Extricated from the Slough of Despond, Bunyan went on his way rejoicing; and though sometimes interrupted by disquieting thoughts and strong temptations, his subsequent career was a path of growing comfort and prevailing peace. At the age of twenty-six he was admitted a member of that Baptist church of which Mr Gifford was the faithful pastor,—a rare man, who, in angry times, and in a small communion, preserved his catholicity. Holding that “union with Christ,” and not agreement concerning any ordinances or things external, is the foundation of Christian fellowship, with his dying hand he addressed a letter to his beloved people, in which the following sentence occurs, the utterance of a heart enlarged by Christian magnanimity, and bent on those objects which alone look important when the believer is waiting on the top of Pisgah:—“Concerning separation from the Church about baptism, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, psalms, or any other externals, I charge every one of you respectively, as you will give an account of it to our Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge both quick and dead at his coming, that none of you be found guilty of this great evil, which some have committed, and that through a zeal for God, yet not according to knowledge. They have erred from the law of the love of Christ, and have made a rent in the true Church, which is but one.” If our Baptist brethren are justly proud that the burning and shining light of Bunyan was set upon their candlestick, they have equal reason to boast of the torch at which his bland and diffussive light was kindled. John Bunyan doubtless owed to John Gifford the peculiar type of his Christianity, its comprehensiveness, and its sect-forgetting zeal for the things of Jesus Christ.