the neck of these unlawful meetings,” and that Bunyan must find securities for his good behaviour or go to gaol.  There was no difficulty in obtaining the security.  Bail was at once forthcoming.  The real difficulty lay with Bunyan himself.  No bond was strong enough to keep him from preaching.  If his friends gave them, their bonds would be forfeited, for he “would not leave speaking the word of God.”  Wingate told him that this being so, he must be sent to gaol to be tried at the next Quarter Sessions, and left the room to make out his mittimus.  While the committal was preparing, one whom Bunyan bitterly styles “an old enemy to the truth,” Dr. Lindall, Vicar of Harlington, Wingate’s father-in-law, came in and began “taunting at him with many reviling terms,” demanding what right he had to preach and meddle with that for which he had no warrant, charging him with making long prayers to devour widows houses, and likening him to “one Alexander the Coppersmith he had read of,” “aiming, ’tis like,” says Bunyan, “at me because I was a tinker.”  The mittimus was now made out, and Bunyan in the constable’s charge was on his way to Bedford, when he was met by two of his friends, who begged the constable to wait a little while that they might use their interest with the magistrate to get Bunyan released.  After a somewhat lengthened interview with Wingate, they returned with the message that if Bunyan would wait on the magistrate and “say certain words” to him, he might go free.  To satisfy his friends, Bunyan returned with them, though not with any expectation that the engagement proposed to him would be such as he could lawfully take.  “If the words were such as he could say with a good conscience he would say them, or else he would not.”

After all this coming and going, by the time Bunyan and his friends got back to Harlington House, night had come on.  As he entered the hall, one, he tells us, came out of an inner room with a lighted candle in his hand, whom Bunyan recognized as one William Foster, a lawyer of Bedford, Wingate’s brother-in-law, afterwards a fierce persecutor of the Nonconformists of the district.  With a simulated affection, “as if he would have leapt on my neck and kissed me,” which put Bunyan on his guard, as he had ever known him for “a close opposer of the ways of God,” he adopted the tone of one who had Bunyan’s interest at heart, and begged him as a friend to yield a little from his stubbornness.  His brother-in-law, he said, was very loath to send him to gaol.  All he had to do was only to promise that he would not call people together, and he should be set at liberty and might go back to his home.  Such meetings were plainly unlawful and must be stopped.  Bunyan had better follow his calling and leave off preaching, especially on week-days, which made other people neglect their calling too.  God commanded men to work six days and serve Him on the seventh.  It was vain for Bunyan to reply that he never summoned people to hear