not “a damp and dreary cell” into which “a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his confinement together,”—­“the common gaol” of Bedford must have been a sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in the open-air in unrestricted freedom.  Prisons in those days, and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places.  A century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition.  One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as “an uncomfortable and close prison.”  Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment, makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English gaols, some of them even unto death.  Bad as it must have been to be a prisoner, as far as his own testimony goes, there is no evidence that his imprisonment, though varying in its strictness with his various gaolers, was aggravated by any special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, “it is unlikely that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships than were absolutely inevitable.”

The arrest of one whose work as a preacher had been a blessing to so many, was not at once tamely acquiesced in by the religious body to which he belonged.  A few days after Bunyan’s committal to gaol, some of “the brethren” applied to Mr. Crompton, a young magistrate at Elstow, to bail him out, offering the required security for his appearance at the Quarter Sessions.  The magistrate was at first disposed to accept the bail; but being a young man, new in his office, and thinking it possible that there might be more against Bunyan than the “mittimus” expressed, he was afraid of compromising himself by letting him go at large.  His refusal, though it sent him back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm trust in God’s overruling providence.  “I was not at all daunted, but rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heard me.”  Before he set out for the justice’s house, he tells us he had committed the whole event to God’s ordering, with the prayer that “if he might do more good by being at liberty than in prison,” the bail might be accepted, “but if not, that His will might be done.”  In the failure of his friends’ good offices he saw an answer to his prayer, encouraging the hope that the untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations, “might be an awaking to the saints in the country,” and while “the slender answer of the justice,” which sent him back to his prison, stirred something akin to contempt, his soul was full of gladness.  “Verily I did meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that it was His will and mind that I should be there.”  The sense that he was being conformed to the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul.  “This word,” he continues, “did drop in upon my heart with some life, for he knew that ‘for envy they had delivered him.’”