casting their feeble glimmer on a stream of workingmen, unusually soon astir, and plainly bent on some engrossing errand. We fall into the stream, and are carried with it into a capacious chapel, which, though it is not yet seven o'clock, is already filled to overflowing with an audience rarely seen on a working day in such a place. A few minutes pass, and a broad-shouldered, cliff-browed countryman is struggling, amid a buzz of whispers, up the pulpit stair. He rises; and as he utters, in his sturdy vernacular, his burning appeals, it is "to astonishment, as if an angel or an apostle had touched the people's souls with a coal of holy fire from the altar."*

Another time-it is the Sabbath-and only a single day's notice has been given of his visit to town. We repair to the spot-it is the "Town'send Meeting-house," holding between one and two thousand persons. The doors are scarcely opened when the anxious multitude pour in, "half being fain to go back again for want of room." The preacher "himself is fain, at a back door, to be pulled almost over people to get up stairs to his pulpit." And oh, how he pleads with these souls! "I have been vile myself," he says, "but have obtained mercy; and I would have my companions in sin to partake of mercy too. A great sinner, when converted, seems a booty to Jesus Christ. He gets by saving such a one; why, then, should both Jesus

*The authority is the Rev. Charles Doe, who was present.

lose His glory and the sinner lose his soul at once, and that for want of an invitation? Come, pardon and a part in heaven and in glory can not be hurtful to you. Manasseh was a bad man, and Magdalene was a bad woman, to say nothing of the thief upon the cross or of the murderers of Christ; yet they obtained mercy: Christ willingly received them. And do you think," he proceeds, as every eye is fixed intently, and an awful stillness pervades the vast concourse, "that those, once so bad, now in heaven, repent them there because they left their sins for Christ when they were in this world? I can not believe but that you think they have verily got the best of it. Why, sinners, do you likewise! Christ, at heaven's gate, says to you, 'Come hither!' and the devil, at the gate of hell, does call you to 'come' to him. Sinners! what say you? whither will you go? Do not go into the fire; there you will be burned. Do not let Jesus lose His longing, since it is for your salvation; but come to Him and live."

And, closing with another of his touching appeals, the tear-drop already stealing down many a rough cheek, he adds, "One word more, and so I have done. Sinner, here thou dost hear of love; prithee do not provoke it by turning it into wantonness. He that dies for slighting love sinks deepest into hell, and will there be tormented by the remembrance of that evil more than by the deepest cogitation of his sins.

Take heed, therefore; do not make love thy tormentFarewell!"

or, sinner!

We return with him to Bedford; and how meekly and lovingly he goes in and out among his simple flock! "To seek yourself in this life," is his observation, one day, "is to be lost." Too intensely has he been refined in the Lord's furnace to be a selfseeking man now.

"That which before was darkened clean
With bushy groves, pricking the looker's eye,
Vanishes away when faith does change the scene,
And now appears a glorious sky."

And right joyous is the fellowship of the saints in this tried church. "Church-fellowship, rightly managed," says he, "is the glory of all the world. No place, no community, no fellowship is adorned and bespangled with those beauties as is a church rightly knit together to their Head, and lovingly serving one another." And such a fellowship meets us here. All who have "spiritual communion with Christ" are welcomed to the table of their common Lord, every detail "being left to private judgment." The light is too heavenly and the love too genuine to give place to any human shibboleth. "Consider," is the affectionate counsel with which he closes his last sermon to them, "that the holy God is your Father; and let this oblige you to live like the children of God, that you may look your Father in the face another day."

CHAPTER XVII.

"Jerusalem, my happy home!

Name ever dear to me!
When shall my labors have an end,
In joy, and peace, and thee ?"

The midnight Lamp.-Writings.-The Furrow.-The great Morrow. The "Blind One."-More than half away.—The Ark of God. Argyle. - Rumbold. - Evil Time. - The Peacemaker.-Illness.-"Black River."-Beulah.-Dying Words. - Heaven. "Feels the Bottom."-"Beatifical Vision.". How to Pray. Ague. - Longing. "Mortal Garments.""The City."-A look in at the Glory.

AT the little upper window of that lowly cottage in Bedford is to be seen, of an evening, a faint light, casting athwart the curtain a dark, deep shadow, as if of a man in deep thought. It is Bunyan, with his Bible, and his glowing heart, and his magic pen, "sequestering" himself to his "beloved work of setting forth the glories of Immanuel." Night after night, his studies are protracted far into the morning; for he does not serve the Lord with that which costs him nothing. Within the sixteen years which elapse betwixt his liberation and his death, that midnight lamp witnesses the production of not fewer than forty-five separate works. During the day his