was a barn standing in an orchard, once forming part of the Castle Moat, which one of the congregation, Josias Roughead, acting for the members of his church, had purchased.  The license bears date May 9, 1672.  This primitive place of worship, in which Bunyan preached regularly till his death, was pulled down in 1707, when a “three-ridged meeting-house” was erected in its place.  This in its turn gave way, in 1849, to the existing more seemly chapel, to which the present Duke of Bedford, in 1876, presented a pair of noble bronze doors bearing scenes, in high relief, from “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the work of Mr. Frederick Thrupp.  In the vestry are preserved Bunyan’s chair, and other relics of the man who has made the name of Bedford famous to the whole civilized world.

CHAPTER VII.