hands, anointing with oil, psalms, or any other externals, I charge
every one of you respectively, as you will give an account of it to
our Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge both quick and dead at his
coming, that none of you be found guilty of this great evil, which
some have committed, and that through a zeal for God, yet not
according to knowledge. They have erred from the law of the love of
Christ, and have made a rent in the true Church, which is but one."
If our Baptist brethren are justly proud that the burning and shining
light of Bunyan was set upon their candlestick, they have equal
reason to boast of the torch at which his bland and diffussive light
was kindled. John Bunyan doubtless owed to John Gifford the peculiar
type of his Christianity, its comprehensiveness, and its sect-
forgetting zeal for the things of Jesus Christ.

He had not long been a member of the church when he was called to
exercise its actual ministry. Gifford was gone to his everlasting
rest; and as a substitute for his labours, it was put upon a few of
the brethren to speak the word of exhortation to the rest. Of these
Bunyan was one. At first he did not venture farther than to address
his friends in their more private meetings, or to follow up, with a
brief application, the sermons delivered by others in their village-
preaching. But these exercises having afforded the utmost
satisfaction to his judicious though warm-hearted hearers, he was
urged forward to more public services. These he was too humble to
covet, and too earnest to refuse. Though his education was
sufficiently rude, God had given him from the first a strong athletic
mind and a glowing heart,--that downright logic and teeming fancy,
whose bold strokes and burning images heat the Saxon temper to the
welding point, and make the popular orator of our English multitude.
Then his low original and rough wild history, however much they might