of the villages far and near which had been the scene of his earlier ministry, preaching whenever opportunity offered, and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour, making long journeys into distant parts of the country for the furtherance of the gospel.  We find him preaching at Leicester in the year of his release.  Reading also is mentioned as receiving occasional visits from him, and that not without peril after the revival of persecution; while the congregations in London had the benefit of his exhortations at stated intervals.  Almost the first thing Bunyan did, after his liberation from gaol, was to make others sharers in his hardly won “liberty of prophesying,” by applying to the Government for licenses for preachers and preaching places in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring counties, under the Declaration of Indulgence.  The still existing list sent in to the authorities by him, in his own handwriting, contains the names of twenty-five preachers and thirty buildings, besides “Josias Roughead’s House in his orchard at Bedford.”  Nineteen of these were in his own native county, three in Northamptonshire, three in Buckinghamshire, two in Cambridgeshire, two in Huntingdonshire, and one in Hertfordshire.  The places sought to be licensed were very various, barns, malthouses, halls belonging to public companies, &c., but more usually private houses.  Over these religious communities, bound together by a common faith and common suffering, Bunyan exercised a quasi-episcopal superintendence, which gained for him the playful title of “Bishop Bunyan.”  In his regular circuits,—­“visitations” we may not improperly term them,—­we are told that he exerted himself to relieve the temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,—­so soon and so cruelly revived,—­ministered diligently to the sick and afflicted, and used his influence in reconciling differences between “professors of the gospel,” and thus prevented the scandal of litigation among Christians.  The closing period of Bunyan’s life was laborious but happy, spent “honourably and innocently” in writing, preaching, visiting his congregations, and planting daughter churches.  “Happy,” writes Mr. Froude, “in his work; happy in the sense that his influence was daily extending—­spreading over his own country and to the far-off settlements of America,—­he spent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting Castle out of sight, and the towers and minarets of Immanuel’s Land growing nearer and clearer as the days went on.”

With his time so largely occupied in his spiritual functions, he could have had but small leisure to devote to his worldly calling.  This, however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure not to have neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extent he should work for his living.  He had a family to maintain.  His congregation were mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contribute much to their pastor’s support.  Had it been otherwise, Bunyan was the last man in the world