Authors, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Bunyan, John, 1628-1688; Puritans -- England -- Clergy -- Biography
found the contents of his study hardly larger than those of his prison
cell. They were limited to a Bible, and copies of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," and a few other books, chiefly his own works, "all lying on a
shelf or shelves." Slight as this sketch is, it puts us more in touch
with the immortal dreamer than many longer and more elaborate paragraphs.
Bunyan's celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shut up in gaol,
was naturally enhanced by the circumstance of his imprisonment. The barn
in Josias Roughead's orchard, where he was licensed as a preacher, was
"so thronged the first time he appeared there to edify, that many were
constrained to stay without; every one that was of his persuasion
striving to partake of his instructions." Wherever he ministered,
sometimes, when troublous days returned, in woods, and in dells, and
other hiding-places, the announcement that John Bunyan was to preach
gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking
from them the word of life. His fame grew the more he was known and
reached its climax when his work was nearest its end. His biographer
Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, "when Mr. Bunyan
preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would
be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold. I have
seen, by my computation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by
seven o'clock on a working day, in the dark winter time. I also computed
about three thousand that came to hear him one Lord's Day in London, at a
town's-end meeting-house, so that half were fain to go back again for
want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled
almost over people to get upstairs to his pulpit." This "town's-end
meeting house" has been identified by some with a quaint straggling long
building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is
an engraving in Wilkinson's "Londina Illustrata." Doe's account,
however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street meeting-
house was not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan's
death, and then for Presbyterian service. Other places in London
connected with his preaching are Pinners' Hall in Old Broad Street,
where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon
on "The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss
thereof," first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen's meeting-house in
White's Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place for titled folk,
city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position and degree. At
earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformists were in
vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealth in private
houses and other places where he might hope to escape the lynx-eyed
informer. It was at one of these furtive meetings that his earliest
biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of London Bridge, Charles
Doe, first heard him preach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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