fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could not be contented
with saying, 'I believe and am sure.' Methought I was more than sure, if
it be lawful so to express myself, that the things I asserted were true."

Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointments which
wrung his heart. He could be satisfied with nothing less than the
conversion and sanctification of his hearers. "If I were fruitless, it
mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who
did condemn." And the result of a sermon was often very different from
what he anticipated: "When I thought I had done no good, then I did the
most; and when I thought I should catch them, I fished for nothing." "A
word cast in by-the-bye sometimes did more execution than all the Sermon
besides." The tie between him and his spiritual children was very close.
The backsliding of any of his converts caused him the most extreme grief;
"it was more to me than if one of my own children were going to the
grave. Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of
the loss of the salvation of my own soul."

A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted,
illustrates the power of his preaching even in the early days of his
ministry. "Being to preach in a church in a country village in
Cambridgeshire"--it was before the Restoration--"and the public being
gathered together in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the
soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people
was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was
to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was
resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear
him. But God met him there by His ministry, so that he came out much
changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long
time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country