And for once the
King did not go to sleep when, through caprice or curiosity, he went
to hear him preach.
"When Bunyan went to preach in London, if there was but one day's
notice, the meeting house was crowded to overflowing. Twelve hundred
people would be found collected before seven o'clock on a dark
winter's morning to hear a lecture from him. In Zoar St. Southwark,
his church was sometimes so crowded that he had to be lifted to the
pulpit stairs over the congregation's heads." He strove not for
popularity, as could be seen in the one little circumstance when "a
friend complimented him, after service, on 'the sweet sermon' which he
had delivered. 'You need not remind me of that,' he said. 'The devil
told me of it before I was out of the pulpit.'"
"Charles Doe, a distinguished nonconformist, visited him in his
confinement. 'When I was there,' he writes, 'there were about sixty
dissenters besides himself, taken but a little before at a religious
meeting at Kaistor, in the county of Bedford, besides two eminent
dissenting ministers, Mr.
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