After this he was asked to go with others and hold meetings in the country roundabout; and finally, "after solemn prayer, with fasting, he was set apart to the more ordinary and public preaching of the Word." "My great desire," he says, "in my fulfilling my ministry, was to get into the darkest places of the country, even amongst those people that were furtherest off of profession.... I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.... Indeed, I have been as one sent to them from the dead. I went myself in chains, to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience, that I persuaded them to be aware of." Later, he says, after two years "crying out against men's sins," he changed his manner of preaching; "I did labor much to hold forth Jesus Christ in all his offices, relations, and benefits unto the world." On one occasion, having preached with much feeling, one of his friends took him by the hand, and spoke of the sweet sermon he had delivered. "Ay," said the self-searching preacher, "you need not remind me of that, for the devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit." Bunyan preached wherever there was an open door,--in a barn, a church, or on the village green. Crowds came to listen,--some from curiosity,--and great numbers were converted. "No such preacher," says Froude, "to the uneducated English masses was to be found within the four seas." Among the crowd gathered in a churchyard in Cambridgeshire on a week-day, was a Cambridge scholar, "none of the soberest," who had come to hear "the tinker prate," and gave a boy twopence to hold his horse while he listened. "But God met him there by his ministry, so that he came out much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country afterwards." Another Cambridge University man asked Bunyan, "How dare you preach, seeing you have not the original, being not a scholar?" "Have you the original?" asked Bunyan. "Yes," said the scholar. "Nay, but have you the very self-same original copies that were written by the penmen of the Scriptures, prophets and apostles?" "No," was the reply, "but we have the true copies of these originals." "How do you know that?" said Bunyan. "How?" said the scholar, "why, we believe what we have is a true copy of the original." "Then," said Bunyan, "so do I believe our English Bible is a true copy of the original." Then away rode the scholar. Bunyan met with many obstacles in his preaching. When Dr. William Dell, the Puritan master of Caius College, Cambridge, asked him to preach in the parish church on Christmas, the orthodox parishioners were indignant. Some of the university professors were "angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans." Others declared him a witch, a highwayman, and accused him of nearly every vice. All these things deeply wounded the earnest man, but he kept steadily at work.