neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many contemporary
celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries of every
land inhabited by an English race, one of the names "men will not
willingly let die." How little could gilded and callous favorites of
the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile
Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were
but rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they
had been immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer
withdrew from man to commune with the King of kings. There the
prisoned student was receiving for the churches new lessons of
surpassing beauty and potency; and the confessor, pillaged by
informers and bullied by judges, and lamented in his own stricken
household and desolate home, but only derided by his godless
sovereign and heartless courtiers, yet often found himself
compensated for every loss, when, like an earlier witness for the
gospel of the Cross, enwrapped "IN THE SPIRIT, ON THE LORD'S DAY."
Such were the schools where Non-conformist piety received its
temper, its edge, and its lustre. The story of Bunyan is, we say,
one of the golden threads binding together into harmony and
symmetry, what, seen apart, seem but fragmentary and incoherent
influences--the track of a divine Providence controlling the fates
and reputations of the race. It is a Providence disappointing men's
judgments and purposes, exalting the lowly and depressing the
illustrious, rebuking despondency on the one hand and on the other
curbing presumption, setting up one and putting down another. This
is done even now and even here, as one of the many intimations which
even time and earth present, of that final and universal reparation
which is reserved for the general resurrection and the last
judgment. Then the unforgetting and universal Sovereign will avenge
all the forgotten of his people, nor leave unpunished one among the