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