The Life of John Bunyan by Edmund Venables
page 114 of 149 (76%)
page 114 of 149 (76%)
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shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile. Given under our
handes and seales this ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second A que Dni., juxta &c 1674 J Napier W Beecher G Blundell Hum: Monoux Will ffranklin John Ventris Will Spencer Will Gery St Jo Chernocke Wm Daniels T Browne W ffoster Gaius Squire" There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant. John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest, would be immediately committed for trial. Once more, then, Bunyan became a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quarters in the Bedford gaol. Errors die hard, and those by whom they have been once accepted find it difficult to give them up. The long-standing tradition of Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment in the little lock-up-house on the Ouse bridge, having been scattered to the winds by the logic of fact and common sense, those to whom the story is dear, including the latest and ablest of his biographers, Dr. Brown, see in this second brief imprisonment a way to rehabilitate it. Probability pointing to this imprisonment as the time of the composition of "The Pilgrim's Progress," they hold that on this occasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol, and that he there wrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring forward any satisfactory reasons for the change of the place of his confinement. The circumstances, however, being the same, there can be no reasonable ground for questioning that, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned |
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