About this time his lovely wife, to whom he owed so much, died, leaving four children, one of them, his idolized blind daughter, Mary, born in 1650. His beloved friend and pastor, Mr. Gifford, died in September of the same year as his wife.
The members of the church, realizing that the uneducated tinker was gifted in speech, and believing in his earnestness, asked him "to speak a word of exhortation unto them."
At first, modest and shrinking as he was, "it did much dash and abash his spirit," but being entreated, he spoke twice, "but with much weakness and infirmity."
After this he was asked to go with others and hold meetings in the country roundabout; and finally, "after solemn prayer, with fasting, he was set apart to the more ordinary and public preaching of the Word."
"My great desire," he says, "in my fulfilling my ministry, was to get into the darkest places of the country, even amongst those people that were furtherest off of profession.... I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel.... Indeed, I have been as one sent to them from the dead. I went myself in chains, to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience, that I persuaded them to be aware of."
Later, he says, after two years "crying out against men's sins," he changed his manner of preaching; "I did labor much to hold forth Jesus Christ in all his offices, relations, and benefits unto the world."
On one occasion, having preached with much feeling, one of his friends took him by the hand, and spoke of the sweet sermon he had delivered. "Ay," said the self-searching preacher, "you need not remind me of that, for the devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit."
Bunyan preached wherever there was an open door,—in a barn, a church, or on the village green. Crowds came to listen,—some from curiosity,—and great numbers were converted.
"No such preacher," says Froude, "to the uneducated English masses was to be found within the four seas."
Among the crowd gathered in a churchyard in Cambridgeshire on a week-day, was a Cambridge scholar, "none of the soberest," who had come to hear "the tinker prate," and gave a boy twopence to hold his horse while he listened. "But God met him there by his ministry, so that he came out much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country afterwards."