"This word," he continues, "did drop in upon my heart with some life, for
he knew that 'for envy they had delivered him.'"

Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the Quarter
Sessions came on, and "John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,"
was indicted in the customary form for having "devilishly and
perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine Service," and
as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to
the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the
kingdom." The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir
John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan's Lord Hategood in Faithful's trial
at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous
government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice's seat, over the head of
Sir Matthew Hale. Keeling had suffered much from the Puritans during the
great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon, he was "always in gaol,"
and was by no means disposed to deal leniently with an offender of that
persuasion. His brethren of the bench were country gentlemen hating
Puritanism from their heart, and eager for retaliation for the wrongs it
had wrought them. From such a bench, even if Bunyan had been less
uncompromising, no leniency was to be anticipated. But Bunyan's attitude
forbade any leniency. As the law stood he had indisputably broken it,
and he expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take the
first opportunity of breaking it again. "I told them that if I was let
out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the help
of God." We may dislike the tone adopted by the magistrates towards the
prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearing and contemptuous; we may smile
at Keeling's expositions of Scripture and his stock arguments against
unauthorized prayer and preaching, though we may charitably believe that
Bunyan misunderstood him when he makes him say that "the Book of Common
Prayer had been ever since the apostles' time"; we may think that the