God. Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been
so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone. When he had
joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time
admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that
he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren
while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been
some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and
his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed
illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training
through which he had passed had given him such an experimental
knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could
never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated
by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not only to
exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort
the half contemptuous admiration of scholars. Yet it was long
before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to
utter words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical
diseases. It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from
the internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp
persecution from without. He had been five years a preacher,
when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier
gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the
Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose history is known to
us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated. In November 1660, he
was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained, with some
intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years.
His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would
abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely