which he regards as something quite indifferent, men being "neither the
better for having it, nor the worse for having it not." "He will receive
them in the Lord as becometh saints. If they will not have communion
with him, the neglect is theirs not his. But with the openly profane and
ungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the
communion, he will have no communion. It would be a strange community,
he says, that consisted of men and beasts. Men do not receive their
horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room by
themselves." As regards forms and ceremonies, he "cannot allow his soul
to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of
this world. He is content to stay in prison even till the moss grows on
his eyelids rather than thus make of his conscience a continual butchery
and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes and committing himself to the
blind to lead him. Eleven years' imprisonment was a weighty argument to
pause and pause again over the foundation of the principles for which he
had thus suffered. Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in
the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them
by the Word of God and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from
or deny them on pain of eternal damnation."

The second-named work, the "Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by
Faith," is entirely controversial. The Rev. Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had published in the early
part of 1671, a book entitled "The Design of Christianity." A copy
having found its way into Bunyan's hands, he was so deeply stirred by
what he deemed its subversion of the true foundation of Evangelical
religion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks composed a
long and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, and a
confutation of its teaching. Fowler's doctrines as Bunyan understood
them--or rather misunderstood them--awoke the worst side of his impetuous