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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life of John Bunyan, by Edmund Venables
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Life of John Bunyan
+
+
+Author: Edmund Venables
+
+Release Date: April 21, 2005  [eBook #1037]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN
+by Edmund Venables, M.A.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+John Bunyan, the author of the book which has probably passed through
+more editions, had a greater number of readers, and been translated into
+more languages than any other book in the English tongue, was born in the
+parish of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the latter part of the year 1628,
+and was baptized in the parish church of the village on the last day of
+November of that year.
+
+The year of John Bunyan's birth was a momentous one both for the nation
+and for the Church of England.  Charles I., by the extorted assent to the
+Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himself of the
+irresponsible authority he had claimed, and had taken the first step in
+the struggle between King and Parliament which ended in the House of
+Commons seating itself in the place of the Sovereign.  Wentworth (better
+known as Lord Strafford) had finally left the Commons, baffled in his
+nobly-conceived but vain hope of reconciling the monarch and his people,
+and having accepted a peerage and the promise of the Presidency of the
+Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policy of "Thorough," which
+was destined to bring both his own head and that of his weak master to
+the block.  The Remonstrance of Parliament against the toleration of
+Roman Catholics and the growth of Arminianism, had been presented to the
+indignant king, who, wilfully blinded, had replied to it by the promotion
+to high and lucrative posts in the Church of the very men against whom it
+was chiefly directed.  The most outrageous upholders of the royal
+prerogative and the irresponsible power of the sovereign, Montagu and
+Mainwaring, had been presented, the one to the see of Chichester, the
+other--the impeached and condemned of the Commons--to the rich living
+Montagu's consecration had vacated.  Montaigne, the licenser of
+Mainwaring's incriminated sermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of
+York, while Neile and Laud, who were openly named in the Remonstrance as
+the "troublers of the English Israel," were rewarded respectively with
+the rich see of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese
+of London.  Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap
+the whirlwind which was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the
+monarchy and the Church in the same overthrow.  Three months before
+Bunyan's birth Buckingham, on the eve of his departure for the
+beleaguered and famine-stricken city of Rochelle, sanguinely hoping to
+conclude a peace with the French king beneath its walls, had been struck
+down by the knife of a fanatic, to the undisguised joy of the majority of
+the nation, bequeathing a legacy of failure and disgrace in the fall of
+the Protestant stronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long
+anxiously fixed.
+
+The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the coming
+hurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable a name
+in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an
+obscure Bedfordshire village.  His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling
+himself in his will by the more dignified title of "brazier," was more
+properly what is known as a "tinker"; "a mender of pots and kettles,"
+according to Bunyan's contemporary biographer, Charles Doe.  He was not,
+however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually
+are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's
+Christopher Sly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled
+home and an acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow.  The
+family was of long standing there, but had for some generations been
+going down in the world.  Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we
+learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a "petty
+chapman," or small retail dealer, in his own freehold cottage, which he
+bequeathed, "with its appurtenances," to his second wife, Ann, to
+descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her
+own son Edward, in equal shares.  This cottage, which was probably John
+Bunyan's birthplace, persistent tradition, confirmed by the testimony of
+local names, warrants us in placing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile
+to the east of the village of Elstow, at a place long called "Bunyan's
+End," where two fields are still called by the name of "Bunyans" and
+"Further Bunyans."  This small freehold appears to have been all that
+remained, at the death of John Bunyan's grandfather, of a property once
+considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the whole
+locality.
+
+The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan (the
+name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of which
+the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent) is one
+that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times.  The
+first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill,
+about nine miles from Elstow.  In 1199, the year of King John's
+accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish.  One
+William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off.  In 1327,
+the first year of Edward III., one of the same name, probably his
+descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden, close
+to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan's birthplace,
+and was the owner of property there.  We have no further notices of the
+Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century.  We then find them greatly
+fallen.  Their ancestral property seems little by little to have passed
+into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but "a messuage and
+pightell {1} with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land."  This small
+residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still further
+diminished by sale.  The field already referred to, known as "Bonyon's
+End," was sold by "Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer," son of William
+Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepers of a small
+roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-baked bread and
+home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into trouble with the
+petty local courts of the day.  Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was
+born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603,
+exactly a month before the great queen passed away.  The mother of the
+immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a
+native of Elstow and only a few months his junior.  The details of her
+mother's will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow,
+prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's
+latest and most complete biographer, the Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the
+very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet
+decent and worthy in their ways."  John Bunyan's mother was his father's
+second wife.  The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily
+consoled themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
+successor.  Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
+1603, the date of his father's baptism.  But before the year was out his
+grandfather had married again.  His father, too, had not completed his
+twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
+1623.  She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
+before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
+he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley.  At the end of
+seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two
+months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a
+third wife.  Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when
+he married.  We have no particulars of the death of his first wife.  But
+he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the time
+of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first wife
+would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a
+widower and his second marriage.
+
+Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
+Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
+which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy town
+of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
+preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree.  Its name in its
+original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the _stow_ or stockaded
+place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in
+1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of
+the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, in honour of the
+mother of the Emperor Constantine.  The parish church, so intimately
+connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of
+the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to
+contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of
+the conventual church.  Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
+The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, peaked dormers,
+and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much
+what they were in Bunyan's days.  A village street, with detached
+cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew
+and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in
+the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at
+the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building,
+with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic
+architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-
+Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor
+when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses--"the scene," writes Dr. Brown
+"of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of
+village life."  The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little
+altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of
+the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it
+so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which
+his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices."  One
+may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his "cat" that
+memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which
+rebuked him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his sport again."
+On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a
+fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed
+at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached
+bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so
+vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding."  On entering every
+object speaks of Bunyan.  The pulpit--if it has survived the recent
+restoration--is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then "Parson"
+of Elstow, preached the sermon which first awoke his sleeping conscience.
+The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and
+mother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-
+loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth,
+on April 14, 1654.  An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of
+thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the
+tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy
+when he "went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost
+counting all things holy that were therein contained."  The five bells
+which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted,
+the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring.  The
+rough flagged floor, "all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of
+generations of ringers," remains undisturbed.  One cannot see the door,
+set in its solid masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing
+in it, after conscience, "beginning to be tender," told him that "such
+practice was but vain," but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of
+seeing others ring, hoping that, "if a bell should fall," he could "slip
+out" safely "behind the thick walls," and so "be preserved
+notwithstanding."  Behind the church, on the south side, stand some
+picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the
+Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early
+part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones,
+which may have given Bunyan the first idea of "the very stately Palace,
+the name of which was Beautiful."
+
+The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields
+at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its
+site has passed away.  That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655)
+after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still
+standing in the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of
+all interest.
+
+From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the
+earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the
+subject of our biography himself.  The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy
+descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which
+has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other
+side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless.  Even if
+Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish
+descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of
+the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the
+decided negative with which his question was met--"he told me, 'No, we
+were not'"--would, one would have thought, have settled the point.  But
+some fictions die hard.  However low the family had sunk, so that in his
+own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most
+despised of all the families in the land," "of a low and inconsiderable
+generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in
+Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it.  And
+his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute
+among their village neighbours.  Bunyan seems to be describing his own
+father and his wandering life when he speaks of "an honest poor labouring
+man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in,
+and was very careful to maintain his family."  He and his wife were also
+careful with a higher care that their children should be properly
+educated.  "Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my
+parents," writes Bunyan, "it pleased God to put it into their hearts to
+put me to school, to learn both to read and write."  If we accept the
+evidence of the "Scriptural Poems," published for the first time twelve
+years after his death, the genuineness of which, though questioned by Dr.
+Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he
+had was "gained in a grammar school."  This would have been that founded
+by Sir William Harpur in Queen Mary's reign in the neighbouring town of
+Bedford.  Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along
+the mile and a half of footpath and road from his father's cottage by the
+brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to "go
+to school to Aristotle or Plato," but to be taught "according to the rate
+of other poor men's children."  The Bedford schoolmaster about this time,
+William Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with "night-walking"
+and haunting "taverns and alehouses," and other evil practices, as well
+as with treating the poor boys "when present" with a cruelty which must
+have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had been more
+protracted.  Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that
+Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with shame he soon
+lost "almost utterly."  He was before long called home to help his father
+at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was "brought up in a very mean
+condition among a company of poor countrymen."  Here, with but little to
+elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and
+grew up what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls "a bitter blackguard."
+According to his own remorseful confession, he was "filled with all
+unrighteousness," having "from a child" in his "tender years," "but few
+equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of
+God."  Sins of this kind he declares became "a second nature to him;" he
+"delighted in all transgression against the law of God," and as he
+advanced in his teens he became a "notorious sinbreeder," the "very
+ringleader," he says, of the village lads "in all manner of vice and
+ungodliness."  But the unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his
+conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him
+ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life.  "The
+wickedness of the tinker," writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated,
+and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to
+pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved."  The justice
+of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge.  "Bunyan,"
+he says, "was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked.'  He was
+chaste, sober, and honest."  He hints at youthful escapades, such,
+perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the
+like, which might have brought him under "the stroke of the laws," and
+put him to "open shame before the face of the world."  But he confesses
+to no crime or profligate habit.  We have no reason to suppose that he
+was ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was
+never guilty of an act of unchastity.  "In our days," to quote Mr.
+Froude, "a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had
+grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint.  If in
+Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious than
+Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth century
+must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleased to
+allow."  How then, it may be asked, are we to explain the passionate
+language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which would hardly
+seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and licentious?  We
+are confident that Bunyan meant what he said.  So intensely honest a
+nature could not allow his words to go beyond his convictions.  When he
+speaks of "letting loose the reins to his lusts," and sinning "with the
+greatest delight and ease," we know that however exaggerated they may
+appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him overstrained.  Dr.
+Johnson marvelled that St. Paul could call himself "the chief of
+sinners," and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly.  But a highly-
+strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called
+into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different
+estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in
+general.  It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others,
+as sins against infinite love--a love unto death--and in the light of the
+sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while
+it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned.  The sinfulness of
+sin--more especially their own sin--is the intensest of all possible
+realities to them.  No language is too strong to describe it.  We may not
+unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may appear
+to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether
+a mistaken one?
+
+The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan.  While still a
+child "but nine or ten years old," he tells us he was racked with
+convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears.  He was scared with
+"fearful dreams," and "dreadful visions," and haunted in his sleep with
+"apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits" coming to carry him away,
+which made his bed a place of terrors.  The thought of the Day of
+Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over
+his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble.  But
+though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted,
+they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased "as if
+they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to the
+youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
+ringleader.  The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him.  He
+could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
+prison to me."  The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
+crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind."  He said to
+God, "depart from me."  According to the later morbid estimate which
+stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
+roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
+unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight and
+ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions."  But that the
+sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that while
+discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by
+the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for godliness
+dishonoured their profession.  "Once," he says, "when I was at the height
+of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a religious man,
+it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache."
+
+This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
+escapes from accidents which threatened his life--"judgments mixed with
+mercy" he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly
+forsaken of God.  Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford
+river"--the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds
+having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the
+Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the
+Stour and Orwell to the east.  At another time, in his wild contempt of
+danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on with admiration, what
+he mistakenly supposed to be an adder's sting.
+
+These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in his brief
+career as a soldier which his anonymous biographer tells us "made so deep
+an impression upon him that he would never mention it, which he often
+did, without thanksgiving to God."  But for this occurrence, indeed, we
+should have probably never known that he had ever served in the army at
+all.  The story is best told in his own provokingly brief words--"When I
+was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to
+besiege it.  But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired
+to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming
+to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket
+bullet and died."  Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan's
+autobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details.
+This is characteristic of the man.  The religious import of the
+occurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; their
+temporal setting, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of no
+account to him.  He gives us not the slightest clue to the name of the
+besieged place, or even to the side on which he was engaged.  The date of
+the event is left equally vague.  The last point however we are able to
+determine with something like accuracy.  November, 1644, was the earliest
+period at which Bunyan could have entered the army, for it was not till
+then that he reached the regulation age of sixteen.  Domestic
+circumstances had then recently occurred which may have tended to
+estrange him from his home, and turn his thoughts to a military life.  In
+the previous June his mother had died, her death being followed within a
+month by that of his sister Margaret.  Before another month was out, his
+father, as we have already said, had married again, and whether the new
+wife had proved the proverbial _injusta noverca_ or not, his home must
+have been sufficiently altered by the double, if we may not say triple,
+calamity, to account for his leaving the dull monotony of his native
+village for the more stirring career of a soldier.  Which of the two
+causes then distracting the nation claimed his adherence, Royalist or
+Parliamentarian, can never be determined.  As Mr. Froude writes, "He does
+not tell us himself.  His friends in after life did not care to ask him
+or he to inform them, or else they thought the matter of too small
+importance to be worth mentioning with exactness."  The only evidence is
+internal, and the deductions from it vary with the estimate of the
+counter-balancing probabilities taken by Bunyan's various biographers.
+Lord Macaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly
+supported by Dr. Brown, decides in favour of the side of the Parliament.
+Mr. Froude, on the other hand, together with the painstaking Mr. Offor,
+holds that "probability is on the side of his having been with the
+Royalists."  Bedfordshire, however, was one of the "Associated Counties"
+from which the Parliamentary army drew its main strength, and it was shut
+in by a strong line of defence from any combination with the Royalist
+army.  In 1643 the county had received an order requiring it to furnish
+"able and armed men" to the garrison at Newport Pagnel, which was then
+the base of operations against the King in that part of England.  All
+probability therefore points to John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of
+Elstow, the leader in all manly sports and adventurous enterprises among
+his mates, and probably caring very little on what side he fought, having
+been drafted to Newport to serve under Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople, and
+other Parliamentary commanders.  The place of the siege he refers to is
+equally undeterminable.  A tradition current within a few years of
+Bunyan's death, which Lord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the
+certainty of fact, names Leicester.  The only direct evidence for this is
+the statement of an anonymous biographer, who professes to have been a
+personal friend of Bunyan's, that he was present at the siege of
+Leicester, in 1645, as a soldier in the Parliamentary army.  This
+statement, however, is in direct defiance of Bunyan's own words.  For the
+one thing certain in the matter is that wherever the siege may have been,
+Bunyan was not at it.  He tells us plainly that he was "drawn to go," and
+that when he was just starting, he gave up his place to a comrade who
+went in his room, and was shot through the head.  Bunyan's presence at
+the siege of Leicester, which has been so often reported that it has
+almost been regarded as an historical truth, must therefore take its
+place among the baseless creations of a fertile fancy.
+
+Bunyan's military career, wherever passed and under whatever standard,
+was very short.  The civil war was drawing near the end of its first
+stage when he enlisted.  He had only been a soldier a few months when the
+battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, was fought, June 14, 1645.
+Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert, Sept. 10th.  Three days later
+Montrose was totally defeated at Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to
+relieve Chester, Charles shut himself up in Oxford.  The royal garrisons
+yielded in quick succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were
+disbanded, and the first act in the great national tragedy having come to
+a close, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker's work at the
+paternal forge.  His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be mentioned,
+lived all through his famous son's twelve years' imprisonment, witnessed
+his growing celebrity as a preacher and a writer, and died in the early
+part of 1676, just when John Bunyan was passing through his last brief
+period of durance, which was to give birth to the work which has made him
+immortal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan's return
+home from his short experience of a soldier's life, that he took the step
+which, more than any other, influences a man's future career for good or
+for evil.  The young tinker married.  With his characteristic disregard
+of all facts or dates but such as concern his spiritual history, Bunyan
+tells us nothing about the orphan girl he made his wife.  Where he found
+her, who her parents were, where they were married, even her christian
+name, were all deemed so many irrelevant details.  Indeed the fact of his
+marriage would probably have been passed over altogether but for the
+important bearing it hid on his inner life.  His "mercy," as he calls it,
+"was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly," and who,
+though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they "came together
+as poor as poor might be," as "poor as howlets," to adopt his own simile,
+"without so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt" them, yet
+brought with her to the Elstow cottage two religious books, which had
+belonged to her father, and which he "had left her when he died."  These
+books were "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," the work of Arthur Dent,
+the puritan incumbent of Shoebury, in Essex--"wearisomely heavy and
+theologically narrow," writes Dr. Brown--and "The Practise of Piety," by
+Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince
+Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as with
+churchmen.  Together with these books, the young wife brought the still
+more powerful influence of a religious training, and the memory of a holy
+example, often telling her young graceless husband "what a godly man her
+father was, and how he would reprove and correct vice both in his house
+and amongst his neighbours, and what a strict and holy life he lived in
+his days both in word and deed."  Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of
+the "little he had learnt" at school, he had not lost it "utterly."  He
+was still able to read intelligently.  His wife's gentle influence
+prevailed on him to begin "sometimes to read" her father's legacy "with
+her."  This must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly
+at first not much to his taste.  What his favourite reading had been up
+to this time, his own nervous words tell us, "Give me a ballad, a news-
+book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book
+that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables."  But as he and his
+young wife read these books together at their fireside, a higher taste
+was gradually awakened in Bunyan's mind; "some things" in them he "found
+somewhat pleasing" to him, and they "begot" within him "some desires to
+religion," producing a degree of outward reformation.  The spiritual
+instinct was aroused.  He would be a godly man like his wife's father.  He
+began to "go to church twice a day, and that too with the foremost."  Nor
+was it a mere formal attendance, for when there he tells us he took his
+part with all outward devotion in the service, "both singing and saying
+as others did; yet," as he penitently confesses, "retaining his wicked
+life," the wickedness of which, however, did not amount to more than a
+liking for the sports and games of the lads of the village, bell-ringing,
+dancing, and the like.  The prohibition of all liturgical forms issued in
+1645, the observance of which varied with the strictness or laxity of the
+local authorities, would not seem to have been put in force very rigidly
+at Elstow.  The vicar, Christopher Hall, was an Episcopalian, who, like
+Bishop Sanderson, retained his benefice unchallenged all through the
+Protectorate, and held it some years after the Restoration and the
+passing of the Act of Uniformity.  He seems, like Sanderson, to have kept
+himself within the letter of the law by making trifling variations in the
+Prayer Book formularies, consistent with a general conformity to the old
+order of the Church, "without persisting to his own destruction in the
+usage of the entire liturgy."  The decent dignity of the ceremonial of
+his parish church had a powerful effect on Bunyan's freshly awakened
+religious susceptibility--a "spirit of superstition" he called it
+afterwards--and helped to its fuller development.  "I adored," he says,
+"with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place"--altars then
+had not been entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire--"Priest,
+Clerk, Vestment, Service, and what else belonging to the church, counting
+all things holy that were therein contained, and especially the Priest
+and Clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed because they were
+the servants of God and were principal in the Holy Temple, to do His work
+therein, . . . their name, their garb, and work, did so intoxicate and
+bewitch me."  If it is questionable whether the Act forbidding the use of
+the Book of Common Prayer was strictly observed at Elstow, it is certain
+that the prohibition of Sunday sports was not.  Bunyan's narrative shows
+that the aspect of a village green in Bedfordshire during the
+Protectorate did not differ much from what Baxter tells us it had been in
+Shropshire before the civil troubles began, where, "after the Common
+Prayer had been read briefly, the rest of the day even till dark night
+almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a
+great tree, when all the town did meet together."  These Sunday sports
+proved the battle-ground of Bunyan's spiritual experience, the scene of
+the fierce inward struggles which he has described so vividly, through
+which he ultimately reached the firm ground of solid peace and hope.  As
+a high-spirited healthy athletic young fellow, all kinds of manly sports
+were Bunyan's delight.  On week days his tinker's business, which he
+evidently pursued industriously, left him small leisure for such
+amusements.  Sunday therefore was the day on which he "did especially
+solace himself" with them.  He had yet to learn the identification of
+diversions with "all manner of vice."  The teaching came in this way.  One
+Sunday, Vicar Hall preached a sermon on the sin of Sabbath-breaking, and
+like many hearers before and since, he imagined that it was aimed
+expressly at him.  Sermon ended, he went home "with a great burden upon
+his spirit," "sermon-stricken" and "sermon sick" as he expresses it
+elsewhere.  But his Sunday's dinner speedily drove away his
+self-condemning thoughts.  He "shook the sermon out of his mind," and
+went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as
+"great delight" as ever.  But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or
+"sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to
+give it a second blow--the minuteness of the detail shows the
+unforgetable reality of the crisis--he seemed to hear a voice from heaven
+asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his
+sins and go to hell."  He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking
+down on him with threatening countenance.  But like his own Hopeful he
+"shut his eyes against the light," and silenced the condemning voice with
+the feeling that repentance was hopeless.  "It was too late for him to
+look after heaven; he was past pardon."  If his condemnation was already
+sealed and he was eternally lost, it would not matter whether he was
+condemned for many sins or for few.  Heaven was gone already.  The only
+happiness he could look for was what he could get out of his sins--his
+morbidly sensitive conscience perversely identifying sports with sin--so
+he returned desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to "take my fill
+of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might
+taste the sweetness of it."
+
+This desperate recklessness lasted with him "about a month or more," till
+"one day as he was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, cursing and
+swearing and playing the madman after his wonted manner, the woman of the
+house, though a very loose and ungodly wretch," rebuked him so severely
+as "the ungodliest fellow for swearing that ever she heard, able to spoil
+all the youth in a whole town," that, self-convicted, he hung down his
+head in silent shame, wishing himself a little child again that he might
+unlearn the wicked habit of which he thought it impossible to break
+himself.  Hopeless as the effort seemed to him, it proved effectual.  He
+did "leave off his swearing" to his own "great wonder," and found that he
+"could speak better and with more pleasantness" than when he "put an oath
+before and another behind, to give his words authority."  Thus was one
+step in his reformation taken, and never retraced; but, he adds
+sorrowfully, "all this while I knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave
+my sports and plays."  We might be inclined to ask, why should he leave
+them?  But indifferent and innocent in themselves, an overstrained
+spirituality had taught him to regard them as sinful.  To indulge in them
+wounded his morbidly sensitive conscience, and so they were sin to him.
+
+The next step onward in this religious progress was the study of the
+Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly neighbour.
+Naturally he first betook himself to the historical books, which, he
+tells us, he read "with great pleasure;" but, like Baxter who, beginning
+his Bible reading in the same course, writes, "I neither understood nor
+relished much the doctrinal part," he frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles
+and such like Scriptures I could not away with."  His Bible reading
+helped forward the outward reformation he had begun.  He set the keeping
+the Ten Commandments before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted
+"sometimes" when, as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled
+in conscience when "now and then he broke one."  "But then," he says, "I
+should repent and say I was sorry for it, and promise God to do better
+next time, and then get help again; for then I thought I pleased God as
+well as any man in England."  His progress was slow, for each step
+involved a battle, but it was steadily onwards.  He had a very hard
+struggle in relinquishing his favourite amusements.  But though he had
+much yet to learn, his feet were set on the upward way, and he had no
+mind to go back, great as the temptation often was.  He had once
+delighted in bell-ringing, but "his conscience beginning to be
+tender"--morbid we should rather say--"he thought such practise to be
+vain, and therefore forced himself to leave it."  But "hankering after it
+still," he continued to go while his old companions rang, and look on at
+what he "durst not" join in, until the fear that if he thus winked at
+what his conscience condemned, a bell, or even the tower itself, might
+fall and kill him, put a stop even to that compromise.  Dancing, which
+from his boyhood he had practised on the village green, or in the old
+Moot Hall, was still harder to give up.  "It was a full year before I
+could quite leave that."  But this too was at last renounced, and
+finally.  The power of Bunyan's indomitable will was bracing itself for
+severe trials yet to come.
+
+Meanwhile Bunyan's neighbours regarded with amazement the changed life of
+the profane young tinker.  "And truly," he honestly confesses, "so they
+well might for this my conversion was as great as for Tom of Bedlam to
+become a sober man."  Bunyan's reformation was soon the town's talk; he
+had "become godly," "become a right honest man."  These commendations
+flattered is vanity, and he laid himself out for them.  He was then but a
+"poor painted hypocrite," he says, "proud of his godliness, and doing all
+he did either to be seen of, or well spoken of by man."  This state of
+self-satisfaction, he tells us, lasted "for about a twelvemonth or more."
+During this deceitful calm he says, "I had great peace of conscience, and
+should think with myself, 'God cannot choose but now be pleased with me,'
+yea, to relate it in mine own way, I thought no man in England could
+please God better than I."  But no outward reformation can bring lasting
+inward peace.  When a man is honest with himself, the more earnestly he
+struggles after complete obedience, the more faulty does his obedience
+appear.  The good opinion of others will not silence his own inward
+condemnation.  He needs a higher righteousness than his own; a firmer
+standing-ground than the shifting quicksand of his own good deeds.  "All
+this while," he writes, "poor wretch as I was, I was ignorant of Jesus
+Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had
+perished therein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by
+nature."
+
+This revolution was nearer than he imagined.  Bunyan's self-satisfaction
+was rudely shaken, and his need of something deeper in the way of
+religion than he had yet experienced was shown him by the conversation of
+three or four poor women whom, one day, when pursuing his tinker's
+calling at Bedford, he came upon "sitting at a door in the sun, and
+talking of the things of God."  These women were members of the
+congregation of "the holy Mr. John Gifford," who, at that time of
+ecclesiastical confusion, subsequently became rector of St. John's
+Church, in Bedford, and master of the hospital attached to it.  Gifford's
+career had been a strange one.  We hear of him first as a young major in
+the king's army at the outset of the Civil War, notorious for his loose
+and debauched life, taken by Fairfax at Maidstone in 1648, and condemned
+to the gallows.  By his sister's help he eluded his keepers' vigilance,
+escaped from prison, and ultimately found his way to Bedford, where for a
+time he practised as a physician, though without any change of his loose
+habits.  The loss of a large sum of money at gaming awoke a disgust at
+his dissolute life.  A few sentences of a pious book deepened the
+impression.  He became a converted man, and joined himself to a handful
+of earnest Christians in Bedford, who becoming, in the language of the
+day, "a church," he was appointed its first minister.  Gifford exercised
+a deep and vital though narrow influence, leaving behind him at his
+death, in 1655, the character of a "wise, tolerant, and truly Christian
+man."  The conversation of the poor women who were destined to exercise
+so momentous an influence on Bunyan's spiritual life, evidenced how
+thoroughly they had drunk in their pastor's teaching.  Bunyan himself was
+at this time a "brisk talker in the matters of religion," such as he drew
+from the life in his own Talkative.  But the words of these poor women
+were entirely beyond him.  They opened a new and blessed land to which he
+was a complete stranger.  "They spoke of their own wretchedness of heart,
+of their unbelief, of their miserable state by nature, of the new birth,
+and the work of God in their souls, and how the Lord refreshed them, and
+supported them against the temptations of the Devil by His words and
+promises."  But what seems to have struck Bunyan the most forcibly was
+the happiness which their religion shed in the hearts of these poor
+women.  Religion up to this time had been to him a system of rules and
+restrictions.  Heaven was to be won by doing certain things and not doing
+certain other things.  Of religion as a Divine life kindled in the soul,
+and flooding it with a joy which creates a heaven on earth, he had no
+conception.  Joy in believing was a new thing to him.  "They spake as if
+joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture
+language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they
+were to me as if they had found a new world," a veritable "El Dorado,"
+stored with the true riches.  Bunyan, as he says, after he had listened
+awhile and wondered at their words, left them and went about his work
+again.  But their words went with him.  He could not get rid of them.  He
+saw that though he thought himself a godly man, and his neighbours
+thought so too, he wanted the true tokens of godliness.  He was convinced
+that godliness was the only true happiness, and he could not rest till he
+had attained it.  So he made it his business to be going again and again
+into the company of these good women.  He could not stay away, and the
+more he talked with them the more uneasy he became--"the more I
+questioned my own condition."  The salvation of his soul became all in
+all to him.  His mind "lay fixed on eternity like a horse-leech at the
+vein."  The Bible became precious to him.  He read it with new eyes, "as
+I never did before."  "I was indeed then never out of the Bible, either
+by reading or meditation."  The Epistles of St. Paul, which before he
+"could not away with," were now "sweet and pleasant" to him.  He was
+still "crying out to God that he might know the truth and the way to
+Heaven and glory."  Having no one to guide him in his study of the most
+difficult of all books, it is no wonder that he misinterpreted and
+misapplied its words in a manner which went far to unsettle his brain.  He
+read that without faith he could not be saved, and though he did not
+clearly know what faith was, it became a question of supreme anxiety to
+him to determine whether he had it or not.  If not, he was a castaway
+indeed, doomed to perish for ever.  So he determined to put it to the
+test.  The Bible told him that faith, "even as a grain of mustard seed,"
+would enable its possessor to work miracles.  So, as Mr. Froude says,
+"not understanding Oriental metaphors," he thought he had here a simple
+test which would at once solve the question.  One day as he was walking
+along the miry road between Elstow and Bedford, which he had so often
+paced as a schoolboy, "the temptation came hot upon him" to put the
+matter to the proof, by saying to the puddles that were in the horse-pads
+"be dry," and to the dry places, "be ye puddles."  He was just about to
+utter the words when a sudden thought stopped him.  Would it not be
+better just to go under the hedge and pray that God would enable him?
+This pause saved him from a rash venture, which might have landed him in
+despair.  For he concluded that if he tried after praying and nothing
+came of it, it would prove that he had no faith, but was a castaway.
+"Nay, thought I, if it be so, I will never try yet, but will stay a
+little longer."  "Then," he continues, "I was so tossed betwixt the Devil
+and my own ignorance, and so perplexed, especially at sometimes, that I
+could not tell what to do."  At another time his mind, as the minds of
+thousands have been and will be to the end, was greatly harassed by the
+insoluble problems of predestination and election.  The question was not
+now whether he had faith, but "whether he was one of the elect or not,
+and if not, what then?"  "He might as well leave off and strive no
+further."  And then the strange fancy occurred to him, that the good
+people at Bedford whose acquaintance he had recently made, were all that
+God meant to save in that part of the country, and that the day of grace
+was past and gone for him; that he had overstood the time of mercy.  "Oh
+that he had turned sooner!" was then his cry.  "Oh that he had turned
+seven years before!  What a fool he had been to trifle away his time till
+his soul and heaven were lost!"  The text, "compel them to come in, and
+yet there is room," came to his rescue when he was so harassed and faint
+that he was "scarce able to take one step more."  He found them "sweet
+words," for they showed him that there was "place enough in heaven for
+him," and he verily believed that when Christ spoke them He was thinking
+of him, and had them recorded to help him to overcome the vile fear that
+there was no place left for him in His bosom.  But soon another fear
+succeeded the former.  Was he truly called of Christ?  "He called to them
+when He would, and they came to Him."  But they could not come unless He
+called them.  Had He called him?  Would He call him?  If He did how
+gladly would he run after Him.  But oh, he feared that He had no liking
+to him; that He would not call him.  True conversion was what he longed
+for.  "Could it have been gotten for gold," he said, "what could I have
+given for it!  Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times
+over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state."  All
+those whom he thought to be truly converted were now lovely in his eyes.
+"They shone, they walked like people that carried the broad seal of
+heaven about them.  Oh that he were like them, and shared in their goodly
+heritage!"
+
+About this time Bunyan was greatly troubled, though at the same time
+encouraged in his endeavours after the blessedness he longed for so
+earnestly but could not yet attain to, by "a dream or vision" which
+presented itself to him, whether in his waking or sleeping hours he does
+not tell us.  He fancied he saw his four Bedford friends refreshing
+themselves on the sunny side of a high mountain while he was shivering
+with dark and cold on the other side, parted from them by a high wall
+with only one small gap in it, and that not found but after long
+searching, and so strait and narrow withal that it needed long and
+desperate efforts to force his way through.  At last he succeeded.
+"Then," he says, "I was exceeding glad, and went and sat down in the
+midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their
+sun."
+
+But this sunshine shone but in illusion, and soon gave place to the old
+sad questioning, which filled his soul with darkness.  Was he already
+called, or should he be called some day?  He would give worlds to know.
+Who could assure him?  At last some words of the prophet Joel (chap. iii,
+21) encouraged him to hope that if not converted already, the time might
+come when he should be converted to Christ.  Despair began to give way to
+hopefulness.
+
+At this crisis Bunyan took the step which he would have been wise if he
+had taken long before.  He sought the sympathy and counsel of others.  He
+began to speak his mind to the poor people in Bedford whose words of
+religious experiences had first revealed to him his true condition.  By
+them he was introduced to their pastor, "the godly Mr. Gifford," who
+invited him to his house and gave him spiritual counsel.  He began to
+attend the meetings of his disciples.
+
+The teaching he received here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan's
+morbid sensitiveness.  For it was based upon a constant introspection and
+a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion
+of its motive, which made a man's ever-varying spiritual feelings the
+standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to
+the Saviour.  It is not, therefore, at all surprising that a considerable
+period intervened before, in the language of his school, "he found
+peace."  This period, which seems to have embraced two or three years,
+was marked by that tremendous inward struggle which he has described, "as
+with a pen of fire," in that marvellous piece of religious autobiography,
+without a counterpart except in "The Confessions of St. Augustine," his
+"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners."  Bunyan's first experiences
+after his introduction to Mr. Gifford and the inner circle of his
+disciples were most discouraging.  What he heard of God's dealings with
+their souls showed him something of "the vanity and inward wretchedness
+of his wicked heart," and at the same time roused all its hostility to
+God's will.  "It did work at that rate for wickedness as it never did
+before."  "The Canaanites _would_ dwell in the land."  "His heart
+hankered after every foolish vanity, and hung back both to and in every
+duty, as a clog on the leg of a bird to hinder her from flying."  He
+thought that he was growing "worse and worse," and was "further from
+conversion than ever before."  Though he longed to let Christ into his
+heart, "his unbelief would, as it were, set its shoulder to the door to
+keep Him out."
+
+Yet all the while he was tormented with the most perverse scrupulosity of
+conscience.  "As to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now;
+I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my
+conscience now was sore, and would smart at every twist.  I could not now
+tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them.  Oh! how
+gingerly did I then go in all I did or said: I found myself in a miry
+bog, that shook if I did but stir, and was as those left both of God, and
+Christ, and the Spirit, and all good things."  All the misdoings of his
+earlier years rose up against him.  There they were, and he could not rid
+himself of them.  He thought that no one could be so bad as he was; "not
+even the Devil could be his equal: he was more loathsome in his own eyes
+than a toad."  What then must God think of him?  Despair seized fast hold
+of him.  He thought he was "forsaken of God and given up to the Devil,
+and to a reprobate mind."  Nor was this a transient fit of despondency.
+"Thus," he writes, "I continued a long while, even for some years
+together."
+
+This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan's religious history
+through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fierce
+temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated
+scraps of Bible language--texts torn from their context--the harassing
+doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the
+elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic
+power.  It is a picture of fearful fascination that he draws.  "A great
+storm" at one time comes down upon him, "piece by piece," which "handled
+him twenty times worse than all he had met with before," while "floods of
+blasphemies were poured upon his spirit," and would "bolt out of his
+heart."  He felt himself driven to commit the unpardonable sin and
+blaspheme the Holy Ghost, "whether he would or no."  "No sin would serve
+but that."  He was ready to "clap his hand under his chin," to keep his
+mouth shut, or to leap head-foremost "into some muckhill-hole," to
+prevent his uttering the fatal words.  At last he persuaded himself that
+he had committed the sin, and a good but not overwise man, "an ancient
+Christian," whom he consulted on his sad case, told him he thought so
+too, "which was but cold comfort."  He thought himself possessed by the
+devil, and compared himself to a child "carried off under her apron by a
+gipsy."  "Kick sometimes I did, and also shriek and cry, but yet I was as
+bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away."
+He wished himself "a dog or a toad," for they "had no soul to be lost as
+his was like to be;" and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle
+upon him.  "If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could
+not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one."  And yet he
+was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought
+himself singular.  "This much sunk me.  I thought my condition was alone;
+but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not."  Again
+the very ground of his faith was shaken.  "Was the Bible true, or was it
+not rather a fable and cunning story?"  All thought "their own religion
+true.  Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet
+Saviour as Christians had for Christ?  What if all we believed in should
+be but 'a think-so' too?"  So powerful and so real were his illusions
+that he had hard work to keep himself from praying to things about him,
+to "a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like," or even to Satan himself.  He
+heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desired to have him, and
+that "so loud and plain that he would turn his head to see who was
+calling him;" when on his knees in prayer he fancied he felt the foul
+fiend pull his clothes from behind, bidding him "break off, make haste;
+you have prayed enough."
+
+This "horror of great darkness" was not always upon him.  Bunyan had his
+intervals of "sunshine-weather" when Giant Despair's fits came on him,
+and the giant "lost the use of his hand."  Texts of Scripture would give
+him a "sweet glance," and flood his soul with comfort.  But these
+intervals of happiness were but short-lived.  They were but "hints,
+touches, and short visits," sweet when present, but "like Peter's sheet,
+suddenly caught up again into heaven."  But, though transient, they
+helped the burdened Pilgrim onward.  So vivid was the impression
+sometimes made, that years after he could specify the place where these
+beams of sunlight fell on him--"sitting in a neighbour's
+house,"--"travelling into the country,"--as he was "going home from
+sermon."  And the joy was real while it lasted.  The words of the
+preacher's text, "Behold, thou art fair, my love," kindling his spirit,
+he felt his "heart filled with comfort and hope."  "Now I could believe
+that my sins would be forgiven."  He was almost beside himself with
+ecstasy.  "I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God that I
+thought I could have spoken of it even to the very crows that sat upon
+the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood
+me."  "Surely," he cried with gladness, "I will not forget this forty
+years hence."  "But, alas! within less than forty days I began to
+question all again."  It was the Valley of the Shadow of Death which
+Bunyan, like his own Pilgrim, was travelling through.  But, as in his
+allegory, "by and by the day broke," and "the Lord did more fully and
+graciously discover Himself unto him."  "One day," he writes, "as I was
+musing on the wickedness and blasphemy of my heart, that scripture came
+into my mind, 'He hath made peace by the Blood of His Cross.'  By which I
+was made to see, both again and again and again that day, that God and my
+soul were friends by this blood: Yea, I saw the justice of God and my
+sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other.  This was a good day to
+me.  I hope I shall not forget it."  At another time the "glory and joy"
+of a passage in the Hebrews (ii. 14-15) were "so weighty" that "I was
+once or twice ready to swoon as I sat, not with grief and trouble, but
+with solid joy and peace."  "But, oh! now how was my soul led on from
+truth to truth by God; now had I evidence of my salvation from heaven,
+with many golden seals thereon all banging in my sight, and I would long
+that the last day were come, or that I were fourscore years old, that I
+might die quickly that my soul might be at rest."
+
+At this time he fell in with an old tattered copy of Luther's "Commentary
+on the Galatians," "so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece if
+I did but turn it over."  As he read, to his amazement and thankfulness,
+he found his own spiritual experience described.  "It was as if his book
+had been written out of my heart."  It greatly comforted him to find that
+his condition was not, as he had thought, solitary, but that others had
+known the same inward struggles.  "Of all the books that ever he had
+seen," he deemed it "most fit for a wounded conscience."  This book was
+also the means of awakening an intense love for the Saviour.  "Now I
+found, as I thought, that I loved Christ dearly.  Oh, methought my soul
+cleaved unto Him, my affections cleaved unto Him; I felt love to Him as
+hot as fire."
+
+And very quickly, as he tells us, his "love was tried to some purpose."
+He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation--"a freak of fancy,"
+Mr. Froude terms it--"fancy resenting the minuteness with which he
+watched his own emotions."  He had "found Christ" and felt Him "most
+precious to his soul."  He was now tempted to give Him up, "to sell and
+part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of
+this life; for anything."  Nor was this a mere passing, intermittent
+delusion.  "It lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so
+continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month, no, not
+sometimes one hour in many days together, except when I was asleep."
+Wherever he was, whatever he was doing day and night, in bed, at table,
+at work, a voice kept sounding in his ears, bidding him "sell Christ" for
+this or that.  He could neither "eat his food, stoop for a pin, chop a
+stick, or cast his eyes on anything" but the hateful words were heard,
+"not once only, but a hundred times over, as fast as a man could speak,
+'sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,'" and, like his own Christian in the dark
+valley, he could not determine whether they were suggestions of the
+Wicked One, or came from his own heart.  The agony was so intense, while,
+for hours together, he struggled with the temptation, that his whole body
+was convulsed by it.  It was no metaphorical, but an actual, wrestling
+with a tangible enemy.  He "pushed and thrust with his hands and elbows,"
+and kept still answering, as fast as the destroyer said "sell Him," "No,
+I will not, I will not, I will not! not for thousands, thousands,
+thousands of worlds!" at least twenty times together.  But the fatal
+moment at last came, and the weakened will yielded, against itself.  One
+morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came again with redoubled force,
+and would not be silenced.  He fought against it as long as he could,
+"even until I was almost out of breath," when "without any conscious
+action of his will" the suicidal words shaped themselves in his heart,
+"Let Him go if He will."
+
+Now all was over.  He had spoken the words and they could not be
+recalled.  Satan had "won the battle," and "as a bird that is shot from
+the top of a tree, down fell he into great guilt and fearful despair."  He
+left his bed, dressed, and went "moping into the field," where for the
+next two hours he was "like a man bereft of life, and as one past all
+recovery and bound to eternal punishment."  The most terrible examples in
+the Bible came trooping before him.  He had sold his birthright like
+Esau.  He a betrayed his Master like Judas--"I was ashamed that I should
+be like such an ugly man as Judas."  There was no longer any place for
+repentance.  He was past all recovery; shut up unto the judgment to come.
+He dared hardly pray.  When he tried to do so, he was "as with a tempest
+driven away from God," while something within said, "'Tis too late; I am
+lost; God hath let me fall."  The texts which once had comforted him gave
+him no comfort now; or, if they did, it was but for a brief space.  "About
+ten or eleven o'clock one day, as I was walking under a hedge and
+bemoaning myself for this hard hap that such a thought should arise
+within me, suddenly this sentence bolted upon me, 'The blood of Christ
+cleanseth from all sin,'" and gave me "good encouragement."  But in two
+or three hours all was gone.  The terrible words concerning Esau's
+selling his birthright took possession of his mind, and "held him down."
+This "stuck with him."  Though he "sought it carefully with tears," there
+was no restoration for him.  His agony received a terrible aggravation
+from a highly coloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira,
+an Italian lawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having
+embraced the Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to
+return to the Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and
+despair, from which Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of "the man
+in the Iron Cage" at "the Interpreter's house."  The reading of this book
+was to his "troubled spirit" as "salt when rubbed into a fresh wound,"
+"as knives and daggers in his soul."  We cannot wonder that his health
+began to give way under so protracted a struggle.  His naturally sturdy
+frame was "shaken by a continual trembling."  He would "wind and twine
+and shrink under his burden," the weight of which so crushed him that he
+"could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet."  His
+digestion became disordered, and a pain, "as if his breastbone would have
+split asunder," made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas' sin,
+so he was to perish by Judas' end, and "burst asunder in the midst."  In
+the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain's mark set upon him; God had
+marked him out for his curse.  No one was ever so bad as he.  No one had
+ever sinned so flagrantly.  When he compared his sins with those of David
+and Solomon and Manasseh and others which had been pardoned, he found his
+sin so much exceeded theirs that he could have no hope of pardon.  Theirs,
+"it was true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour.  But none of them
+were of the nature of his.  He had sold his Saviour.  His sin was point
+blank against Christ."  "Oh, methought this sin was bigger than the sins
+of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world; not all of them
+together was able to equal mine; mine outwent them every one."
+
+It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of his self-
+torturing illusions.  Fierce as the storm was, and long in its
+duration--for it was more than two years before the storm became a
+calm--the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossings which
+threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong on the rocks
+of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the "haven where he
+would be."  His vivid imagination, as we have seen, surrounded him with
+audible voices.  He had heard, as he thought, the tempter bidding him
+"Sell Christ;" now he thought he heard God "with a great voice, as it
+were, over his shoulder behind him," saying, "Return unto Me, for I have
+redeemed thee;" and though he felt that the voice mocked him, for he
+could not return, there was "no place of repentance" for him, and fled
+from it, it still pursued him, "holloaing after him, 'Return, return!'"
+And return he did, but not all at once, or without many a fresh struggle.
+With his usual graphic power he describes the zigzag path by which he
+made his way.  His hot and cold fits alternated with fearful suddenness.
+"As Esau beat him down, Christ raised him up."  "His life hung in doubt,
+not knowing which way he should tip."  More sensible evidence came.  "One
+day," he tells us, "as I walked to and fro in a good man's shop"--we can
+hardly be wrong in placing it in Bedford--"bemoaning myself for this hard
+hap of mine, for that I should commit so great a sin, greatly fearing
+that I should not be pardoned, and ready to sink with fear, suddenly
+there was as if there had rushed in at the window the noise of wind upon
+me, but very pleasant, and I heard a voice speaking, 'Did'st ever refuse
+to be justified by the Blood of Christ?'"  Whether the voice were
+supernatural or not, he was not, "in twenty years' time," able to
+determine.  At the time he thought it was.  It was "as if an angel had
+come upon me."  "It commanded a great calm upon me.  It persuaded me
+there might be hope."  But this persuasion soon vanished.  "In three or
+four days I began to despair again."  He found it harder than ever to
+pray.  The devil urged that God was weary of him; had been weary for
+years past; that he wanted to get rid of him and his "bawlings in his
+ears," and therefore He had let him commit this particular sin that he
+might be cut off altogether.  For such an one to pray was but to add sin
+to sin.  There was no hope for him.  Christ might indeed pity him and
+wish to help him; but He could not, for this sin was unpardonable.  He
+had said "let Him go if He will," and He had taken him at his word.
+"Then," he says, "I was always sinking whatever I did think or do."  Years
+afterwards he remembered how, in this time of hopelessness, having walked
+one day, to a neighbouring town, wearied out with his misery, he sat down
+on a settle in the street to ponder over his fearful state.  As he looked
+up, everything he saw seemed banded together for the destruction of so
+vile a sinner.  The "sun grudged him its light, the very stones in the
+streets and the tiles on the house-roofs seemed to bend themselves
+against him."  He burst forth with a grievous sigh, "How can God comfort
+such a wretch as I?"  Comfort was nearer than he imagined.  "No sooner
+had I said it, but this returned to me, as an echo doth answer a voice,
+'This sin is not unto death.'"  This breathed fresh life into his soul.
+He was "as if he had been raised out of a grave."  "It was a release to
+me from my former bonds, a shelter from my former storm."  But though the
+storm was allayed it was by no means over.  He had to struggle hard to
+maintain his ground.  "Oh, how did Satan now lay about him for to bring
+me down again.  But he could by no means do it, for this sentence stood
+like a millpost at my back."  But after two days the old despairing
+thoughts returned, "nor could his faith retain the word."  A few hours,
+however, saw the return of his hopes.  As he was on his knees before
+going to bed, "seeking the Lord with strong cries," a voice echoed his
+prayer, "I have loved Thee with an everlasting love."  "Now I went to bed
+at quiet, and when I awaked the next morning it was fresh upon my soul
+and I believed it."
+
+These voices from heaven--whether real or not he could not tell, nor did
+he much care, for they were real to him--were continually sounding in his
+ears to help him out of the fresh crises of his spiritual disorder.  At
+one time "O man, great is thy faith," "fastened on his heart as if one
+had clapped him on the back."  At another, "He is able," spoke suddenly
+and loudly within his heart; at another, that "piece of a sentence," "My
+grace is sufficient," darted in upon him "three times together," and he
+was "as though he had seen the Lord Jesus look down through the tiles
+upon him," and was sent mourning but rejoicing home.  But it was still
+with him like an April sky.  At one time bright sunshine, at another
+lowering clouds.  The terrible words about Esau "returned on him as
+before," and plunged him in darkness, and then again some good words, "as
+it seemed writ in great letters," brought back the light of day.  But the
+sunshine began to last longer than before, and the clouds were less
+heavy.  The "visage" of the threatening texts was changed; "they looked
+not on him so grimly as before;" "that about Esau's birthright began to
+wax weak and withdraw and vanish."  "Now remained only the hinder part of
+the tempest.  The thunder was gone; only a few drops fell on him now and
+then."
+
+The long-expected deliverance was at hand.  As he was walking in the
+fields, still with some fears in his heart, the sentence fell upon his
+soul, "Thy righteousness is in heaven."  He looked up and "saw with the
+eyes of his soul our Saviour at God's right hand."  "There, I say, was my
+righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-doing, God
+could not say of me, 'He wants my righteousness,' for that was just
+before Him.  Now did the chains fall off from my legs.  I was loosed from
+my affliction and irons.  My temptations also fled away, so that from
+that time those dreadful Scriptures left off to trouble me.  Oh methought
+Christ, Christ, there was nothing but Christ that was before mine eyes.  I
+could look from myself to Him, and should reckon that all those graces of
+God that now were green upon me, were yet but like those crack-groats,
+and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, while
+their gold is in their trunks at home.  Oh, I saw my gold was in my trunk
+at home.  In Christ my Lord and Saviour.  Further the Lord did lead me
+into the mystery of union with the Son of God.  His righteousness was
+mine, His merits mine, His victory also mine.  Now I could see myself in
+heaven and earth at once; in heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my
+Righteousness and Life, though on earth by my body or person.  These
+blessed considerations were made to spangle in mine eyes.  Christ was my
+all; all my Wisdom, all my Righteousness, all my Sanctification, and all
+my Redemption."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The Pilgrim, having now floundered through the Slough of Despond, passed
+through the Wicket Gate, climbed the Hill Difficulty, and got safe by the
+Lions, entered the Palace Beautiful, and was "had in to the family."  In
+plain words, Bunyan united himself to the little Christian brotherhood at
+Bedford, of which the former loose-living royalist major, Mr. Gifford,
+was the pastor, and was formally admitted into their society.  In Gifford
+we recognize the prototype of the Evangelist of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
+while the Prudence, Piety, and Charity of Bunyan's immortal narrative had
+their human representatives in devout female members of the congregation,
+known in their little Bedford world as Sister Bosworth, Sister Munnes,
+and Sister Fenne, three of the poor women whose pleasant words on the
+things of God, as they sat at a doorway in the sun, "as if joy did make
+them speak," had first opened Bunyan's eyes to his spiritual ignorance.
+He was received into the church by baptism, which, according to his
+earliest biographer, Charles Doe "the Struggler," was performed publicly
+by Mr. Gifford, in the river Ouse, the "Bedford river" into which Bunyan
+tells us he once fell out of a boat, and barely escaped drowning.  This
+was about the year 1653.  The exact date is uncertain.  Bunyan never
+mentions his baptism himself, and the church books of Gifford's
+congregation do not commence till May, 1656, the year after Gifford's
+death.  He was also admitted to the Holy Communion, which for want, as he
+deemed, of due reverence in his first approach to it, became the occasion
+of a temporary revival of his old temptations.  While actually at the
+Lord's Table he was "forced to bend himself to pray" to be kept from
+uttering blasphemies against the ordinance itself, and cursing his fellow
+communicants.  For three-quarters of a year he could "never have rest or
+ease" from this shocking perversity.  The constant strain of beating off
+this persistent temptation seriously affected his health.  "Captain
+Consumption," who carried off his own "Mr. Badman," threatened his life.
+But his naturally robust constitution "routed his forces," and brought
+him through what at one time he anticipated would prove a fatal illness.
+Again and again, during his period of indisposition, the Tempter took
+advantage of his bodily weakness to ply him with his former despairing
+questionings as to his spiritual state.  That seemed as bad as bad could
+be.  "Live he must not; die he dare not."  He was repeatedly near giving
+up all for lost.  But a few words of Scripture brought to his mind would
+revive his drooping spirits, with a natural reaction on his physical
+health, and he became "well both in body and mind at once."  "My sickness
+did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again."
+At another time, after three or four days of deep dejection, some words
+from the Epistle to the Hebrews "came bolting in upon him," and sealed
+his sense of acceptance with an assurance he never afterwards entirely
+lost.  "Then with joy I told my wife, 'Now I know, I know.'  That night
+was a good night to me; I never had but few better.  I could scarce lie
+in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ."
+
+During this time Bunyan, though a member of the Bedford congregation,
+continued to reside at Elstow, in the little thatched wayside tenement,
+with its lean-to forge at one end, already mentioned, which is still
+pointed out as "Bunyan's Cottage."  There his two children, Mary, his
+passionately loved blind daughter, and Elizabeth were born; the one in
+1650, and the other in 1654.  It was probably in the next year, 1655,
+that he finally quitted his native village and took up his residence in
+Bedford, and became a deacon of the congregation.  About this time also
+he must have lost the wife to whom he owed so much.  Bunyan does not
+mention the event, and our only knowledge of it is from the conversation
+of his second wife, Elizabeth, with Sir Matthew Hale.  He sustained also
+an even greater loss in the death of his friend and comrade, Mr. Gifford,
+who died in September, 1655.  The latter was succeeded by a young man
+named John Burton, of very delicate health, who was taken by death from
+his congregation, by whom he was much beloved, in September, 1660, four
+months after the restoration of the Monarchy and the Church.  Burton
+thoroughly appreciated Bunyan's gifts, and stood sponsor for him on the
+publication of his first printed work.  This was a momentous year for
+Bunyan, for in it Dr. Brown has shown, by a "comparison of dates," that
+we may probably place the beginning of Bunyan's ministerial life.  Bunyan
+was now in his twenty-seventh year, in the prime of his manly vigour,
+with a vivid imagination, ready speech, minute textual knowledge of the
+Bible, and an experience of temptation and the wiles of the evil one,
+such as few Christians of double his years have ever reached.  "His gifts
+could not long be hid."  The beginnings of that which was to prove the
+great work of his life were slender enough.  As Mr. Froude says, "he was
+modest, humble, shrinking."  The members of his congregation, recognizing
+that he had "the gift of utterance" asked him to speak "a word of
+exhortation" to them.  The request scared him.  The most truly gifted are
+usually the least conscious of their gifts.  At first it did much "dash
+and abash his spirit."  But after earnest entreaty he gave way, and made
+one or two trials of his gift in private meetings, "though with much
+weakness and infirmity."  The result proved the correctness of his
+brethren's estimate.  The young tinker showed himself no common preacher.
+His words came home with power to the souls of his hearers, who
+"protested solemnly, as in the sight of God, that they were both affected
+and comforted by them, and gave thanks to the Father of mercies for the
+grace bestowed on him."  After this, as the brethren went out on their
+itinerating rounds to the villages about, they began to ask Bunyan to
+accompany them, and though he "durst not make use of his gift in an open
+way," he would sometimes, "yet more privately still, speak a word of
+admonition, with which his hearers professed their souls edified."  That
+he had a real Divine call to the ministry became increasingly evident,
+both to himself and to others.  His engagements of this kind multiplied.
+An entry in the Church book records "that Brother Bunyan being taken off
+by the preaching of the gospel" from his duties as deacon, another member
+was appointed in his room.  His appointment to the ministry was not long
+delayed.  After "some solemn prayer with fasting," he was "called forth
+and appointed a preacher of the word," not, however, so much for the
+Bedford congregation as for the neighbouring villages.  He did not
+however, like some, neglect his business, or forget to "show piety at
+home."  He still continued his craft as a tinker, and that with industry
+and success.  "God," writes an early biographer, "had increased his
+stores so that he lived in great credit among his neighbours."  He
+speedily became famous as a preacher.  People "came in by hundreds to
+hear the word, and that from all parts, though upon sundry and divers
+accounts,"--"some," as Southey writes, "to marvel, and some perhaps to
+mock."  Curiosity to hear the once profane tinker preach was not one of
+the least prevalent motives.  But his word proved a word of power to
+many.  Those "who came to scoff remained to pray."  "I had not preached
+long," he says, "before some began to be touched and to be greatly
+afflicted in their minds."  His success humbled and amazed him, as it
+must every true man who compares the work with the worker.  "At first,"
+he says, "I could not believe that God should speak by me to the heart of
+any man, still counting myself unworthy; and though I did put it from me
+that they should be awakened by me, still they would confess it and
+affirm it before the saints of God.  They would also bless God for
+me--unworthy wretch that I am--and count me God's instrument that showed
+to them the way of salvation."  He preached wherever he found
+opportunity, in woods, in barns, on village greens, or even in churches.
+But he liked best to preach "in the darkest places of the country, where
+people were the furthest off from profession," where he could give the
+fullest scope to "the awakening and converting power" he possessed.  His
+success as a preacher might have tempted him to vanity.  But the
+conviction that he was but an instrument in the hand of a higher power
+kept it down.  He saw that if he had gifts and wanted grace he was but as
+a "tinkling cymbal."  "What, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a
+sounding brass?  Is it so much to be a fiddle?"  This thought was, "as it
+were, a maul on the head of the pride and vainglory" which he found
+"easily blown up at the applause and commendation of every unadvised
+christian."  His experiences, like those of every public speaker,
+especially the most eloquent, were very varied, even in the course of the
+same sermon.  Sometimes, he tells us, he would begin "with much
+clearness, evidence, and liberty of speech," but, before he had done, he
+found himself "so straitened in his speech before the people," that he
+"scarce knew or remembered what he had been about," and felt "as if his
+head had been in a bag all the time of the exercise."  He feared that he
+would not be able to "speak sense to the hearers," or he would be "seized
+with such faintness and strengthlessness that his legs were hardly able
+to carry him to his place of preaching."  Old temptations too came back.
+Blasphemous thoughts formed themselves into words, which he had hard work
+to keep himself from uttering from the pulpit.  Or the tempter tried to
+silence him by telling him that what he was going to say would condemn
+himself, and he would go "full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit
+door."  "'What,' the devil would say, 'will you preach this?  Of this
+your own soul is guilty.  Preach not of it at all, or if you do, yet so
+mince it as to make way for your own escape.'"  All, however, was in
+vain.  Necessity was laid upon him.  "Woe," he cried, "is me, if I preach
+not the gospel."  His heart was "so wrapped up in the glory of this
+excellent work, that he counted himself more blessed and honoured of God
+than if he had made him emperor of the Christian world."  Bunyan was no
+preacher of vague generalities.  He knew that sermons miss their mark if
+they hit no one.  Self-application is their object.  "Wherefore," he
+says, "I laboured so to speak the word, as that the sin and person guilty
+might be particularized by it."  And what he preached he knew and felt to
+be true.  It was not what he read in books, but what he had himself
+experienced.  Like Dante he had been in hell himself, and could speak as
+one who knew its terrors, and could tell also of the blessedness of
+deliverance by the person and work of Christ.  And this consciousness
+gave him confidence and courage in declaring his message.  It was "as if
+an angel of God had stood at my back."  "Oh it hath been with such power
+and heavenly evidence upon my own soul while I have been labouring to
+fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could not be contented
+with saying, 'I believe and am sure.'  Methought I was more than sure, if
+it be lawful so to express myself, that the things I asserted were true."
+
+Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointments which
+wrung his heart.  He could be satisfied with nothing less than the
+conversion and sanctification of his hearers.  "If I were fruitless, it
+mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who
+did condemn."  And the result of a sermon was often very different from
+what he anticipated: "When I thought I had done no good, then I did the
+most; and when I thought I should catch them, I fished for nothing."  "A
+word cast in by-the-bye sometimes did more execution than all the Sermon
+besides."  The tie between him and his spiritual children was very close.
+The backsliding of any of his converts caused him the most extreme grief;
+"it was more to me than if one of my own children were going to the
+grave.  Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of
+the loss of the salvation of my own soul."
+
+A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted,
+illustrates the power of his preaching even in the early days of his
+ministry.  "Being to preach in a church in a country village in
+Cambridgeshire"--it was before the Restoration--"and the public being
+gathered together in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the
+soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people
+was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was
+to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was
+resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear
+him.  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."  "This story," continues the anonymous biographer, "I know
+to be true, having many times discoursed with the man."  To the same ante-
+Restoration period, Dr. Brown also assigns the anecdote of Bunyan's
+encounter, on the road near Cambridge, with the university man who asked
+him how he dared to preach not having the original Scriptures.  With
+ready wit, Bunyan turned the tables on the scholar by asking whether he
+had the actual originals, the copies written by the apostles and
+prophets.  The scholar replied, "No," but they had what they believed to
+be a true copy of the original.  "And I," said Bunyan, "believe the
+English Bible to be a true copy, too."  "Then away rid the scholar."
+
+The fame of such a preacher, naturally, soon spread far and wide; all the
+countryside flocked eagerly to hear him.  In some places, as at Meldreth
+in Cambridgeshire, and Yelden in his own county of Bedfordshire, the
+pulpits of the parish churches were opened to him.  At Yelden, the
+Rector, Dr. William Dell, the Puritan Master of Caius College, Cambridge,
+formerly Chaplain to the army under Fairfax, roused the indignation of
+his orthodox parishioners by allowing him--"one Bunyon of Bedford, a
+tinker," as he is ignominiously styled in the petition sent up to the
+House of Lords in 1660--to preach in his parish church on Christmas Day.
+But, generally, the parochial clergy were his bitterest enemies.  "When I
+first went to preach the word abroad," he writes, "the Doctors and
+priests of the country did open wide against me."  Many were envious of
+his success where they had so signally failed.  In the words of Mr. Henry
+Deane, when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith,
+Professor of Arabic and Keeper of the University Library at Cambridge,
+who had come upon Bunyan preaching in a barn at Toft, they were "angry
+with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and
+pans," and proved himself more skilful in his craft than those who had
+graduated at a university.  Envy is ever the mother of detraction.
+Slanders of the blackest dye against his moral character were freely
+circulated, and as readily believed.  It was the common talk that he was
+a thorough reprobate.  Nothing was too bad for him.  He was "a witch, a
+Jesuit, a highwayman, and the like."  It was reported that he had "his
+misses and his bastards; that he had two wives at once," &c.  Such
+charges roused all the man in Bunyan.  Few passages in his writings show
+more passion than that in "Grace Abounding," in which he defends himself
+from the "fools or knaves" who were their authors.  He "begs belief of no
+man, and if they believe him or disbelieve him it is all one to him.  But
+he would have them know how utterly baseless their accusations are."  "My
+foes," he writes, "have missed their mark in their open shooting at me.  I
+am not the man.  If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were
+hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would be still alive.  I
+know not whether there is such a thing as a woman breathing under the
+copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by
+common fame, except my wife."  He calls not only men, but angels, nay,
+even God Himself, to bear testimony to his innocence in this respect.  But
+though they were so absolutely baseless, nay, the rather because they
+were so baseless, the grossness of these charges evidently stung Bunyan
+very deeply.
+
+So bitter was the feeling aroused against him by the marvellous success
+of his irregular ministry, that his enemies, even before the restoration
+of the Church and Crown, endeavoured to put the arm of the law in motion
+to restrain him.  We learn from the church books that in March, 1658, the
+little Bedford church was in trouble for "Brother Bunyan," against whom
+an indictment had been laid at the Assizes for "preaching at Eaton
+Socon."  Of this indictment we hear no more; so it was probably dropped.
+But it is an instructive fact that, even during the boasted religious
+liberty of the Protectorate, irregular preaching, especially that of the
+much dreaded Anabaptists, was an indictable offence.  But, as Dr. Brown
+observes, "religious liberty had not yet come to mean liberty all round,
+but only liberty for a certain recognized section of Christians."  That
+there was no lack of persecution during the Commonwealth is clear from
+the cruel treatment to which Quakers were subjected, to say nothing of
+the intolerance shown to Episcopalians and Roman Catholics.  In Bunyan's
+own county of Bedford, Quakeresses were sentenced to be whipped and sent
+to Bridewell for reproving a parish priest, perhaps well deserving of it,
+and exhorting the folks on a market day to repentance and amendment of
+life.  "The simple truth is," writes Robert Southey, "all parties were
+agreed on the one catholic opinion that certain doctrines were not to be
+tolerated:" the only points of difference between them were "what those
+doctrines were," and how far intolerance might be carried.  The withering
+lines are familiar to us, in which Milton denounces the "New Forcers of
+Conscience," who by their intolerance and "super-metropolitan and
+hyperarchiepiscopal tyranny," proved that in his proverbial words, "New
+Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"--
+
+   "Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,
+   And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy
+   Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
+   To force our consciences that Christ set free!"
+
+How Bunyan came to escape we know not.  But the danger he was in was
+imminent enough for the church at Bedford to meet to pray "for counsail
+what to doe" in respect of it.
+
+It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan made his
+first essay at authorship.  He was led to it by a long and tiresome
+controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to
+Bedford.  The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being
+undermined.  The Quakers' teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a
+serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view
+of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart,
+came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal
+Christ.  He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from
+time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, at "Paul's Steeple-house in
+Bedford town," and other places.  One of them, Anne Blackley by name,
+openly bade him throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, "No;
+for then the devil would be too hard for me."  The same enthusiast
+charged him with "preaching up an idol, and using conjuration and
+witchcraft," because of his assertion of the bodily presence of Christ in
+heaven.
+
+The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author,
+cannot but be viewed with much interest.  It was a little volume in
+duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled "Some Gospel Truths
+Opened, by that unworthy servant of Christ, John Bunyan, of Bedford, by
+the Grace of God, preacher of the Gospel of His dear Son," published in
+1656.  The little book, which, as Dr. Brown says, was "evidently thrown
+off at a heat," was printed in London and published at Newport Pagnel.
+Bunyan being entirely unknown to the world, his first literary venture
+was introduced by a commendatory "Epistle" written by Gifford's
+successor, John Burton.  In this Burton speaks of the young author--Bunyan
+was only in his twenty-ninth year--as one who had "neither the greatness
+nor the wisdom of the world to commend him," "not being chosen out of an
+earthly but out of a heavenly university, the Church of Christ," where
+"through grace he had taken three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with
+Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experience of the temptations of
+Satan," and as one of whose "soundness in the faith, godly conversation,
+and his ability to preach the Gospel, not by human aid, but by the Spirit
+of the Lord," he "with many other saints had had experience."  This book
+must be pronounced a very remarkable production for a young travelling
+tinker, under thirty, and without any literary or theological training
+but such as he had gained for himself after attaining to manhood.  Its
+arrangement is excellent, the arguments are ably marshalled, the style is
+clear, the language pure and well chosen.  It is, in the main, a well-
+reasoned defence of the historical truth of the Articles of the Creed
+relating to the Second Person of the Trinity, against the mystical
+teaching of the followers of George Fox, who, by a false spiritualism,
+sublimated the whole Gospel narrative into a vehicle for the
+representation of truths relating to the inner life of the believer.  No
+one ever had a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the
+facts of the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men.  But he would
+not suffer their "subjectivity"--to adopt modern terms--to destroy their
+"objectivity."  If the Son of God was not actually born of the Virgin
+Mary, if He did not live in a real human body, and in that body die, lie
+in the grave, rise again, and ascend up into heaven, whence He would
+return--and that Bunyan believed shortly--in the same Body He took of His
+mortal mother, His preaching was vain; their faith was vain; they were
+yet in their sins.  Those who "cried up a Christ within, _in opposition_
+to a Christ without," who asserted that Christ had no other Body but the
+Church, that the only Crucifixion, rising again, and ascension of Christ
+was that _within_ the believer, and that every man had, as an inner
+light, a measure of Christ's Spirit within him sufficient to guide him to
+salvation, he asserted were "possessed with a spirit of delusion;"
+deceived themselves, they were deceiving others to their eternal ruin.  To
+the refutation of such fundamental errors, substituting a mystical for an
+historical faith, Bunyan's little treatise is addressed; and it may be
+truly said the work is done effectually.  To adopt Coleridge's expression
+concerning Bunyan's greater and world-famous work, it is an admirable
+"_Summa Theologiae Evangelicae_," which, notwithstanding its obsolete
+style and old-fashioned arrangement, may be read even now with advantage.
+
+Bunyan's denunciation of the tenets of the Quakers speedily elicited a
+reply.  This was written by a certain Edward Burrough, a young man of
+three and twenty, fearless, devoted, and ardent in the propagation of the
+tenets of his sect.  Being subsequently thrown into Newgate with hundreds
+of his co-religionists, at the same time that his former antagonist was
+imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, Burrough met the fate Bunyan's stronger
+constitution enabled him to escape; and in the language of the times,
+"rotted in prison," a victim to the loathsome foulness of his place of
+incarceration, in the year of the "Bartholomew Act," 1662.
+
+Burrough entitled his reply, "The Gospel of Peace, contended for in the
+Spirit of Meekness and Love against the secret opposition of John Bunyan,
+a professed minister in Bedfordshire."  His opening words, too
+characteristic of the entire treatise, display but little of the meekness
+professed.  "How long, ye crafty fowlers, will ye prey upon the innocent?
+How long shall the righteous be a prey to your teeth, ye subtle foxes!
+Your dens are in darkness, and your mischief is hatched upon your beds of
+secret whoredoms?"  Of John Burton and the others who recommended
+Bunyan's treatise, he says, "They have joined themselves with the broken
+army of Magog, and have showed themselves in the defence of the dragon
+against the Lamb in the day of war betwixt them."  We may well echo Dr.
+Brown's wish that "these two good men could have had a little free and
+friendly talk face to face.  There would probably have been better
+understanding, and fewer hard words, for they were really not so far
+apart as they thought.  Bunyan believed in the inward light, and Burrough
+surely accepted an objective Christ.  But failing to see each other's
+exact point of view, Burrough thunders at Bunyan, and Bunyan swiftly
+returns the shot."
+
+The rapidity of Bunyan's literary work is amazing, especially when we
+take his antecedents into account.  Within a few weeks he published his
+rejoinder to Friend Burrough, under the title of "A Vindication of Gospel
+Truths Opened."  In this work, which appeared in 1667, Bunyan repays
+Burrough in his own coin, styling him "a proved enemy to the truth," a
+"grossly railing Rabshakeh, who breaks out with a taunt and a jeer," is
+very "censorious and utters many words without knowledge."  In vigorous,
+nervous language, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself
+from Burrough's charges, and proves that the Quakers are "deceivers."  "As
+for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbands is not walking
+after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do make a religion out
+of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walking after their own
+lusts, and not after the Spirit of God."  Burrough had most unwarrantably
+stigmatized Bunyan as one of "the false prophets, who love the wages of
+unrighteousness, and through covetousness make merchandise of souls."
+Bunyan calmly replies, "Friend, dost thou speak this as from thy own
+knowledge, or did any other tell thee so?  However that spirit that led
+thee out this way is a lying spirit.  For though I be poor and of no
+repute in the world as to outward things, yet through grace I have
+learned by the example of the Apostle to preach the truth, and also to
+work with my hands both for mine own living, and for those that are with
+me, when I have opportunity.  And I trust that the Lord Jesus who hath
+helped me to reject the wages of unrighteousness hitherto, will also help
+me still so that I shall distribute that which God hath given me freely,
+and not for filthy lucre's sake."  The fruitfulness of his ministry which
+Burrough had called in question, charging him with having "run before he
+was sent," he refuses to discuss.  Bunyan says, "I shall leave it to be
+taken notice of by the people of God and the country where I dwell, who
+will testify the contrary for me, setting aside the carnal ministry with
+their retinue who are so mad against me as thyself."
+
+In his third book, published in 1658, at "the King's Head, in the Old
+Bailey," a few days before Oliver Cromwell's death, Bunyan left the
+thorny domain of polemics, for that of Christian exhortation, in which
+his chief work was to be done.  This work was an exposition of the
+parable of "the Rich Man and Lazarus," bearing the horror-striking title,
+"A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul."  In this work,
+as its title would suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the
+parable as a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave,
+gives full scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of
+the lost.  It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in the
+similes, and is written in the nervous homespun English of which he was
+master.  Its popularity is shown by its having gone through nine editions
+in the author's lifetime.  To take an example or two of its style:
+dealing with the excuses people make for not hearing the Gospel, "O,
+saith one, I dare not for my master, my brother, my landlord; I shall
+lose his favour, his house of work, and so decay my calling.  O, saith
+another, I would willingly go in this way but for my father; he chides me
+and tells me he will not stand my friend when I come to want; I shall
+never enjoy a pennyworth of his goods; he will disinherit me--And I dare
+not, saith another, for my husband, for he will be a-railing, and tells
+me he will turn me out of doors, he will beat me and cut off my legs;"
+and then turning from the hindered to the hinderers: "Oh, what red lines
+will there be against all those rich ungodly landlords that so keep under
+their poor tenants that they dare not go out to hear the word for fear
+that their rent should be raised or they turned out of their houses.
+Think on this, you drunken proud rich, and scornful landlords; think on
+this, you madbrained blasphemous husbands, that are against the godly and
+chaste conversation of your wives; also you that hold your servants so
+hard to it that you will not spare them time to hear the Word, unless it
+will be where and when your lusts will let you."  He bids the ungodly
+consider that "the profits, pleasures, and vanities of the world" will
+one day "give thee the slip, and leave thee in the sands and the brambles
+of all that thou hast done."  The careless man lies "like the smith's dog
+at the foot of the anvil, though the fire sparks flee in his face."  The
+rich man remembers how he once despised Lazarus, "scrubbed beggarly
+Lazarus.  What, shall I dishonour my fair sumptuous and gay house with
+such a scabbed creephedge as he?  The Lazaruses are not allowed to warn
+them of the wrath to come, because they are not gentlemen, because they
+cannot with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.  Nay, they
+must not, shall not, speak to them, and all because of this."
+
+The fourth production of Bunyan's pen, his last book before his twelve
+years of prison life began, is entitled, "The Doctrine of Law and Grace
+Unfolded."  With a somewhat overstrained humility which is hardly worthy
+of him, he describes himself in the title-page as "that poor contemptible
+creature John Bunyan, of Bedford."  It was given to the world in May,
+1659, and issued from the same press in the Old Bailey as his last work.
+It cannot be said that this is one of Bunyan's most attractive writings.
+It is as he describes it, "a parcel of plain yet sound, true, and home
+sayings," in which with that clearness of thought and accuracy of
+arrangement which belongs to him, and that marvellous acquaintance with
+Scripture language which he had gained by his constant study of the
+Bible, he sets forth the two covenants--the covenant of works, and the
+covenant of Grace--"in their natures, ends, bounds, together with the
+state and condition of them that are under the one, and of them that are
+under the other."  Dr. Brown describes the book as "marked by a firm
+grasp of faith and a strong view of the reality of Christ's person and
+work as the one Priest and Mediator for a sinful world."  To quote a
+passage, "Is there righteousness in Christ? that is mine.  Is there
+perfection in that righteousness? that is mine.  Did He bleed for sin?  It
+was for mine.  Hath He overcome the law, the devil, and hell?  The
+victory is mine, and I am come forth conqueror, nay, more than a
+conqueror through Him that hath loved me. . . Lord, show me continually
+in the light of Thy Spirit, through Thy word, that Jesus that was born in
+the days of Caesar Augustus, when Mary, a daughter of Judah, went with
+Joseph to be taxed in Bethlehem, that He is the very Christ.  Let me not
+rest contented without such a faith that is so wrought even by the
+discovery of His Birth, Crucifying Death, Blood, Resurrection, Ascension,
+and Second--which is His Personal--Coming again, that the very faith of
+it may fill my soul with comfort and holiness."  Up and down its pages we
+meet with vivid reminiscences of his own career, of which he can only
+speak with wonder and thankfulness.  In the "Epistle to the Reader,"
+which introduces it, occurs the passage already referred to describing
+his education.  "I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was
+brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company
+of poor countrymen."  Of his own religious state before his conversion he
+thus speaks: "When it pleased the Lord to begin to instruct my soul, He
+found me one of the black sinners of the world.  He found me making a
+sport of oaths, and also of lies; and many a soul-poisoning meal did I
+make out of divers lusts, such as drinking, dancing, playing, pleasure
+with the wicked ones of the world; and so wedded was I to my sins, that
+thought I to myself, 'I will have them though I lose my soul.'"  And
+then, after narrating the struggles he had had with his conscience, the
+alternations of hope and fear which he passed through, which are more
+fully described in his "Grace Abounding," he thus vividly depicts the
+full assurance of faith he had attained to: "I saw through grace that it
+was the Blood shed on Mount Calvary that did save and redeem sinners, as
+clearly and as really with the eyes of my soul as ever, methought, I had
+seen a penny loaf bought with a penny. . . O let the saints know that
+unless the devil can pluck Christ out of heaven he cannot pull a true
+believer out of Christ."  In a striking passage he shows how, by turning
+Satan's temptations against himself, Christians may "Get the art as to
+outrun him in his own shoes, and make his own darts pierce himself."
+"What! didst thou never learn to outshoot the devil in his own bow, and
+cut off his head with his own sword as David served Goliath?"  The whole
+treatise is somewhat wearisome, but the pious reader will find much in it
+for spiritual edification.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+We cannot doubt that one in whom loyalty was so deep and fixed a
+principle as Bunyan, would welcome with sincere thankfulness the
+termination of the miserable interval of anarchy which followed the death
+of the Protector and the abdication of his indolent and feeble son, by
+the restoration of monarchy in the person of Charles the Second.  Even if
+some forebodings might have arisen that with the restoration of the old
+monarchy the old persecuting laws might be revived, which made it
+criminal for a man to think for himself in the matters which most nearly
+concerned his eternal interests, and to worship in the way which he found
+most helpful to his spiritual life, they would have been silenced by the
+promise, contained in Charles's "Declaration from Breda," of liberty to
+tender consciences, and the assurance that no one should be disquieted
+for differences of opinion in religion, so long as such differences did
+not endanger the peace and well-being of the realm.  If this declaration
+meant anything, it meant a breadth of toleration larger and more liberal
+than had been ever granted by Cromwell.  Any fears of the renewal of
+persecution must be groundless.
+
+But if such dreams of religious liberty were entertained they were
+speedily and rudely dispelled, and Bunyan was one of the first to feel
+the shock of the awakening.  The promise was coupled with a reference to
+the "mature deliberation of Parliament."  With such a promise Charles's
+easy conscience was relieved of all responsibility.  Whatever he might
+promise, the nation, and Parliament which was its mouthpiece, might set
+his promise aside.  And if he knew anything of the temper of the people
+he was returning to govern, he must have felt assured that any scheme of
+comprehension was certain to be rejected by them.  As Mr. Froude has
+said, "before toleration is possible, men must have learnt to tolerate
+toleration," and this was a lesson the English nation was very far from
+having learnt; at no time, perhaps, were they further from it.  Puritanism
+had had its day, and had made itself generally detested.  Deeply
+enshrined as it was in many earnest and devout hearts, such as Bunyan's,
+it was necessarily the religion not of the many, but of the few; it was
+the religion not of the common herd, but of a spiritual aristocracy.  Its
+stern condemnation of all mirth and pastime, as things in their nature
+sinful, of which we have so many evidences in Bunyan's own writings; its
+repression of all that makes life brighter and more joyous, and the sour
+sanctimoniousness which frowned upon innocent relaxation, had rendered
+its yoke unbearable to ordinary human nature, and men took the earliest
+opportunity of throwing the yoke off and trampling it under foot.  They
+hailed with rude and boisterous rejoicings the restoration of the
+Monarchy which they felt, with a true instinct, involved the restoration
+of the old Church of England, the church of their fathers and of the
+older among themselves, with its larger indulgence for the instincts of
+humanity, its wider comprehensiveness, and its more dignified and
+decorous ritual.
+
+The reaction from Puritanism pervaded all ranks.  In no class, however,
+was its influence more powerful than among the country gentry.  Most of
+them had been severe sufferers both in purse and person during the
+Protectorate.  Fines and sequestrations had fallen heavily upon them, and
+they were eager to retaliate on their oppressors.  Their turn had come;
+can we wonder that they were eager to use it?  As Mr. J. R. Green has
+said: "The Puritan, the Presbyterian, the Commonwealthsman, all were at
+their feet. . . Their whole policy appeared to be dictated by a
+passionate spirit of reaction. . . The oppressors of the parson had been
+the oppressors of the squire.  The sequestrator who had driven the one
+from his parsonage had driven the other from his manor-house.  Both had
+been branded with the same charge of malignity.  Both had suffered
+together, and the new Parliament was resolved that both should triumph
+together."
+
+The feeling thus eloquently expressed goes far to explain the harshness
+which Bunyan experienced at the hands of the administrators of justice at
+the crisis of his life at which we have now arrived.  Those before whom
+he was successively arraigned belonged to this very class, which, having
+suffered most severely during the Puritan usurpation, was least likely to
+show consideration to a leading teacher of the Puritan body.  Nor were
+reasons wanting to justify their severity.  The circumstances of the
+times were critical.  The public mind was still in an excitable state,
+agitated by the wild schemes of political and religious enthusiasts
+plotting to destroy the whole existing framework both of Church and
+State, and set up their own chimerical fabric.  We cannot be surprised
+that, as Southey has said, after all the nation had suffered from
+fanatical zeal, "The government, rendered suspicious by the constant
+sense of danger, was led as much by fear as by resentment to seventies
+which are explained by the necessities of self-defence," and which the
+nervous apprehensions of the nation not only condoned, but incited.
+Already Churchmen in Wales had been taking the law into their own hands,
+and manifesting their orthodoxy by harrying Quakers and Nonconformists.
+In the May and June of this year, we hear of sectaries being taken from
+their beds and haled to prison, and brought manacled to the Quarter
+Sessions and committed to loathsome dungeons.  Matters had advanced since
+then.  The Church had returned in its full power and privileges together
+with the monarchy, and everything went back into its old groove.  Every
+Act passed for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church was
+declared a dead letter.  Those of the ejected incumbents who remained
+alive entered again into their parsonages, and occupied their pulpits as
+of old; the surviving bishops returned to their sees; and the whole
+existing statute law regarding the Church revived from its suspended
+animation.  No new enactment was required to punish Nonconformists and to
+silence their ministers; though, to the disgrace of the nation and its
+parliament, many new ones were subsequently passed, with ever-increasing
+disabilities.  The various Acts of Elizabeth supplied all that was
+needed.  Under these Acts all who refused to attend public worship in
+their parish churches were subject to fines; while those who resorted to
+conventicles were to be imprisoned till they made their submissions; if
+at the end of three months they refused to submit they were to be
+banished the realm, and if they returned from banishment, without
+permission of the Crown, they were liable to execution as felons.  This
+long-disused sword was now drawn from its rusty sheath to strike terror
+into the hearts of Nonconformists.  It did not prove very effectual.  All
+the true-hearted men preferred to suffer rather than yield in so sacred a
+cause.  Bunyan was one of the earliest of these, as he proved one of the
+staunchest.
+
+Early in October, 1660, the country magistrates meeting in Bedford issued
+an order for the public reading of the Liturgy of the Church of England.
+Such an order Bunyan would not regard as concerning him.  Anyhow he would
+not give obeying it a thought.  One of the things we least like in Bunyan
+is the feeling he exhibits towards the Book of Common Prayer.  To him it
+was an accursed thing, the badge and token of a persecuting party, a
+relic of popery which he exhorted his adherents to "take heed that they
+touched not" if they would be "steadfast in the faith of Jesus Christ."
+Nothing could be further from his thoughts than to give any heed to the
+magistrates' order to go to church and pray "after the form of men's
+inventions."
+
+The time for testing Bunyan's resolution was now near at hand.  Within
+six months of the king's landing, within little more than a month of the
+issue of the magistrate's order for the use of the Common Prayer Book,
+his sturdy determination to yield obedience to no authority in spiritual
+matters but that of his own conscience was put to the proof.  Bunyan may
+safely be regarded as at that time the most conspicuous of the
+Nonconformists of the neighbourhood.  He had now preached for five or six
+years with ever-growing popularity.  No name was so rife in men's mouths
+as his.  At him, therefore, as the representative of his brother
+sectaries, the first blow was levelled.  It is no cause of surprise that
+in the measures taken against him he recognized the direct agency of
+Satan to stop the course of the truth: "That old enemy of man's
+salvation," he says, "took his opportunity to inflame the hearts of his
+vassals against me, insomuch that at the last I was laid out for the
+warrant of a justice."  The circumstances were these, on November 12,
+1660, Bunyan had engaged to go to the little hamlet of Lower Samsell near
+Harlington, to hold a religious service.  His purpose becoming known, a
+neighbouring magistrate, Mr. Francis Wingate, of Harlington House, was
+instructed to issue a warrant for his apprehension under the Act of
+Elizabeth.  The meeting being represented to him as one of seditious
+persons bringing arms, with a view to the disturbance of the public
+peace, he ordered that a strong watch should be kept about the house, "as
+if," Bunyan says, "we did intend to do some fearful business to the
+destruction of the country."  The intention to arrest him oozed out, and
+on Bunyan's arrival the whisperings of his friends warned him of his
+danger.  He might have easily escaped if he "had been minded to play the
+coward."  Some advised it, especially the brother at whose house the
+meeting was to take place.  He, "living by them," knew "what spirit" the
+magistrates "were of," before whom Bunyan would be taken if arrested, and
+the small hope there would be of his avoiding being committed to gaol.
+The man himself, as a "harbourer of a conventicle," would also run no
+small danger of the same fate, but Bunyan generously acquits him of any
+selfish object in his warning: "he was, I think, more afraid of (for) me,
+than of (for) himself."  The matter was clear enough to Bunyan.  At the
+same time it was not to be decided in a hurry.  The time fixed for the
+service not being yet come, Bunyan went into the meadow by the house, and
+pacing up and down thought the question well out.  "If he who had up to
+this time showed himself hearty and courageous in his preaching, and had
+made it his business to encourage others, were now to run and make an
+escape, it would be of an ill savour in the country.  If he were now to
+flee because there was a warrant out for him, would not the weak and
+newly-converted brethren be afraid to stand when great words only were
+spoken to them.  God had, in His mercy, chosen him to go on the forlorn
+hope; to be the first to be opposed for the gospel; what a discouragement
+it must be to the whole body if he were to fly.  No, he would never by
+any cowardliness of his give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme the
+gospel."  So back to the house he came with his mind made up.  He had
+come to hold the meeting, and hold the meeting he would.  He was not
+conscious of saying or doing any evil.  If he had to suffer it was the
+Lord's will, and he was prepared for it.  He had a full hour before him
+to escape if he had been so minded, but he was resolved "not to go away."
+He calmly waited for the time fixed for the brethren to assemble, and
+then, without hurry or any show of alarm, he opened the meeting in the
+usual manner, with prayer for God's blessing.  He had given out his text,
+the brethren had just opened their Bibles and Bunyan was beginning to
+preach, when the arrival of the constable with the warrant put an end to
+the exercise.  Bunyan requested to be allowed to say a few parting words
+of encouragement to the terrified flock.  This was granted, and he
+comforted the little company with the reflection that it was a mercy to
+suffer in so good a cause; and that it was better to be the persecuted
+than the persecutors; better to suffer as Christians than as thieves or
+murderers.  The constable and the justice's servant soon growing weary of
+listening to Bunyan's exhortations, interrupted him and "would not be
+quiet till they had him away" from the house.
+
+The justice who had issued the warrant, Mr. Wingate, not being at home
+that day, a friend of Bunyan's residing on the spot offered to house him
+for the night, undertaking that he should be forthcoming the next day.
+The following morning this friend took him to the constable's house, and
+they then proceeded together to Mr. Wingate's.  A few inquiries showed
+the magistrate that he had entirely mistaken the character of the Samsell
+meeting and its object.  Instead of a gathering of "Fifth Monarchy men,"
+or other turbulent fanatics as he had supposed, for the disturbance of
+the public peace, he learnt from the constable that they were only a few
+peaceable, harmless people, met together "to preach and hear the word,"
+without any political meaning.  Wingate was now at a nonplus, and "could
+not well tell what to say."  For the credit of his magisterial character,
+however, he must do something to show that he had not made a mistake in
+issuing the warrant.  So he asked Bunyan what business he had there, and
+why it was not enough for him to follow his own calling instead of
+breaking the law by preaching.  Bunyan replied that his only object in
+coming there was to exhort his hearers for their souls' sake to forsake
+their sinful courses and close in with Christ, and this he could do and
+follow his calling as well.  Wingate, now feeling himself in the wrong,
+lost his temper, and declared angrily that he would "break the neck of
+these unlawful meetings," and that Bunyan must find securities for his
+good behaviour or go to gaol.  There was no difficulty in obtaining the
+security.  Bail was at once forthcoming.  The real difficulty lay with
+Bunyan himself.  No bond was strong enough to keep him from preaching.  If
+his friends gave them, their bonds would be forfeited, for he "would not
+leave speaking the word of God."  Wingate told him that this being so, he
+must be sent to gaol to be tried at the next Quarter Sessions, and left
+the room to make out his mittimus.  While the committal was preparing,
+one whom Bunyan bitterly styles "an old enemy to the truth," Dr. Lindall,
+Vicar of Harlington, Wingate's father-in-law, came in and began "taunting
+at him with many reviling terms," demanding what right he had to preach
+and meddle with that for which he had no warrant, charging him with
+making long prayers to devour widows houses, and likening him to "one
+Alexander the Coppersmith he had read of," "aiming, 'tis like," says
+Bunyan, "at me because I was a tinker."  The mittimus was now made out,
+and Bunyan in the constable's charge was on his way to Bedford, when he
+was met by two of his friends, who begged the constable to wait a little
+while that they might use their interest with the magistrate to get
+Bunyan released.  After a somewhat lengthened interview with Wingate,
+they returned with the message that if Bunyan would wait on the
+magistrate and "say certain words" to him, he might go free.  To satisfy
+his friends, Bunyan returned with them, though not with any expectation
+that the engagement proposed to him would be such as he could lawfully
+take.  "If the words were such as he could say with a good conscience he
+would say them, or else he would not."
+
+After all this coming and going, by the time Bunyan and his friends got
+back to Harlington House, night had come on.  As he entered the hall,
+one, he tells us, came out of an inner room with a lighted candle in his
+hand, whom Bunyan recognized as one William Foster, a lawyer of Bedford,
+Wingate's brother-in-law, afterwards a fierce persecutor of the
+Nonconformists of the district.  With a simulated affection, "as if he
+would have leapt on my neck and kissed me," which put Bunyan on his
+guard, as he had ever known him for "a close opposer of the ways of God,"
+he adopted the tone of one who had Bunyan's interest at heart, and begged
+him as a friend to yield a little from his stubbornness.  His brother-in-
+law, he said, was very loath to send him to gaol.  All he had to do was
+only to promise that he would not call people together, and he should be
+set at liberty and might go back to his home.  Such meetings were plainly
+unlawful and must be stopped.  Bunyan had better follow his calling and
+leave off preaching, especially on week-days, which made other people
+neglect their calling too.  God commanded men to work six days and serve
+Him on the seventh.  It was vain for Bunyan to reply that he never
+summoned people to hear him, but that if they came he could not but use
+the best of his skill and wisdom to counsel them for their soul's
+salvation; that he could preach and the people could come to hear without
+neglecting their callings, and that men were bound to look out for their
+souls' welfare on week-days as well as Sundays.  Neither could convince
+the other.  Bunyan's stubbornness was not a little provoking to Foster,
+and was equally disappointing to Wingate.  They both evidently wished to
+dismiss the case, and intentionally provided a loophole for Bunyan's
+escape.  The promise put into his mouth--"that he would not call the
+people together"--was purposely devised to meet his scrupulous
+conscience.  But even if he could keep the promise in the letter, Bunyan
+knew that he was fully purposed to violate its spirit.  He was the last
+man to forfeit self-respect by playing fast and loose with his
+conscience.  All evasion was foreign to his nature.  The long interview
+came to an end at last.  Once again Wingate and Foster endeavoured to
+break down Bunyan's resolution; but when they saw he was "at a point, and
+would not be moved or persuaded," the mittimus was again put into the
+constable's hands, and he and his prisoner were started on the walk to
+Bedford gaol.  It was dark, as we have seen, when this protracted
+interview began.  It must have now been deep in the night.  Bunyan gives
+no hint whether the walk was taken in the dark or in the daylight.  There
+was however no need for haste.  Bedford was thirteen miles away, and the
+constable would probably wait till the morning to set out for the prison
+which was to be Bunyan's home for twelve long years, to which he went
+carrying, he says, the "peace of God along with me, and His comfort in my
+poor soul."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+A long-standing tradition has identified Bunyan's place of imprisonment
+with a little corporation lock-up-house, some fourteen feet square,
+picturesquely perched on one of the mid-piers of the many-arched mediaeval
+bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse at Bedford, and as Mr.
+Froude has said, has "furnished a subject for pictures," both of pen and
+pencil, "which if correct would be extremely affecting."  Unfortunately,
+however, for the lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not
+"correct," but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a
+desire to heap contumely on Bunyan's enemies by exaggerating the severity
+of his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment.  Being arrested by
+the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan's place
+of incarceration was naturally the county gaol.  There he undoubtedly
+passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there the royal warrant for
+his release found him "a prisoner in the common gaol for our county of
+Bedford."  But though far different from the pictures which writers,
+desirous of exhibiting the sufferings of the Puritan confessor in the
+most telling form, have drawn--if not "a damp and dreary cell" into which
+"a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the
+prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his
+daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his
+confinement together,"--"the common gaol" of Bedford must have been a
+sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the
+travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in
+the open-air in unrestricted freedom.  Prisons in those days, and indeed
+long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places.  A
+century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what
+would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition.  One who visited
+Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as "an uncomfortable and close
+prison."  Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment,
+makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way
+suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not
+a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English
+gaols, some of them even unto death.  Bad as it must have been to be a
+prisoner, as far as his own testimony goes, there is no evidence that his
+imprisonment, though varying in its strictness with his various gaolers,
+was aggravated by any special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, "it
+is unlikely that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships
+than were absolutely inevitable."
+
+The arrest of one whose work as a preacher had been a blessing to so
+many, was not at once tamely acquiesced in by the religious body to which
+he belonged.  A few days after Bunyan's committal to gaol, some of "the
+brethren" applied to Mr. Crompton, a young magistrate at Elstow, to bail
+him out, offering the required security for his appearance at the Quarter
+Sessions.  The magistrate was at first disposed to accept the bail; but
+being a young man, new in his office, and thinking it possible that there
+might be more against Bunyan than the "mittimus" expressed, he was afraid
+of compromising himself by letting him go at large.  His refusal, though
+it sent him back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm
+trust in God's overruling providence.  "I was not at all daunted, but
+rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heard me."  Before he
+set out for the justice's house, he tells us he had committed the whole
+event to God's ordering, with the prayer that "if he might do more good
+by being at liberty than in prison," the bail might be accepted, "but if
+not, that His will might be done."  In the failure of his friends' good
+offices he saw an answer to his prayer, encouraging the hope that the
+untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations, "might
+be an awaking to the saints in the country," and while "the slender
+answer of the justice," which sent him back to his prison, stirred
+something akin to contempt, his soul was full of gladness.  "Verily I did
+meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that
+it was His will and mind that I should be there."  The sense that he was
+being conformed to the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul.
+"This word," he continues, "did drop in upon my heart with some life, for
+he knew that 'for envy they had delivered him.'"
+
+Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the Quarter
+Sessions came on, and "John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,"
+was indicted in the customary form for having "devilishly and
+perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine Service," and
+as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to
+the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the
+kingdom."  The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir
+John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan's Lord Hategood in Faithful's trial
+at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous
+government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice's seat, over the head of
+Sir Matthew Hale.  Keeling had suffered much from the Puritans during the
+great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon, he was "always in gaol,"
+and was by no means disposed to deal leniently with an offender of that
+persuasion.  His brethren of the bench were country gentlemen hating
+Puritanism from their heart, and eager for retaliation for the wrongs it
+had wrought them.  From such a bench, even if Bunyan had been less
+uncompromising, no leniency was to be anticipated.  But Bunyan's attitude
+forbade any leniency.  As the law stood he had indisputably broken it,
+and he expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take the
+first opportunity of breaking it again.  "I told them that if I was let
+out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the help
+of God."  We may dislike the tone adopted by the magistrates towards the
+prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearing and contemptuous; we may smile
+at Keeling's expositions of Scripture and his stock arguments against
+unauthorized prayer and preaching, though we may charitably believe that
+Bunyan misunderstood him when he makes him say that "the Book of Common
+Prayer had been ever since the apostles' time"; we may think that the
+prisoner, in his "canting pedlar's French," as Keeling called it, had the
+better of his judges in knowledge of the Bible, in Christian charity, as
+well as in dignity and in common sense, and that they showed their wisdom
+in silencing him in court--"Let him speak no further," said one of them,
+"he will do harm,"--since they could not answer him more convincingly:
+but his legal offence was clear.  He confessed to the indictment, if not
+in express terms, yet virtually.  He and his friends had held "many
+meetings together, both to pray to God and to exhort one another.  I
+confessed myself guilty no otherwise."  Such meetings were forbidden by
+the law, which it was the duty of the justices to administer, and they
+had no choice whether they would convict or no.  Perhaps they were not
+sorry they had no such choice.  Bunyan was a most "impracticable"
+prisoner, and as Mr. Froude says, the "magistrates being but unregenerate
+mortals may be pardoned if they found him provoking."  The sentence
+necessarily followed.  It was pronounced, not, we are sure reluctantly,
+by Keeling, in the terms of the Act.  "He was to go back to prison for
+three months.  If at three months' end he still refused to go to church
+to hear Divine service and leave his preaching, he was to be banished the
+realm,"--in modern language "transported," and if "he came back again
+without special royal license," he must "stretch by the neck for it."
+
+"This," said Keeling, "I tell you plainly."  Bunyan's reply that "as to
+that matter he was at a point with the judge," for "that he would repeat
+the offence the first time he could," provoked a rejoinder from one of
+the bench, and the unseemly wrangling might have been still further
+prolonged, had it not been stopped by the gaoler, who "pulling him away
+to be gone," had him back to prison, where he says, and "blesses the Lord
+Jesus Christ for it," his heart was as "sweetly refreshed" in returning
+to it as it had "been during his examination.  So that I find Christ's
+words more than bare trifles, where He saith, He will give a mouth and
+wisdom, even such as all the adversaries shall not gainsay or resist.  And
+that His peace no man can take from us."
+
+The magistrates, however, though not unnaturally irritated by what seemed
+to them Bunyan's unreasonable obstinacy, were not desirous to push
+matters to extremity.  The three months named in his sentence, at the
+expiration of which he was either to conform or be banished the realm,
+were fast drawing to an end, without any sign of submission on his part.
+As a last resort Mr. Cobb, the Clerk of the Peace, was sent to try what
+calm and friendly reasoning might effect.  Cobb, who evidently knew
+Bunyan personally, did his best, as a kind-hearted, sensible man, to
+bring him to reason.  Cobb did not profess to be "a man that could
+dispute," and Bunyan had the better of him in argument.  His position,
+however, was unassailable.  The recent insurrection of Venner and his
+Fifth Monarchy men, he said, had shown the danger to the public peace
+there was in allowing fanatical gatherings to assemble unchecked.  Bunyan,
+whose loyalty was unquestioned, must acknowledge the prudence of
+suppressing meetings which, however good their ostensible aim, might
+issue in nothing less than the ruin of the kingdom and commonwealth.
+Bunyan had confessed his readiness to obey the apostolic precept by
+submitting himself to the king as supreme.  The king forbade the holding
+of private meetings, which, under colour of religion, might be
+prejudicial to the State.  Why then did he not submit?  This need not
+hinder him from doing good in a neighbourly way.  He might continue to
+use his gifts and exhort his neighbours in private discourse, provided he
+did not bring people together in public assemblies.  The law did not
+abridge him of this liberty.  Why should he stand so strictly on public
+meetings?  Or why should he not come to church and hear?  Was his gift so
+far above that of others that he could learn of no one?  If he could not
+be persuaded, the judges were resolved to prosecute the law against him.
+He would be sent away beyond the seas to Spain or Constantinople--either
+Cobb's or Bunyan's colonial geography was rather at fault here--or some
+other remote part of the world, and what good could he do to his friends
+then?  "Neighbour Bunyan" had better consider these things seriously
+before the Quarter Session, and be ruled by good advice.  The gaoler here
+put in his word in support of Cobb's arguments: "Indeed, sir, I hope he
+will be ruled."  But all Cobb's friendly reasonings and expostulations
+were ineffectual to bend Bunyan's sturdy will.  He would yield to no-one
+in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law.  But,
+he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly
+condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, "one to obey
+actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to
+lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him."  The Clerk of the
+Peace saw that it was no use to prolong the argument any further.  "At
+this," writes Bunyan, "he sat down, and said no more; which, when he had
+done, I did thank him for his civil and meek discoursing with me; and so
+we parted: O that we might meet in heaven!"
+
+The Coronation which took place very soon after this interview, April 13,
+1661, afforded a prospect of release without unworthy submission.  The
+customary proclamation, which allowed prisoners under sentence for any
+offence short of felony to sue out a pardon for twelve months from that
+date, suspended the execution of the sentence of banishment and gave a
+hope that the prison doors might be opened for him.  The local
+authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royal
+clemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders, his
+second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,--no slight venture for a
+young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on which the first news
+of her husband's arrest had laid her,--and with dauntless courage made
+her way to the House of Lords, where she presented her petition to one of
+the peers, whom she calls Lord Barkwood, but whom unfortunately we cannot
+now identify.  He treated her kindly, and showed her petition to other
+peers, who appear to have been acquainted with the circumstances of
+Bunyan's case.  They replied that the matter was beyond their province,
+and that the question of her husband's release was committed to the
+judges at the next assizes.  These assizes were held at Bedford in the
+following August.  The judges of the circuit were Twisden and Sir Matthew
+Hale.  From the latter--the friend of Richard Baxter, who, as Burnet
+records, took great care to "cover the Nonconformists, whom he thought
+too hardly used, all he could from the seventies some designed; and
+discouraged those who were inclined to stretch the laws too much against
+them"--Bunyan's case would be certain to meet with sympathetic
+consideration.  But being set to administer the law, not according to his
+private wishes, but according to its letter and its spirit, he was
+powerless to relieve him.  Three several times did Bunyan's noble-hearted
+wife present her husband's petition that he might be heard, and his case
+taken impartially into consideration.  But the law forbad what Burnet
+calls Sir Matthew Hale's "tender and compassionate nature" to have free
+exercise.  He "received the petition very mildly at her hand, telling her
+that he would do her and her husband the best good he could; but he
+feared he could do none."  His brother judge's reception of her petition
+was very different.  Having thrown it into the coach, Twisden "snapt her
+up," telling her, what after all was no more than the truth, that her
+husband was a convicted person, and could not be released unless he would
+promise to obey the law and abstain from preaching.  On this the High
+Sheriff, Edmund Wylde, of Houghton Conquest, spoke kindly to the poor
+woman, and encouraged her to make a fresh application to the judges
+before they left the town.  So she made her way, "with abashed face and
+trembling heart," to the large chamber at the Old Swan Inn at the Bridge
+Foot, where the two judges were receiving a large number of the justices
+of the peace and other gentry of the county.  Addressing Sir Matthew Hale
+she said, "My lord, I make bold to come again to your lordship to know
+what may be done with my husband."  Hale received her with the same
+gentleness as before, repeated what he had said previously, that as her
+husband had been legally convicted, and his conviction was recorded,
+unless there was something to undo that he could do her no good.  Twisden,
+on the other hand, got violently angry, charged her brutally with making
+poverty her cloak, told her that her husband was a breaker of the peace,
+whose doctrine was the doctrine of the devil, and that he ran up and down
+and did harm, while he was better maintained by his preaching than by
+following his tinker's craft.  At last he waxed so violent that "withal
+she thought he would have struck her."  In the midst of all his coarse
+abuse, however, Twisden hit the mark when he asked: "What! you think we
+can do what we list?"  And when we find Hale, confessedly the soundest
+lawyer of the time, whose sympathies were all with the prisoner, after
+calling for the Statute Book, thus summing up the matter: "I am sorry,
+woman, that I can do thee no good.  Thou must do one of these three
+things, viz., either apply thyself to the king, or sue out his pardon, or
+get a writ of error," which last, he told her, would be the cheapest
+course--we may feel sure that Bunyan's Petition was not granted because
+it could not be granted legally.  The blame of his continued imprisonment
+lay, if anywhere, with the law, not with its administrators.  This is not
+always borne in mind as it ought to be.  As Mr. Froude remarks, "Persons
+often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administer the law which
+they find, and rail at them as if the sentences which they are obliged by
+their oath to pass were their own personal acts."  It is not surprising
+that Elizabeth Bunyan was unable to draw this distinction, and that she
+left the Swan chamber in tears, not, however, so much at what she thought
+the judges' "hardheartedness to her and her husband," as at the thought
+of "the sad account such poor creatures would have to give" hereafter,
+for what she deemed their "opposition to Christ and His gospel."
+
+No steps seem to have been taken by Bunyan's wife, or any of his
+influential friends, to carry out either of the expedients named by Hale.
+It may have been that the money needed was not forthcoming, or, what
+Southey remarks is "quite probable,"--"because it is certain that Bunyan,
+thinking himself in conscience bound to preach in defiance of the law,
+would soon have made his case worse than it then was."
+
+At the next assizes, which were held in January, 1662, Bunyan again made
+strenuous efforts to get his name put on the calendar of felons, that he
+might have a regular trial before the king's judges and be able to plead
+his cause in person.  This, however, was effectually thwarted by the
+unfriendly influence of the county magistrates by whom he had been
+committed, and the Clerk of the Peace, Mr. Cobb, who having failed in his
+kindly meant attempt to induce "Neighbour Bunyan" to conform, had turned
+bitterly against him and become one of his chief enemies.  "Thus," writes
+Bunyan, "was I hindered and prevented at that time also from appearing
+before the judge, and left in prison."  Of this prison, the county gaol
+of Bedford, he remained an inmate, with one, short interval in 1666, for
+the next twelve years, till his release by order of the Privy Council,
+May 17, 1672.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+The exaggeration of the severity of Bunyan's imprisonment long current,
+now that the facts are better known, has led, by a very intelligible
+reaction, to an undue depreciation of it.  Mr. Froude thinks that his
+incarceration was "intended to be little more than nominal," and was
+really meant in kindness by the authorities who "respected his
+character," as the best means of preventing him from getting himself into
+greater trouble by "repeating an offence that would compel them to adopt
+harsh measures which they were earnestly trying to avoid."  If convicted
+again he must be transported, and "they were unwilling to drive him out
+of the country."  It is, however, to be feared that it was no such kind
+consideration for the tinker-preacher which kept the prison doors closed
+on Bunyan.  To the justices he was simply an obstinate law-breaker, who
+must be kept in prison as long as he refused compliance with the Act.  If
+he rotted in gaol, as so many of his fellow sufferers for conscience'
+sake did in those unhappy times, it was no concern of theirs.  He and his
+stubbornness would be alone to blame.
+
+It is certainly true that during a portion of his captivity, Bunyan, in
+Dr. Brown's words, "had an amount of liberty which in the case of a
+prisoner nowadays would be simply impossible."  But the mistake has been
+made of extending to the whole period an indulgence which belonged only
+to a part, and that a very limited part of it.  When we are told that
+Bunyan was treated as a prisoner at large, and like one "on parole," free
+to come and go as he pleased, even as far as London, we must remember
+that Bunyan's own words expressly restrict this indulgence to the six
+months between the Autumn Assizes of 1661 and the Spring Assizes of 1662.
+"Between these two assizes," he says, "I had by my jailer some liberty
+granted me more than at the first."  This liberty was certainly of the
+largest kind consistent with his character of a prisoner.  The church
+books show that he was occasionally present at their meetings, and was
+employed on the business of the congregation.  Nay, even his preaching,
+which was the cause of his imprisonment, was not forbidden.  "I
+followed," he says, writing of this period, "my wonted course of
+preaching, taking all occasions that were put into my hand to visit the
+people of God."  But this indulgence was very brief and was brought
+sharply to an end.  It was plainly irregular, and depended on the
+connivance of his jailer.  We cannot be surprised that when it came to
+the magistrates' ears--"my enemies," Bunyan rather unworthily calls
+them--they were seriously displeased.  Confounding Bunyan with the Fifth
+Monarchy men and other turbulent sectaries, they imagined that his visits
+to London had a political object, "to plot, and raise division, and make
+insurrections," which, he honestly adds, "God knows was a slander."  The
+jailer was all but "cast out of his place," and threatened with an
+indictment for breach of trust, while his own liberty was so seriously
+"straitened" that he was prohibited even "to look out at the door."  The
+last time Bunyan's name appears as present at a church meeting is October
+28, 1661, nor do we see it again till October 9, 1668, only four years
+before his twelve years term of imprisonment expired.
+
+But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quite so
+narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, during the
+greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painful one,
+especially when spent, as it sometimes was, "under cruel and oppressive
+jailers."  The enforced separation from his wife and children, especially
+his tenderly loved blind daughter, Mary, was a continually renewed
+anguish to his loving heart.  "The parting with them," he writes, "hath
+often been to me as pulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only
+because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I
+should often have brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and
+wants my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them;
+especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all
+beside.  Poor child, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou
+must suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I
+cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee.  O, the thoughts of the
+hardships my blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces."  He
+seemed to himself like a man pulling down his house on his wife and
+children's head, and yet he felt, "I must do it; O, I must do it."  He
+was also, he tells us, at one time, being but "a young prisoner," greatly
+troubled by the thoughts that "for aught he could tell," his
+"imprisonment might end at the gallows," not so much that he dreaded
+death as that he was apprehensive that when it came to the point, even if
+he made "a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder," he might play the
+coward and so do discredit to the cause of religion.  "I was ashamed to
+die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this."  The
+belief that his imprisonment might be terminated by death on the
+scaffold, however groundless, evidently weighed long on his mind.  The
+closing sentences of his third prison book, "Christian Behaviour,"
+published in 1663, the second year of his durance, clearly point to such
+an expectation.  "Thus have I in few words written to you before I die,
+.  . . not knowing the shortness of my life, nor the hindrances that
+hereafter I may have of serving my God and you."  The ladder of his
+apprehensions was, as Mr. Froude has said, "an imaginary ladder," but it
+was very real to Bunyan.  "Oft I was as if I was on the ladder with a
+rope about my neck."  The thought of it, as his autobiography shows,
+caused him some of his deepest searchings of heart, and noblest ventures
+of faith.  He was content to suffer by the hangman's hand if thus he
+might have an opportunity of addressing the crowd that he thought would
+come to see him die.  "And if it must be so, if God will but convert one
+soul by my very last words, I shall not count my life thrown away or
+lost."  And even when hours of darkness came over his soul, and he was
+tempted to question the reality of his Christian profession, and to doubt
+whether God would give him comfort at the hour of death, he stayed
+himself up with such bold words as these.  "I was bound, but He was free.
+Yea, 'twas my duty to stand to His word whether He would ever look on me
+or no, or save me at the last.  If God doth not come in, thought I, I
+will leap off the ladder even blindfold into Eternity, sink or swim, come
+heaven, come hell.  Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do.  If not, I
+will venture for Thy name."
+
+Bunyan being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his brazier's
+craft for the support of his wife and family, and his active spirit
+craving occupation, he got himself taught how to make "long tagged
+laces," "many hundred gross" of which, we are told by one who first
+formed his acquaintance in prison, he made during his captivity, for "his
+own and his family's necessities."  "While his hands were thus busied,"
+writes Lord Macaulay, "he had often employment for his mind and for his
+lips."  "Though a prisoner he was a preacher still."  As with St. Paul in
+his Roman chains, "the word of God was not bound."  The prisoners for
+conscience' sake, who like him, from time to time, were cooped up in
+Bedford gaol, including several of his brother ministers and some of his
+old friends among the leading members of his own little church, furnished
+a numerous and sympathetic congregation.  At one time a body of some
+sixty, who had met for worship at night in a neighbouring wood, were
+marched off to gaol, with their minister at their head.  But while all
+about him was in confusion, his spirit maintained its even calm, and he
+could at once speak the words of strength and comfort that were needed.
+In the midst of the hurry which so many "newcomers occasioned," writes
+the friend to whom we are indebted for the details of his prison life, "I
+have heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of
+faith and plerophory of Divine assistance that has made me stand and
+wonder."  These sermons addressed to his fellow prisoners supplied, in
+many cases, the first outlines of the books which, in rapid succession,
+flowed from his pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment,
+relieving the otherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement.
+Bunyan himself tells us that this was the case with regard to his "Holy
+City," the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind when addressing
+"his brethren in the prison chamber," nor can we doubt that the case was
+the same with other works of his.  To these we shall hereafter return.
+Nor was it his fellow prisoners only who profited by his counsels.  In
+his "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," he gives us a story of a woman who
+came to him when he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her
+master, and to ask his help.  Hers was probably a representative case.
+The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious
+counsel and exhortation, was given to study and composition.  For this
+his confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would have
+looked for in vain.  The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably.
+His library was, at least at one period, a very limited one,--"the least
+and the best library," writes a friend who visited him in prison, "that I
+ever saw, consisting only of two books--the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of
+Martyrs.'"  "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no
+cause to complain of intellectual destitution."  Bunyan's mode of
+composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,--thoughts succeeding one
+another with a quickness akin to inspiration,--was anything but careless.
+The "limae labor" with him was unsparing.  It was, he tells us, "first
+with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that
+his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of
+Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow
+dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine; books
+which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of
+language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and
+earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.
+
+Bunyan's prison life when the first bitterness of it was past, and habit
+had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it would seem, not an
+unhappy one.  A manly self-respect bore him up and forbade his dwelling
+on the darker features of his position, or thinking or speaking harshly
+of the authors of his durance.  "He was," writes one who saw him at this
+time, "mild and affable in conversation; not given to loquacity or to
+much discourse unless some urgent occasion required.  It was observed he
+never spoke of himself or his parents, but seemed low in his own eyes.  He
+was never heard to reproach or revile, whatever injury he received, but
+rather rebuked those who did so.  He managed all things with such
+exactness as if he had made it his study not to give offence."
+
+According to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe, in 1666, the year of
+the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol, "by
+the intercession of some interest or power that took pity on his
+sufferings," he enjoyed a short interval of liberty.  Who these friends
+and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it would be vain to
+conjecture.  This period of freedom, however, was very short.  He at once
+resumed his old work of preaching, against which the laws had become even
+more stringent during his imprisonment, and was apprehended at a meeting
+just as he was about to preach a sermon.  He had given out his text,
+"Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" (John ix. 35), and was standing
+with his open Bible in his hand, when the constable came in to take him.
+Bunyan fixed his eyes on the man, who turned pale, let go his hold, and
+drew back, while Bunyan exclaimed, "See how this man trembles at the word
+of God!"  This is all we know of his second arrest, and even this little
+is somewhat doubtful.  The time, the place, the circumstances, are as
+provokingly vague as much else of Bunyan's life.  The fact, however, is
+certain.  Bunyan returned to Bedford gaol, where he spent another six
+years, until the issuing of the "Declaration of Indulgence" early in 1672
+opened the long-closed doors, and he walked out a free man, and with what
+he valued far more than personal liberty, freedom to deliver Christ's
+message as he understood it himself, none making him afraid, and to
+declare to his brother sinners what their Saviour had done for them, and
+what he expected them to do that they might obtain the salvation He died
+to win.
+
+From some unknown cause, perhaps the depressing effect of protracted
+confinement, during this second six years Bunyan's pen was far less
+prolific than during the former period.  Only two of his books are dated
+in these years.  The last of these, "A Defence of the Doctrine of
+Justification by Faith," a reply to a work of Edward Fowler, afterwards
+Bishop of Gloucester, the rector of Northill, was written in hot haste
+immediately before his release, and issued from the press
+contemporaneously with it, the prospect of liberty apparently breathing
+new life into his wearied soul.  When once Bunyan became a free man
+again, his pen recovered its former copiousness of production, and the
+works by which he has been immortalized, "The Pilgrim's Progress"--which
+has been erroneously ascribed to Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment--and
+its sequel, "The Holy War," and the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," and a
+host of more strictly theological works, followed one another in rapid
+succession.
+
+Bunyan's second term of imprisonment was certainly less severe than that
+which preceded it.  At its commencement we learn that, like Joseph in
+Egypt, he found favour in his jailer's eyes, who "took such pity of his
+rigorous suffering, that he put all care and trust into his hands."
+Towards the close of his imprisonment its rigour was still further
+relaxed.  The Bedford church book begins its record again in 1688, after
+an interval of ominous silence of five years, when the persecution was at
+the hottest.  In its earliest entries we find Bunyan's name, which occurs
+repeatedly up to the date of his final release in 1672.  Not one of these
+notices gives the slightest allusion of his being a prisoner.  He is
+deputed with others to visit and remonstrate with backsliding brethren,
+and fulfil other commissions on behalf of the congregation, as if he were
+in the full enjoyment of his liberty.  This was in the two years'
+interval between the expiration of the Conventicle Act, March 2, 1667-8,
+and the passing of the new Act, styled by Marvell, "the quintessence of
+arbitrary malice," April 11, 1670.  After a few months of hot
+persecution, when a disgraceful system of espionage was set on foot and
+the vilest wretches drove a lucrative trade as spies on "meetingers," the
+severity greatly lessened.  Charles II. was already meditating the
+issuing of a Declaration of Indulgence, and signified his disapprobation
+of the "forceable courses" in which, "the sad experience of twelve years"
+showed, there was "very little fruit."  One of the first and most notable
+consequences of this change of policy was Bunyan's release.
+
+Mr. Offor's patient researches in the State Paper Office have proved that
+the Quakers, than whom no class of sectaries had suffered more severely
+from the persecuting edicts of the Crown, were mainly instrumental in
+throwing open the prison doors to those who, like Bunyan, were in bonds
+for the sake of their religion.  Gratitude to John Groves, the Quaker
+mate of Tattersall's fishing boat, in which Charles had escaped to France
+after the battle of Worcester, had something, and the untiring advocacy
+of George Whitehead, the Quaker, had still more, to do with this act of
+royal clemency.  We can readily believe that the good-natured Charles was
+not sorry to have an opportunity of evidencing his sense of former
+services rendered at a time of his greatest extremity.  But the main
+cause lay much deeper, and is connected with what Lord Macaulay justly
+styles "one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that
+England has ever seen"--that of the Cabal.  Our national honour was at
+its lowest ebb.  Charles had just concluded the profligate Treaty of
+Dover, by which, in return for the "protection" he sought from the French
+king, he declared himself a Roman Catholic at heart, and bound himself to
+take the first opportunity of "changing the present state of religion in
+England for a better," and restoring the authority of the Pope.  The
+announcement of his conversion Charles found it convenient to postpone.
+Nor could the other part of his engagement be safely carried into effect
+at once.  It called for secret and cautious preparation.  But to pave the
+way for it, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative he issued
+a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended all penal laws against
+"whatever sort of Nonconformists or Recusants."  The latter were
+evidently the real object of the indulgence; the former class were only
+introduced the better to cloke his infamous design.  Toleration, however,
+was thus at last secured, and the long-oppressed Nonconformists hastened
+to profit by it.  "Ministers returned," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "after
+years of banishment, to their homes and their flocks.  Chapels were re-
+opened.  The gaols were emptied.  Men were set free to worship God after
+their own fashion.  John Bunyan left the prison which had for twelve
+years been his home."  More than three thousand licenses to preach were
+at once issued.  One of the earliest of these, dated May 9, 1672, four
+months before his formal pardon under the Great Seal, was granted to
+Bunyan, who in the preceding January had been chosen their minister by
+the little congregation at Bedford, and "giving himself up to serve
+Christ and His Church in that charge, had received of the elders the
+right hand of fellowship."  The place licensed for the exercise of
+Bunyan's ministry was a barn standing in an orchard, once forming part of
+the Castle Moat, which one of the congregation, Josias Roughead, acting
+for the members of his church, had purchased.  The license bears date May
+9, 1672.  This primitive place of worship, in which Bunyan preached
+regularly till his death, was pulled down in 1707, when a "three-ridged
+meeting-house" was erected in its place.  This in its turn gave way, in
+1849, to the existing more seemly chapel, to which the present Duke of
+Bedford, in 1876, presented a pair of noble bronze doors bearing scenes,
+in high relief, from "The Pilgrim's Progress," the work of Mr. Frederick
+Thrupp.  In the vestry are preserved Bunyan's chair, and other relics of
+the man who has made the name of Bedford famous to the whole civilized
+world.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+Mr. Green has observed that Bunyan "found compensation for the narrow
+bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of his pen.  Tracts,
+controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his 'Grace Abounding,' and
+his 'Holy War,' followed each other in quick succession."  Bunyan's
+literary fertility in the earlier half of his imprisonment was indeed
+amazing.  Even if, as seems almost certain, we have been hitherto in
+error in assigning the First Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to this
+period, while the "Holy War" certainly belongs to a later, the works
+which had their birth in Bedford Gaol during the first six years of his
+confinement, are of themselves sufficient to make the reputation of any
+ordinary writer.  As has been already remarked, for some unexplained
+cause, Bunyan's gifts as an author were much more sparingly called into
+exercise during the second half of his captivity.  Only two works appear
+to have been written between 1666 and his release in 1672.
+
+Mr. Green has spoken of "poems" as among the products of Bunyan's pen
+during this period.  The compositions in verse belonging to this epoch,
+of which there are several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a
+title.  At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet.
+He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his
+thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly
+for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience
+that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered
+in that form.  Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse
+than is commonly held, remarks that though it is the fashion to apply the
+epithet of "doggerel" to it, the "sincere and rational meaning" which
+pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper.  "His ear for
+rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom
+wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative
+merit that he could never write nonsense."  Bunyan's earliest prison
+work, entitled "Profitable Meditations," was in verse, and neither this
+nor his later metrical ventures before his release--his "Four Last
+Things," his "Ebal and Gerizim," and his "Prison Meditations"--can be
+said to show much poetical power.  At best he is a mere rhymester, to
+whom rhyme and metre, even when self-chosen, were as uncongenial
+accoutrements "as Saul's armour was to David."  The first-named book,
+which is entitled a "Conference between Christ and a Sinner," in the form
+of a poetical dialogue, according to Dr. Brown has "small literary merit
+of any sort."  The others do not deserve much higher commendation.  There
+is an individuality about the "Prison Meditations" which imparts to it a
+personal interest, which is entirely wanting in the other two works,
+which may be characterized as metrical sermons, couched in verse of the
+Sternhold and Hopkins type.  A specimen or two will suffice.  The "Four
+Last Things" thus opens:--
+
+   "These lines I at this time present
+   To all that will them heed,
+   Wherein I show to what intent
+   God saith, 'Convert with speed.'
+   For these four things come on apace,
+   Which we should know full well,
+   Both death and judgment, and, in place
+   Next to them, heaven and hell."
+
+The following lines are from "Ebal and Gerizim":--
+
+   "Thou art like one that hangeth by a thread
+   Over the mouth of hell, as one half dead;
+   And oh, how soon this thread may broken be,
+   Or cut by death, is yet unknown to thee.
+   But sure it is if all the weight of sin,
+   And all that Satan too hath doing been
+   Or yet can do, can break this crazy thread,
+   'Twill not be long before among the dead
+   Thou tumble do, as linked fast in chains,
+   With them to wait in fear for future pains."
+
+The poetical effusion entitled "Prison Meditations" does not in any way
+rise above the prosaic level of its predecessors.  But it can be read
+with less weariness from the picture it presents of Bunyan's prison life,
+and of the courageous faith which sustained him.  Some unnamed friend, it
+would appear, fearing he might flinch, had written him a letter
+counselling him to keep "his head above the flood."  Bunyan replied in
+seventy stanzas in ballad measure, thanking his correspondent for his
+good advice, of which he confesses he stood in need, and which he takes
+it kindly of him to send, even though his feet stand upon Mount Zion, and
+the gaol is to him like a hill from which he could see beyond this world,
+and take his fill of the blessedness of that which remains for the
+Christian.  Though in bonds his mind is free, and can wander where it
+will.
+
+   "For though men keep my outward man
+   Within their locks and bars,
+   Yet by the faith of Christ, I can
+   Mount higher than the stars."
+
+Meanwhile his captivity is sweetened by the thought of what it was that
+brought him there:--
+
+   "I here am very much refreshed
+   To think, when I was out,
+   I preached life, and peace, and rest,
+   To sinners round about.
+
+   My business then was souls to save
+   By preaching grace and faith,
+   Of which the comfort now I have
+   And have it shall till death.
+
+   That was the work I was about
+   When hands on me they laid.
+   'Twas this for which they plucked me out
+   And vilely to me said,
+
+   'You heretic, deceiver, come,
+   To prison you must go,
+   You preach abroad, and keep not home,
+   You are the Church's foe.'
+
+   Wherefore to prison they me sent,
+   Where to this day I lie,
+   And can with very much content
+   For my profession die.
+
+   The prison very sweet to me
+   Hath been since I came here,
+   And so would also hanging be
+   If God would there appear.
+
+   To them that here for evil lie
+   The place is comfortless;
+   But not to me, because that I
+   Lie here for righteousness.
+
+   The truth and I were both here cast
+   Together, and we do
+   Lie arm in arm, and so hold fast
+   Each other, this is true.
+
+   Who now dare say we throw away
+   Our goods or liberty,
+   When God's most holy Word doth say
+   We gain thus much thereby?"
+
+It will be seen that though Bunyan's verses are certainly not high-class
+poetry, they are very far removed from doggerel.  Nothing indeed that
+Bunyan ever wrote, however rugged the rhymes and limping the metre, can
+be so stigmatized.  The rude scribblings on the margins of the copy of
+the "Book of Martyrs," which bears Bunyan's signature on the title-pages,
+though regarded by Southey as "undoubtedly" his, certainly came from a
+later and must less instructed pen.  And as he advanced in his literary
+career, his claim to the title of a poet, though never of the highest,
+was much strengthened.  The verses which diversify the narrative in the
+Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" are decidedly superior to those
+in the First Part, and some are of high excellence.  Who is ignorant of
+the charming little song of the Shepherd Boy in the Valley of
+Humiliation, "in very mean clothes, but with a very fresh and
+well-favoured countenance, and wearing more of the herb called Heartsease
+in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet?"--
+
+   "He that is down need fear no fall;
+   He that is low, no pride;
+   He that is humble, ever shall
+   Have God to be his guide.
+
+   I am content with what I have,
+   Little be it or much,
+   And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
+   Because Thou savest such.
+
+   Fulness to such a burden is
+   That go on Pilgrimage,
+   Here little, and hereafter Bliss
+   Is best from age to age."
+
+Bunyan reaches a still higher flight in Valiant-for-Truth's song, later
+on, the Shakesperian ring of which recalls Amiens' in "As You Like It,"
+
+   "Under the greenwood tree,
+   Who loves to lie with me. . .
+   Come hither, come hither,"
+
+and has led some to question whether it can be Bunyan's own.  The
+resemblance, as Mr. Froude remarks, is "too near to be accidental."
+"Perhaps he may have heard the lines, and the rhymes may have clung to
+him without his knowing whence they came."
+
+   "Who would true Valour see,
+   Let him come hither,
+   One here will constant be,
+   Come wind, come weather.
+   There's no discouragement
+   Shall make him once relent
+   His first avowed intent
+   To be a Pilgrim.
+
+   Who so beset him round
+   With dismal stories,
+   Do but themselves confound
+   His strength the more is.
+   No lion can him fright,
+   He'll with a giant fight,
+   But he will have a right
+   To be a Pilgrim.
+
+   Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
+   Can daunt his spirit,
+   He knows he at the end
+   Shall life inherit.
+   Then fancies fly away
+   He'll fear not what men say,
+   He'll labour night and day
+   To be a Pilgrim."
+
+All readers of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Holy War" are familiar
+with the long metrical compositions giving the history of these works by
+which they are prefaced and the latter work is closed.  No more
+characteristic examples of Bunyan's muse can be found.  They show his
+excellent command of his native tongue in racy vernacular, homely but
+never vulgar, and his power of expressing his meaning "with sharp defined
+outlines and without the waste of a word."
+
+Take this account of his perplexity, when the First Part of his
+"Pilgrim's Progress" was finished, whether it should be given to the
+world or no, and the characteristic decision with which he settled the
+question for himself:--
+
+   "Well, when I had then put mine ends together,
+   I show'd them others that I might see whether
+   They would condemn them, or them justify;
+   And some said Let them live; some, Let them die.
+   Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so;
+   Some said it might do good; others said No.
+   Now was I in a strait, and did not see
+   Which was the best thing to be done by me;
+   At last I thought since you are thus divided
+   I print it will; and so the case decided;"
+
+or the lines in which he introduces the Second Part of the Pilgrim to the
+readers of the former part:--
+
+   "Go now, my little Book, to every place
+   Where my first Pilgrim hath but shown his face:
+   Call at their door: If any say, 'Who's there?'
+   Then answer that Christiana is here.
+   If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
+   With all thy boys.  And then, as thou knowest how,
+   Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
+   Perhaps they'll know them by their looks or name.
+   But if they should not, ask them yet again
+   If formerly they did not entertain
+   One Christian, a pilgrim.  If they say
+   They did, and were delighted in his way:
+   Then let them know that these related are
+   Unto him, yea, his wife and children are.
+   Tell them that they have left their house and home,
+   Are turned Pilgrims, seek a world to come;
+   That they have met with hardships on the way,
+   That they do meet with troubles night and day."
+
+How racy, even if the lines are a little halting, is the defence of the
+genuineness of his Pilgrim in "The Advertisement to the Reader" at the
+end of "The Holy War."
+
+   "Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
+   Insinuating as if I would shine
+   In name or fame by the worth of another,
+   Like some made rich by robbing of their brother;
+   Or that so fond I am of being sire
+   I'll father bastards; or if need require,
+   I'll tell a lie or print to get applause.
+   I scorn it.  John such dirt-heap never was
+   Since God converted him. . .
+   Witness my name, if anagram'd to thee
+   The letters make _Nu hony in a B_.
+   IOHN BUNYAN."
+
+How full of life and vigour his sketch of the beleaguerment and
+deliverance of "Mansoul," as a picture of his own spiritual experience,
+in the introductory verses to "The Holy War"!--
+
+   "For my part I, myself, was in the town,
+   Both when 'twas set up, and when pulling down;
+   I saw Diabolus in possession,
+   And Mansoul also under his oppression.
+   Yes, I was there when she crowned him for lord,
+   And to him did submit with one accord.
+   When Mansoul trampled upon things divine,
+   And wallowed in filth as doth a swine,
+   When she betook herself unto her arms,
+   Fought her Emmanuel, despised his charms:
+   Then I was there, and did rejoice to see
+   Diabolus and Mansoul so agree.
+   I saw the prince's armed men come down
+   By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town,
+   I saw the captains, heard the trumpets sound,
+   And how his forces covered all the ground,
+   Yea, how they set themselves in battle array,
+   I shall remember to my dying day."
+
+Bunyan's other essays in the domain of poetry need not detain us long.
+The most considerable of these--at least in bulk--if it be really his, is
+a version of some portions of the Old and New Testaments: the life of
+Joseph, the Book of Ruth, the history of Samson, the Book of Jonah, the
+Sermon on the Mount, and the General Epistle of St. James.  The attempt
+to do the English Bible into verse has been often made and never
+successfully: in the nature of things success in such a task is
+impossible, nor can this attempt be regarded as happier than that of
+others.  Mr. Froude indeed, who undoubtingly accepts their genuineness,
+is of a different opinion.  He styles the "Book of Ruth" and the "History
+of Joseph" "beautiful idylls," of such high excellence that, "if we found
+them in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a
+difficult task had been accomplished successfully."  It would seem almost
+doubtful whether Mr. Froude can have read the compositions that he
+commends so largely, and so much beyond their merit.  The following
+specimen, taken haphazard, will show how thoroughly Bunyan or the
+rhymester, whoever he may be, has overcome what Mr. Froude regards as an
+almost insuperable difficulty, and has managed to "spoil completely the
+faultless prose of the English translation":--
+
+   "Ruth replied,
+   Intreat me not to leave thee or return;
+   For where thou goest I'll go, where thou sojourn
+   I'll sojourn also--and what people's thine,
+   And who thy God, the same shall both be mine.
+   Where thou shalt die, there will I die likewise,
+   And I'll be buried where thy body lies.
+   The Lord do so to me and more if I
+   Do leave thee or forsake thee till I die."
+
+The more we read of these poems, not given to the world till twelve years
+after Bunyan's death, and that by a publisher who was "a repeated
+offender against the laws of honest dealing," the more we are inclined to
+agree with Dr. Brown, that the internal evidence of their style renders
+their genuineness at the least questionable.  In the dull prosaic level
+of these compositions there is certainly no trace of the "force and
+power" always present in Bunyan's rudest rhymes, still less of the "dash
+of genius" and the "sparkle of soul" which occasionally discover the hand
+of a master.
+
+Of the authenticity of Bunyan's "Divine Emblems," originally published
+three years after his death under the title of "Country Rhymes for
+Children," there is no question.  The internal evidence confirms the
+external.  The book is thoroughly in Bunyan's vein, and in its homely
+naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the "Interpreter's
+House," especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys.  As in
+that "house of imagery" things of the most common sort, the sweeping of a
+room, the burning of a fire, the drinking of a chicken, a robin with a
+spider in his mouth, are made the vehicle of religious teaching; so in
+this "Book for Boys and Girls," a mole burrowing in the ground, a swallow
+soaring in the air, the cuckoo which can do nothing but utter two notes,
+a flaming and a blinking candle, or a pound of candles falling to the
+ground, a boy chasing a butterfly, the cackling of a hen when she has
+laid her egg, all, to his imaginative mind, set forth some spiritual
+truth or enforce some wholesome moral lesson.  How racy, though homely,
+are these lines on a Frog!--
+
+   "The Frog by nature is but damp and cold,
+   Her mouth is large, her belly much will hold,
+   She sits somewhat ascending, loves to be
+   Croaking in gardens, though unpleasantly.
+
+   The hypocrite is like unto this Frog,
+   As like as is the puppy to the dog.
+   He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide
+   To prate, and at true goodness to deride.
+   And though this world is that which he doth love,
+   He mounts his head as if he lived above.
+   And though he seeks in churches for to croak,
+   He neither seeketh Jesus nor His yoke."
+
+There is some real poetry in those on the Cuckoo, though we may be
+inclined to resent his harsh treatment of our universal favourite:--
+
+   "Thou booby says't thou nothing but Cuckoo?
+   The robin and the wren can that outdo.
+   They to us play thorough their little throats
+   Not one, but sundry pretty tuneful notes.
+   But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
+   Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.
+
+   Thy notes do not first welcome in our spring,
+   Nor dost thou its first tokens to us bring.
+   Birds less than thee by far like prophets do
+   Tell us 'tis coming, though not by Cuckoo,
+   Nor dost thou summer bear away with thee
+   Though thou a yawling bawling Cuckoo be.
+   When thou dost cease among us to appear,
+   Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year.
+   But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
+   Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.
+
+   Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring
+   Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in,
+   And since while here, she only makes a noise
+   So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
+   The Formalist we may compare her to,
+   For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo."
+
+A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness,
+sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque
+images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet.  His muse,
+it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one.  She is "clad
+in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks
+along the level Bedfordshire roads."  But if the lines are unpolished,
+"they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the
+"strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a
+single blow the nail home to the head."
+
+During his imprisonment Bunyan's pen was much more fertile in prose than
+in poetry.  Besides his world-famous "Grace Abounding," he produced
+during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer,
+entitled "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian Behaviour,"
+setting forth with uncompromising plainness the relative duties of
+husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, by which
+those who profess a true faith are bound to show forth its reality and
+power; the "Holy City," an exposition of the vision in the closing
+chapters of the Book of Revelation, brilliant with picturesque
+description and rich in suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its
+origin in a sermon preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their
+prison chamber; and a work on the "Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal
+Judgment."  On these works we may not linger.  There is not one of them
+which is not marked by vigour of thought, clearness of language, accuracy
+of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience.  Nor is there one which
+does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan's picturesque
+imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy language.  Each
+will reward perusal.  His work on "Prayer" is couched in the most exalted
+strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing
+experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the
+soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not
+denied, is granted.  It is, however, unhappily deformed by much ignorant
+reviling of the Book of Common Prayer.  He denounces it as "taken out of
+the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragments of some popes, some
+friars, and I know not what;" and ridicules the order of service it
+propounds to the worshippers.  "They have the matter and the manner of
+their prayer at their fingers' ends; they set such a prayer for such a
+day, and that twenty years before it comes: one for Christmas, another
+for Easter, and six days after that.  They have also bounded how many
+syllables must be said in every one of them at their public exercises.
+For each saint's day also they have them ready for the generations yet
+unborn to say.  They can tell you also when you shall kneel, when you
+shall stand, when you should abide in your seats, when you should go up
+into the chancel, and what you should do when you come there.  All which
+the apostles came short of, as not being able to compose so profound a
+manner."  This bitter satirical vein in treating of sacred things is
+unworthy of its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence.  It has
+its excuse in the hard measure he had received from those who were so
+unwisely endeavouring to force the Prayer Book on a generation which had
+largely forgotten it.  In his mind, the men and the book were identified,
+and the unchristian behaviour of its advocates blinded his eyes to its
+merits as a guide to devotion.  Bunyan, when denouncing forms in worship,
+forgot that the same apostle who directs that in our public assemblies
+everything should be done "to edification," directs also that everything
+should be done "decently and in order."
+
+By far the most important of these prison works--"The Pilgrim's
+Progress," belonging, as will be seen, to a later period--is the "Grace
+Abounding," in which with inimitable earnestness and simplicity Bunyan
+gives the story of his early life and his religious history.  This book,
+if he had written no other, would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest
+masters of the English language of his own or any other age.  In graphic
+delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a
+hardly won freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of
+hope and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid self-torturing
+questionings of motive and action, this work of the travelling tinker, as
+a spiritual history, has never been surpassed.  Its equal can hardly be
+found, save perhaps in the "Confessions of St. Augustine."  These,
+however, though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a
+more cultured style, and rise to a higher metaphysical region than Bunyan
+was capable of attaining to.  His level is a lower one, but on that level
+Bunyan is without a rival.  Never has the history of a soul convinced of
+the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most
+certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger of
+hopeless, irreversible doom--seeing itself, to employ his own image,
+hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might
+snap any moment--been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring
+language.  And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth.
+Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, but
+simply telling in plain unadorned language what he had felt.  The
+experience was a very tremendous reality to him.  Like Dante, if he had
+not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he
+had in very deed traversed "the Valley of the Shadow of Death," had heard
+its "hideous noises," and seen "the Hobgoblins of the Pit."  He "spake
+what he knew and testified what he had seen."  Every sentence breathes
+the most tremendous earnestness.  His words are the plainest, drawn from
+his own homely vernacular.  He says in his preface, which will amply
+repay reading, as one of the most characteristic specimens of his style,
+that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adorned his narrative
+more plentifully.  But he dared not.  "God did not play in convincing
+him.  The devil did not play in tempting him.  He himself did not play
+when he sunk as into a bottomless pit, and the pangs of hell caught hold
+on him.  Nor could he play in relating them.  He must be plain and simple
+and lay down the thing as it was.  He that liked it might receive it.  He
+that did not might produce a better."  The remembrance of "his great
+sins, his great temptations, his great fears of perishing for ever,
+recalled the remembrance of his great help, his great support from
+heaven, the great grace God extended to such a wretch as he was."  Having
+thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children,
+for whose use the work was originally composed and to whom it is
+dedicated,--"those whom God had counted him worthy to beget to Faith by
+his ministry in the Word"--to survey their own religious history, to
+"work diligently and leave no corner unsearched."  He would have them
+"remember their tears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every
+hedge for mercy.  Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember?
+Had they forgotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where
+God visited their souls?  Let them remember the Word on which the Lord
+had caused them to hope.  If they had sinned against light, if they were
+tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let them remember
+that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and that out of
+them all the Lord had delivered him."  This dedication ends thus: "My
+dear children, the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness.  God be
+merciful to you, and grant you be not slothful to go in to possess the
+land."
+
+This remarkable book, as we learn from the title-page, was "written by
+his own hand in prison."  It was first published by George Larkin in
+London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the year of the Fire
+of London, about the time that he experienced his first brief release.  As
+with "The Pilgrim's Progress," the work grew in picturesque detail and
+graphic power in the author's hand after its first appearance.  The later
+editions supply some of the most interesting personal facts contained in
+the narrative, which were wanting when it first issued from the press.
+His two escapes from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder;
+his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance from
+death; the graphic account of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at
+Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green--these and other
+minor touches which give a life and colour to the story, which we should
+be very sorry to lose, are later additions.  It is impossible to over-
+estimate the value of the "Grace Abounding," both for the facts of
+Bunyan's earlier life and for the spiritual experience of which these
+facts were, in his eyes only the outward framework.  Beginning with his
+parentage and boyhood, it carries us down to his marriage and life in the
+wayside-cottage at Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford's congregation
+at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and his subsequent call to
+the work of the ministry among them, and winds up with an account of his
+apprehension, examinations, and imprisonment in Bedford gaol.  The work
+concludes with a report of the conversation between his noble-hearted
+wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes,
+narrated in a former chapter, "taken down," he says, "from her own
+mouth."  The whole story is of such sustained interest that our chief
+regret on finishing it is that it stops where it does, and does not go on
+much further.  Its importance for our knowledge of Bunyan as a man, as
+distinguished from an author, and of the circumstances of his life, is
+seen by a comparison of our acquaintance with his earlier and with his
+later years.  When he laid down his pen no one took it up, and beyond two
+or three facts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little or nothing of all
+that happened between his final release and his death.
+
+The value of the "Grace Abounding," however, as a work of experimental
+religion may be easily over-estimated.  It is not many who can study
+Bunyan's minute history of the various stages of his spiritual life with
+real profit.  To some temperaments, especially among the young, the book
+is more likely to prove injurious than beneficial; it is calculated
+rather to nourish morbid imaginations, and a dangerous habit of
+introspection, than to foster the quiet growth of the inner life.
+Bunyan's unhappy mode of dealing with the Bible as a collection of texts,
+each of Divine authority and declaring a definite meaning entirely
+irrespective of its context, by which the words hide the Word, is also
+utterly destructive of the true purpose of the Holy Scriptures as a
+revelation of God's loving and holy mind and will.  Few things are more
+touching than the eagerness with which, in his intense self-torture,
+Bunyan tried to evade the force of those "fearful and terrible
+Scriptures" which appeared to seal his condemnation, and to lay hold of
+the promises to the penitent sinner.  His tempest-tossed spirit could
+only find rest by doing violence to the dogma, then universally accepted
+and not quite extinct even in our own days, that the authority of the
+Bible--that "Divine Library"--collectively taken, belongs to each and
+every sentence of the Bible taken for and by itself, and that, in
+Coleridge's words, "detached sentences from books composed at the
+distance of centuries, nay, sometimes at a millenium from each other,
+under different dispensations and for different objects," are to be
+brought together "into logical dependency."  But "where the Spirit of the
+Lord is there is liberty."  The divinely given life in the soul of man
+snaps the bonds of humanly-constructed logical systems.  Only those,
+however, who have known by experience the force of Bunyan's spiritual
+combat, can fully appreciate and profit by Bunyan's narrative.  He tells
+us on the title-page that it was written "for the support of the weak and
+tempted people of God."  For such the "Grace Abounding to the chief of
+sinners" will ever prove most valuable.  Those for whom it was intended
+will find in it a message--of comfort and strength.
+
+As has been said, Bunyan's pen was almost idle during the last six years
+of his imprisonment.  Only two of his works were produced in this period:
+his "Confession of Faith," and his "Defence of the Doctrine of
+Justification by Faith."  Both were written very near the end of his
+prison life, and published in the same year, 1672, only a week or two
+before his release.  The object of the former work was, as Dr. Brown
+tells us, "to vindicate his teaching, and if possible, to secure his
+liberty."  Writing as one "in bonds for the Gospel," his professed
+principles, he asserts, are "faith, and holiness springing therefrom,
+with an endeavour so far as in him lies to be at peace with all men."  He
+is ready to hold communion with all whose principles are the same; with
+all whom he can reckon as children of God.  With these he will not
+quarrel about "things that are circumstantial," such as water baptism,
+which he regards as something quite indifferent, men being "neither the
+better for having it, nor the worse for having it not."  "He will receive
+them in the Lord as becometh saints.  If they will not have communion
+with him, the neglect is theirs not his.  But with the openly profane and
+ungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the
+communion, he will have no communion.  It would be a strange community,
+he says, that consisted of men and beasts.  Men do not receive their
+horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room by
+themselves."  As regards forms and ceremonies, he "cannot allow his soul
+to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of
+this world.  He is content to stay in prison even till the moss grows on
+his eyelids rather than thus make of his conscience a continual butchery
+and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes and committing himself to the
+blind to lead him.  Eleven years' imprisonment was a weighty argument to
+pause and pause again over the foundation of the principles for which he
+had thus suffered.  Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in
+the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them
+by the Word of God and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from
+or deny them on pain of eternal damnation."
+
+The second-named work, the "Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by
+Faith," is entirely controversial.  The Rev. Edward Fowler, afterwards
+Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had published in the early
+part of 1671, a book entitled "The Design of Christianity."  A copy
+having found its way into Bunyan's hands, he was so deeply stirred by
+what he deemed its subversion of the true foundation of Evangelical
+religion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks composed a
+long and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, and a
+confutation of its teaching.  Fowler's doctrines as Bunyan understood
+them--or rather misunderstood them--awoke the worst side of his impetuous
+nature.  His vituperation of the author and his book is coarse and
+unmeasured.  He roundly charges Fowler with having "closely, privily, and
+devilishly turned the grace of God into a licentious doctrine,
+bespattering it with giving liberty to lasciviousness;" and he calls him
+"a pretended minister of the Word," who, in "his cursed blasphemous book
+vilely exposes to public view the rottenness of his heart, in principle
+diametrically opposite to the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, a
+glorious latitudinarian that can, as to religion, turn and twist like an
+eel on the angle, or rather like the weathercock that stands on the
+steeple;" and describes him as "contradicting the wholesome doctrine of
+the Church of England."  He "knows him not by face much less his personal
+practise."  He may have "kept himself clear of the ignorant Sir Johns who
+had for a long time, as a judgment of God, been made the mouth to the
+people--men of debauched lives who for the love of filthy lucre and the
+pampering of their idle carcases had made shipwreck of their former
+faith;" but he does know that having been ejected as a Nonconformist in
+1662, he had afterwards gone over to the winning side, and he fears that
+"such an unstable weathercock spirit as he had manifested would stumble
+the work and give advantage to the adversary to speak vilifyingly of
+religion."  No excuse can be offered for the coarse violence of Bunyan's
+language in this book; but it was too much the habit of the time to load
+a theological opponent with vituperation, to push his assertions to the
+furthest extreme, and make the most unwarrantable deductions from them.
+It must be acknowledged that Bunyan does not treat Fowler and his
+doctrines with fairness, and that, if the latter may be thought to
+depreciate unduly the sacrifice of the Death of Christ as an expiation
+for man's guilt, and to lay too great a stress on the moral faculties
+remaining in the soul after the Fall, Bunyan errs still more widely on
+the other side in asserting the absolute, irredeemable corruption of
+human nature, leaving nothing for grace to work upon, but demanding an
+absolutely fresh creation, not a revivification of the Divine nature
+grievously marred but not annihilated by Adam's sin.
+
+A reply to Bunyan's severe strictures was not slow to appear.  The book
+bears the title, characteristic of the tone and language of its contents,
+of "_Dirt wip't off_; or, a manifest discovery of the Gross Ignorance,
+Erroneousness, and most Unchristian and Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan,
+Lay-preacher in Bedford."  It professes to be written by a friend of
+Fowler's, but Fowler was generally accredited with it.  Its violent
+tirades against one who, he says, had been "near these twenty years or
+longer very infamous in the Town and County of Bedford as a very
+Pestilent Schismatick," and whom he suggests the authorities have done
+wrong in letting out of prison, and had better clap in gaol again as "an
+impudent and malicious Firebrand," have long since been consigned to a
+merciful oblivion, where we may safely leave them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Bunyan's protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672.  The exact date
+of his actual liberation is uncertain.  His pardon under the Great Seal
+bears date September 13th.  But we find from the church books that he had
+been appointed pastor of the congregation to which he belonged as early
+as the 21st of January of that year, and on the 9th of May his
+ministerial position was duly recognized by the Government, and a license
+was granted to him to act "as preacher in the house of Josias Roughead,"
+for those "of the Persuasion commonly called Congregational."  His
+release would therefore seem to have anticipated the formal issue of his
+pardon by four months.  Bunyan was now half way through his forty-fourth
+year.  Sixteen years still remained to him before his career of
+indefatigable service in the Master's work was brought to a close.  Of
+these sixteen years, as has already been remarked, we have only a very
+general knowledge.  Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known
+source from which they can be recovered.  If he kept any diary it has not
+been preserved.  If he wrote letters--and one who was looked up to by so
+large a circle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose
+pen was so ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written many--not one
+has come down to us.  The pages of the church books during his pastorate
+are also provokingly barren of record, and little that they contain is in
+Bunyan's handwriting.  As Dr. Brown has said, "he seems to have been too
+busy to keep any records of his busy life."  Nor can we fill up the blank
+from external authorities.  The references to Bunyan in contemporary
+biographies are far fewer than we might have expected; certainly far
+fewer than we could have desired.  But the little that is recorded is
+eminently characteristic.  We see him constantly engaged in the great
+work to which he felt God had called him, and for which, "with much
+content through grace," he had suffered twelve years' incarceration.  In
+addition to the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own
+congregation, he took a general oversight of the villages far and near
+which had been the scene of his earlier ministry, preaching whenever
+opportunity offered, and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour,
+making long journeys into distant parts of the country for the
+furtherance of the gospel.  We find him preaching at Leicester in the
+year of his release.  Reading also is mentioned as receiving occasional
+visits from him, and that not without peril after the revival of
+persecution; while the congregations in London had the benefit of his
+exhortations at stated intervals.  Almost the first thing Bunyan did,
+after his liberation from gaol, was to make others sharers in his hardly
+won "liberty of prophesying," by applying to the Government for licenses
+for preachers and preaching places in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring
+counties, under the Declaration of Indulgence.  The still existing list
+sent in to the authorities by him, in his own handwriting, contains the
+names of twenty-five preachers and thirty buildings, besides "Josias
+Roughead's House in his orchard at Bedford."  Nineteen of these were in
+his own native county, three in Northamptonshire, three in
+Buckinghamshire, two in Cambridgeshire, two in Huntingdonshire, and one
+in Hertfordshire.  The places sought to be licensed were very various,
+barns, malthouses, halls belonging to public companies, &c., but more
+usually private houses.  Over these religious communities, bound together
+by a common faith and common suffering, Bunyan exercised a
+quasi-episcopal superintendence, which gained for him the playful title
+of "Bishop Bunyan."  In his regular circuits,--"visitations" we may not
+improperly term them,--we are told that he exerted himself to relieve the
+temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,--so soon and so
+cruelly revived,--ministered diligently to the sick and afflicted, and
+used his influence in reconciling differences between "professors of the
+gospel," and thus prevented the scandal of litigation among Christians.
+The closing period of Bunyan's life was laborious but happy, spent
+"honourably and innocently" in writing, preaching, visiting his
+congregations, and planting daughter churches.  "Happy," writes Mr.
+Froude, "in his work; happy in the sense that his influence was daily
+extending--spreading over his own country and to the far-off settlements
+of America,--he spent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting
+Castle out of sight, and the towers and minarets of Immanuel's Land
+growing nearer and clearer as the days went on."
+
+With his time so largely occupied in his spiritual functions, he could
+have had but small leisure to devote to his worldly calling.  This,
+however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure not to have
+neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extent he should
+work for his living.  He had a family to maintain.  His congregation were
+mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contribute much to their pastor's
+support.  Had it been otherwise, Bunyan was the last man in the world to
+make a trade of the gospel, and though never hesitating to avail himself
+of the apostolic privilege to "live of the gospel," he, like the apostle
+of the Gentiles, would never be ashamed to "work with his own hands,"
+that he might "minister to his own necessities," and those of his family.
+But from the time of his release he regarded his ministerial work as the
+chief work of his life.  "When he came abroad," says one who knew him,
+"he found his temporal affairs were gone to wreck, and he had as to them
+to begin again as if he had newly come into the world.  But yet he was
+not destitute of friends, who had all along supported him with
+necessaries and had been very good to his family, so that by their
+assistance getting things a little about him again, he resolved as much
+as possible to decline worldly business, and give himself wholly up to
+the service of God."  The anonymous writer to whom we are indebted for
+information concerning his imprisonment and his subsequent life, says
+that Bunyan, "contenting himself with that little God had bestowed upon
+him, sequestered himself from all secular employments to follow that of
+his call to the ministry."  The fact, however, that in the "deed of gift"
+of all his property to his wife in 1685, he still describes himself as a
+"brazier," puts it beyond all doubt that though his ministerial duties
+were his chief concern, he prudently kept fast hold of his handicraft as
+a certain means of support for himself and those dependent on him.  On
+the whole, Bunyan's outward circumstances were probably easy.  His wants
+were few and easily supplied.  "Having food and raiment" for himself, his
+wife, and his children, he was "therewith content."  The house in the
+parish of St. Cuthbert's which was his home from his release to his death
+(unhappily demolished fifty years back), shows the humble character of
+his daily life.  It was a small cottage, such as labourers now occupy,
+with three small rooms on the ground floor, and a garret with a
+diminutive dormer window under the high-pitched tiled roof.  Behind stood
+an outbuilding which served as his workshop.  We have a passing glimpse
+of this cottage home in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary.
+One Mr. Bagford, otherwise unknown to us, had once "walked into the
+country" on purpose to see "the study of John Bunyan," and the student
+who made it famous.  On his arrival the interviewer--as we should now
+call him--met with a civil and courteous reception from Bunyan; but he
+found the contents of his study hardly larger than those of his prison
+cell.  They were limited to a Bible, and copies of "The Pilgrim's
+Progress," and a few other books, chiefly his own works, "all lying on a
+shelf or shelves."  Slight as this sketch is, it puts us more in touch
+with the immortal dreamer than many longer and more elaborate paragraphs.
+
+Bunyan's celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shut up in gaol,
+was naturally enhanced by the circumstance of his imprisonment.  The barn
+in Josias Roughead's orchard, where he was licensed as a preacher, was
+"so thronged the first time he appeared there to edify, that many were
+constrained to stay without; every one that was of his persuasion
+striving to partake of his instructions."  Wherever he ministered,
+sometimes, when troublous days returned, in woods, and in dells, and
+other hiding-places, the announcement that John Bunyan was to preach
+gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking
+from them the word of life.  His fame grew the more he was known and
+reached its climax when his work was nearest its end.  His biographer
+Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, "when Mr. Bunyan
+preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would
+be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold.  I have
+seen, by my computation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by
+seven o'clock on a working day, in the dark winter time.  I also computed
+about three thousand that came to hear him one Lord's Day in London, at a
+town's-end meeting-house, so that half were fain to go back again for
+want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled
+almost over people to get upstairs to his pulpit."  This "town's-end
+meeting house" has been identified by some with a quaint straggling long
+building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is
+an engraving in Wilkinson's "Londina Illustrata."  Doe's account,
+however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street meeting-
+house was not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan's
+death, and then for Presbyterian service.  Other places in London
+connected with his preaching are Pinners' Hall in Old Broad Street,
+where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon
+on "The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss
+thereof," first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen's meeting-house in
+White's Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place for titled folk,
+city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position and degree.  At
+earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformists were in
+vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealth in private
+houses and other places where he might hope to escape the lynx-eyed
+informer.  It was at one of these furtive meetings that his earliest
+biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of London Bridge, Charles
+Doe, first heard him preach.  His choice of an Old Testament text at
+first offended Doe, who had lately come into New Testament light and had
+had enough of the "historical and doing-for-favour of the Old Testament."
+But as he went on he preached "so New Testament like" that his hearer's
+prejudices vanished, and he could only "admire, weep for joy, and give
+the preacher his affections."
+
+Bunyan was more than once urged to leave Bedford and settle in the
+metropolis.  But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear.  Bedford
+was the home of his deepest affections.  It was there the holy words of
+the poor women "sitting in the sun," speaking "as if joy did make them
+speak," had first "made his heart shake," and shown him that he was still
+a stranger to vital godliness.  It was there he had been brought out of
+darkness into light himself, and there too he had been the means of
+imparting the same blessing to others.  The very fact of his long
+imprisonment had identified him with the town and its inhabitants.  There
+he had a large and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the ties
+of a common faith and common sufferings.  Many of these recognized in
+Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few "of the baser sort,"
+reverenced him as their teacher and guide.  No prospect of a wider field
+of usefulness, still less of a larger income, could tempt him to desert
+his "few sheep in the wilderness."  Some of them, it is true, were
+wayward sheep, who wounded the heart of their pastor by breaking from the
+fold, and displaying very un-lamb-like behaviour.  He had sometimes to
+realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep
+in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion,
+however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy members.  Brother John
+Stanton had to be admonished "for abusing his wife and beating her often
+for very light matters" (if the matters had been less light, would the
+beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary
+Foskett, for "privately whispering of a horrid scandal, 'without culler
+of truth,' against Brother Honeylove."  Evil-speaking and backbiting set
+brother against brother.  Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan's
+spirit.  He himself was not always spared.  A letter had to be written to
+Sister Hawthorn "by way of reproof for her unseemly language against
+Brother Scot and the whole Church."  John Wildman was had up before the
+Church and convicted of being "an abominable liar and slanderer,"
+"extraordinary guilty" against "our beloved Brother Bunyan himself."  And
+though Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by "humble acknowledgment of
+her miscariag," the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by "a frothy
+letter," which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion.  But
+though Bunyan's flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as
+he desired, these were the exception.  The congregation meeting in Josias
+Roughead's barn must have been, take them as a whole, a quiet,
+God-fearing, spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think
+with thankfulness and satisfaction as "his hope and joy and crown of
+rejoicing."  From such he could not be severed lightly.  Inducements
+which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his
+independent spirit.  He was not "a man that preached by way of bargain
+for money," and, writes Doe, "more than once he refused a more plentiful
+income to keep his station."  As Dr. Brown says: "He was too deeply
+rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings to think of
+striking his tent till the command came from the Master to come up to the
+higher service for which he had been ripening so long."  At Bedford,
+therefore, he remained; quietly staying on in his cottage in St.
+Cuthbert's, and ministering to his humble flock, loving and beloved, as
+Mr. Froude writes, "through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and
+Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of Popery was
+bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets, and confident
+that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforward could only
+bite his nails at the passing pilgrims."
+
+Bunyan's peace was not, however, altogether undisturbed.  Once it
+received a shock in a renewal of his imprisonment, though only for a
+brief period, in 1675, to which we owe the world-famous "Pilgrim's
+Progress"; and it was again threatened, though not actually disturbed ten
+years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconformists
+induced him to make over all his property--little enough in good sooth--to
+his wife by deed of gift.
+
+The former of these events demands our attention, not so much for itself
+as for its connection with Bishop Barlow's interference in Bunyan's
+behalf, and, still more, for its results in the production of "The
+Pilgrim's Progress."  Until very recently the bare fact of this later
+imprisonment, briefly mentioned by Charles Doe and another of his early
+biographers, was all that was known to us.  They even leave the date to
+be gathered, though both agree in limiting its duration to six months or
+thereabouts.  The recent discovery, among the Chauncey papers, by Mr. W.
+G. Thorpe, of the original warrant under which Bunyan was at this time
+sent to gaol, supplies the missing information.  It has been already
+noticed that the Declaration of Indulgence, under which Bunyan was
+liberated in 1672, was very short-lived.  Indeed it barely lasted in
+force a twelvemonth.  Granted on the 15th of March of that year, it was
+withdrawn on the 9th of March of the following year, at the instance of
+the House of Commons, who had taken alarm at a suspension of the laws of
+the realm by the "inherent power" of the sovereign, without the advice or
+sanction of Parliament.  The Declaration was cancelled by Charles II.,
+the monarch, it is said, tearing off the Great Seal with his own hands, a
+subsidy being promised to the royal spendthrift as a reward for his
+complaisance.  The same year the Test Act became law.  Bunyan therefore
+and his fellow Nonconformists were in a position of greater peril, as far
+as the letter of the law was concerned, than they had ever been.  But, as
+Dr. Stoughton has remarked, "the letter of the law is not to be taken as
+an accurate index of the Nonconformists' condition.  The pressure of a
+bad law depends very much upon the hands employed in its administration."
+Unhappily for Bunyan, the parties in whose hands the execution of the
+penal statutes against Nonconformists rested in Bedfordshire were his
+bitter personal enemies, who were not likely to let them lie inactive.
+The prime mover in the matter was doubtless Dr. William Foster, that
+"right Judas" whom we shall remember holding the candle in Bunyan's face
+in the hall of Harlington House at his first apprehension, and showing
+such feigned affection "as if he would have leaped on his neck and kissed
+him."  He had some time before this become Chancellor of the Bishop of
+Lincoln, and Commissary of the Court of the Archdeacon of Bedford,
+offices which put in his hands extensive powers which he had used with
+the most relentless severity.  He has damned himself to eternal infamy by
+the bitter zeal he showed in hunting down Dissenters, inflicting
+exorbitant fines, and breaking into their houses and distraining their
+goods for a full discharge, maltreating their wives and daughters, and
+haling the offenders to prison.  Having been chiefly instrumental in
+Bunyan's first committal to gaol, he doubtless viewed his release with
+indignation as the leader of the Bedfordshire sectaries who was doing
+more mischief to the cause of conformity, which it was his province at
+all hazards to maintain, than any other twenty men.  The church would
+never be safe till he was clapped in prison again.  The power to do this
+was given by the new proclamation.  By this act the licenses to preach
+previously granted to Nonconformists were recalled.  Henceforward no
+conventicle had "any authority, allowance, or encouragement from his
+Majesty."  We can easily imagine the delight with which Foster would hail
+the issue of this proclamation.  How he would read and read again with
+ever fresh satisfaction its stringent clauses.  That pestilent fellow,
+Bunyan, was now once more in his clutches.  This time there was no chance
+of his escape.  All licences were recalled, and he was absolutely
+defenceless.  It should not be Foster's fault if he failed to end his
+days in the prison from which he ought never to have been released.  The
+proclamation is dated the 4th of March, 1674-5, and was published in the
+_Gazette_ on the 9th.  It would reach Bedford on the 11th.  It placed
+Bunyan at the mercy of "his enemies, who struck at him forthwith."  A
+warrant was issued for his apprehension, undoubtedly written by our old
+friend, Paul Cobb, the clerk of the peace, who, it will be remembered,
+had acted in the same capacity on Bunyan's first committal.  It is dated
+the 4th of March, and bears the signature of no fewer than thirteen
+magistrates, ten of them affixing their seals.
+
+That so unusually large a number took part in the execution of this
+warrant, is sufficient indication of the importance attached to Bunyan's
+imprisonment by the gentry of the county.  The following is the
+document:--
+
+   "To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them
+
+   Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that
+   (notwithstanding the Kings Majties late Act of most gracious generall
+   and free pardon to all his subjects for past misdemeanours that by his
+   said clemencie and indulgent grace and favor they might bee mooved and
+   induced for the time to come more carefully to observe his Highenes
+   lawes and Statutes and to continue in theire loyall and due obedience
+   to his Majtie) Yett one John Bunnyon of youre said Towne Tynker hath
+   divers times within one month last past in contempt of his Majtie's
+   good Lawes preached or teached at a Conventicle Meeting or Assembly
+   under color or ptence of exercise of Religion in other manner than
+   according to the Liturgie or practiss of the Church of England  These
+   are therefore in his Majties name to comand you forthwith to apprehend
+   and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion before us or any of us or
+   other his Majties Justice of Peace within the said County to answer
+   the premisses and further to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice
+   shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile.  Given under our
+   handes and seales this ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth
+   yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles
+   the Second  A que Dni., juxta &c 1674
+
+   J Napier     W Beecher     G Blundell      Hum: Monoux
+   Will ffranklin     John Ventris
+   Will Spencer
+   Will Gery       St Jo Chernocke          Wm Daniels
+   T Browne          W ffoster
+   Gaius Squire"
+
+There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant.
+
+John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest,
+would be immediately committed for trial.  Once more, then, Bunyan became
+a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quarters in
+the Bedford gaol.  Errors die hard, and those by whom they have been once
+accepted find it difficult to give them up.  The long-standing tradition
+of Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment in the little lock-up-house on the
+Ouse bridge, having been scattered to the winds by the logic of fact and
+common sense, those to whom the story is dear, including the latest and
+ablest of his biographers, Dr. Brown, see in this second brief
+imprisonment a way to rehabilitate it.  Probability pointing to this
+imprisonment as the time of the composition of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
+they hold that on this occasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol,
+and that he there wrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring
+forward any satisfactory reasons for the change of the place of his
+confinement.  The circumstances, however, being the same, there can be no
+reasonable ground for questioning that, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned
+in the county gaol.
+
+This last imprisonment of Bunyan's lasted only half as many months as his
+former imprisonment had lasted years.  At the end of six months he was
+again a free man.  His release was due to the good officers of Owen,
+Cromwell's celebrated chaplain, with Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln.  The
+suspicion which hung over this intervention from its being erroneously
+attributed to his release in 1672, three years before Barlow became a
+bishop, has been dispelled by the recently discovered warrant.  The dates
+and circumstances are now found to tally.  The warrant for Bunyan's
+apprehension bears date March 4, 1675.  On the 14th of the following May
+the supple and time-serving Barlow, after long and eager waiting for a
+mitre, was elected to the see of Lincoln vacated by the death of Bishop
+Fuller, and consecrated on the 27th of June.  Barlow, a man of very
+dubious churchmanship, who had succeeded in keeping his university
+appointments undisturbed all through the Commonwealth, and who was yet
+among the first with effusive loyalty to welcome the restoration of
+monarchy, had been Owen's tutor at Oxford, and continued to maintain
+friendly relations with him.  As bishop of the diocese to which
+Bedfordshire then, and long after, belonged, Barlow had the power, by the
+then existing law, of releasing a prisoner for nonconformity on a bond
+given by two persons that he would conform within half a year.  A friend
+of Bunyan's, probably Ichabod Chauncey, obtained a letter from Owen to
+the bishop requesting him to employ this prerogative in Bunyan's behalf.
+Barlow with hollow complaisance expressed his particular kindness for Dr.
+Owen, and his desire to deny him nothing he could legally grant.  He
+would even strain a point to serve him.  But he had only just been made a
+bishop, and what was asked was a new thing to him.  He desired a little
+time to consider of it.  If he could do it, Owen might be assured of his
+readiness to oblige him.  A second application at the end of a fortnight
+found this readiness much cooled.  It was true that on inquiry he found
+he might do it; but the times were critical, and he had many enemies.  It
+would be safer for him not to take the initiative.  Let them apply to the
+Lord Chancellor, and get him to issue an order for him to release Bunyan
+on the customary bond.  Then he would do what Owen asked.  It was vain to
+tell Barlow that the way he suggested was chargeable, and Bunyan poor.
+Vain also to remind him that there was no point to be strained.  He had
+satisfied himself that he might do the thing legally.  It was hoped he
+would remember his promise.  But the bishop would not budge from the
+position he had taken up.  They had his ultimatum; with that they must be
+content.  If Bunyan was to be liberated, his friends must accept Barlow's
+terms.  "This at last was done, and the poor man was released.  But
+little thanks to the bishop."
+
+This short six months' imprisonment assumes additional importance from
+the probability, first suggested by Dr. Brown, which the recovery of its
+date renders almost a certainty, that it was during this period that
+Bunyan began, if he did not complete, the first part of "The Pilgrim's
+Progress."  We know from Bunyan's own words that the book was begun in
+gaol, and its composition has been hitherto unhesitatingly assigned to
+his twelve years' confinement.  Dr. Brown was, we believe, the first to
+call this in question.  Bunyan's imprisonment, we know, ended in 1672.
+The first edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" did not appear till 1678.
+If written during his earlier imprisonment, six years must have elapsed
+between its writing and its publication.  But it was not Bunyan's way to
+keep his works in manuscript so long after their completion.  His books
+were commonly put in the printers' hands as soon as they were finished.
+There are no sufficient reasons--though some have been suggested--for his
+making an exception to this general habit in the case of "The Pilgrim's
+Progress."  Besides we should certainly conclude, from the poetical
+introduction, that there was little delay between the finishing of the
+book and its being given to the world.  After having written the book, he
+tells us, simply to gratify himself, spending only "vacant seasons" in
+his "scribble," to "divert" himself "from worser thoughts," he showed it
+to his friends to get their opinion whether it should be published or
+not.  But as they were not all of one mind, but some counselled one thing
+and some another, after some perplexity, he took the matter into his own
+hands.
+
+   "Now was I in a strait, and did not see
+   Which was the best thing to be done by me;
+   At last I thought, Since you are so divided,
+   I print it will, and so the case decided."
+
+We must agree with Dr. Brown that "there is a briskness about this which,
+to say the least, is not suggestive of a six years' interval before
+publication."  The break which occurs in the narrative after the visit of
+the Pilgrims to the Delectable Mountains, which so unnecessarily
+interrupts the course of the story--"So I awoke from my dream; and I
+slept and dreamed again"--has been not unreasonably thought by Dr. Brown
+to indicate the point Bunyan had reached when his six months'
+imprisonment ended, and from which he continued the book after his
+release.
+
+The First Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" issued from the press in 1678.
+A second edition followed in the same year, and a third with large and
+important additions in 1679.  The Second Part, after an interval of seven
+years, followed early in 1685.  Between the two parts appeared two of his
+most celebrated works--the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," published in
+1680, originally intended to supply a contrast and a foil to "The
+Pilgrim's Progress," by depicting a life which was scandalously bad; and,
+in 1682, that which Macaulay, with perhaps exaggerated eulogy, has said,
+"would have been our greatest allegory if the earlier allegory had never
+been written," the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus."  Superior to
+"The Pilgrim's Progress" as a literary composition, this last work must
+be pronounced decidedly inferior to it in attractive power.  For one who
+reads the "Holy War," five hundred read the "Pilgrim."  And those who
+read it once return to it again and again, with ever fresh delight.  It
+is a book that never tires.  One or two perusals of the "Holy War"
+satisfy: and even these are not without weariness.  As Mr. Froude has
+said, "The 'Holy War' would have entitled Bunyan to a place among the
+masters of English literature.  It would never have made his name a
+household word in every English-speaking family on the globe."
+
+Leaving the further notice of these and his other chief literary
+productions to another chapter, there is little more to record in
+Bunyan's life.  Though never again seriously troubled for his
+nonconformity, his preaching journeys were not always without risk.  There
+is a tradition that when he visited Reading to preach, he disguised
+himself as a waggoner carrying a long whip in his hand to escape
+detection.  The name of "Bunyan's Dell," in a wood not very far from
+Hitchin, tells of the time when he and his hearers had to conceal their
+meetings from their enemies' quest, with scouts planted on every side to
+warn them of the approach of the spies and informers, who for reward were
+actively plying their odious trade.  Reference has already been made to
+Bunyan's "deed of gift" of all that he possessed in the world--his
+"goods, chattels, debts, ready money, plate, rings, household stuff,
+apparel, utensils, brass, pewter, bedding, and all other his substance
+whatsoever--to his well-beloved wife Elizabeth Bunyan."  Towards the
+close of the first year of James the Second, 1685, the apprehensions
+under which Bunyan executed this document were far from groundless.  At
+no time did the persecution of Nonconformists rage with greater
+fierceness.  Never, not even under the tyranny of Laud, as Lord Macaulay
+records had the condition of the Puritans been so deplorable.  Never had
+spies been so actively employed in detecting congregations.  Never had
+magistrates, grand-jurors, rectors, and churchwardens been so much on the
+alert.  Many Nonconformists were cited before the ecclesiastical courts.
+Others found it necessary to purchase the connivance of the agents of the
+Government by bribes.  It was impossible for the sectaries to pray
+together without precautions such as are employed by coiners and
+receivers of stolen goods.  Dissenting ministers, however blameless in
+life, however eminent in learning, could not venture to walk the streets
+for fear of outrages which were not only not repressed, but encouraged by
+those whose duty it was to preserve the peace.  Richard Baxter was in
+prison.  Howe was afraid to show himself in London for fear of insult,
+and had been driven to Utrecht.  Not a few who up to that time had borne
+up boldly lost heart and fled the kingdom.  Other weaker spirits were
+terrified into a show of conformity.  Through many subsequent years the
+autumn of 1685 was remembered as a time of misery and terror.  There is,
+however, no indication of Bunyan having been molested.  The "deed of
+gift" by which he sought to avoid the confiscation of his goods was never
+called into exercise.  Indeed its very existence was forgotten by his
+wife in whose behalf it had been executed.  Hidden away in a recess in
+his house in St. Cuthbert's, this interesting document was accidentally
+discovered at the beginning of the present century, and is preserved
+among the most valued treasures of the congregation which bears his name.
+
+Quieter times for Nonconformists were however at hand.  Active
+persecution was soon to cease for them, and happily never to be renewed
+in England.  The autumn of 1685 showed the first indications of a great
+turn of fortune, and before eighteen months had elapsed, the intolerant
+king and the intolerant Church were eagerly bidding against each other
+for the support of the party which both had so deeply injured.  A new
+form of trial now awaited the Nonconformists.  Peril to their personal
+liberty was succeeded by a still greater peril to their honesty and
+consistency of spirit.  James the Second, despairing of employing the
+Tories and the Churchmen as his tools, turned, as his brother had turned
+before him, to the Dissenters.  The snare was craftily baited with a
+Declaration of Indulgence, by which the king, by his sole authority,
+annulled a long series of statutes and suspended all penal laws against
+Nonconformists of every sort.  These lately political Pariahs now held
+the balance of power.  The future fortunes of England depended mainly on
+the course they would adopt.  James was resolved to convert the House of
+Commons from a free deliberative assembly into a body subservient to his
+wishes, and ready to give parliamentary sanction to any edict he might
+issue.  To obtain this end the electors must be manipulated.  Leaving the
+county constituencies to be dealt with by the lords-lieutenants, half of
+whom preferred dismissal to carrying out the odious service peremptorily
+demanded of them, James's next concern was to "regulate" the
+Corporations.  In those days of narrowly restricted franchise, the
+municipalities virtually returned the town members.  To obtain an
+obedient parliament, he must secure a roll of electors pledged to return
+the royal nominees.  A committee of seven privy councillors, all Roman
+Catholics but the infamous Jeffreys, presided over the business, with
+local sub-committees scattered over the country to carry out the details.
+Bedford was dealt with in its turn.  Under James's policy of courting the
+Puritans, the leading Dissenters were the first persons to be approached.
+Two are specially named, a Mr. Margetts, formerly Judge-Advocate-General
+of the Army under General Monk, and John Bunyan.  It is no matter of
+surprise that Bunyan, who had been so severe a sufferer under the old
+penal statutes, should desire their abrogation, and express his readiness
+to "steer his friends and followers" to support candidates who would
+pledge themselves to vote for their repeal.  But no further would he go.
+The Bedford Corporation was "regulated," which means that nearly the
+whole of its members were removed and others substituted by royal order.
+Of these new members some six or seven were leading persons of Bunyan's
+congregation.  But, with all his ardent desire for religious liberty,
+Bunyan was too keen-witted not to see through James's policy, and too
+honest to give it any direct insidious support.  "In vain is the net
+spread in the sight of any bird."  He clearly saw that it was not for any
+love of the Dissenters that they were so suddenly delivered from their
+persecutions, and placed on a kind of equality with the Church.  The
+king's object was the establishment of Popery.  To this the Church was
+the chief obstacle.  That must be undermined and subverted first.  That
+done, all other religious denominations would follow.  All that the
+Nonconformists would gain by yielding, was the favour Polyphemus promised
+Ulysses, to be devoured last.  Zealous as he was for the "liberty of
+prophesying," even that might be purchased at too high a price.  The boon
+offered by the king was "good in itself," but not "so intended."  So, as
+his biographer describes, when the regulators came, "he expressed his
+zeal with some weariness as perceiving the bad consequences that would
+ensue, and laboured with his congregation" to prevent their being imposed
+on by the fair promises of those who were at heart the bitterest enemies
+of the cause they professed to advocate.  The newly-modelled corporation
+of Bedford seems like the other corporations through the country, to have
+proved as unmanageable as the old.  As Macaulay says, "The sectaries who
+had declared in favour of the Indulgence had become generally ashamed of
+their error, and were desirous to make atonement."  Not knowing the man
+they had to deal with, the "regulators" are said to have endeavoured to
+buy Bunyan's support by the offer of some place under government.  The
+bribe was indignantly rejected.  Bunyan even refused to see the
+government agent who offered it,--"he would, by no means come to him, but
+sent his excuse."  Behind the treacherous sunshine he saw a black cloud,
+ready to break.  The Ninevites' remedy he felt was now called for.  So he
+gathered his congregation together and appointed a day of fasting and
+prayer to avert the danger that, under a specious pretext, again menaced
+their civil and religious liberties.  A true, sturdy Englishman, Bunyan,
+with Baxter and Howe, "refused an indulgence which could only be
+purchased by the violent overthrow of the law."
+
+Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution.  Four months after he had
+witnessed the delirious joy which hailed the acquittal of the seven
+bishops, the Pilgrim's earthly Progress ended, and he was bidden to cross
+the dark river which has no bridge.  The summons came to him in the very
+midst of his religious activity, both as a preacher and as a writer.  His
+pen had never been more busy than when he was bidden to lay it down
+finally.  Early in 1688, after a two years' silence, attributable perhaps
+to the political troubles of the times, his "Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or a
+Help to Despairing Souls," one of the best known and most powerfully
+characteristic of his works, had issued from the press, and had been
+followed by four others between March and August, the month of his death.
+These books were, "The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate;" a poetical
+composition entitled "The Building, Nature, and Excellency of the House
+of God," a discourse on the constitution and government of the Christian
+Church; the "Water of Life," and "Solomon's Temple Spiritualized."  At
+the time of his death he was occupied in seeing through the press a sixth
+book, "The Acceptable Sacrifice," which was published after his funeral.
+In addition to these, Bunyan left behind him no fewer than fourteen works
+in manuscript, written at this time, as the fruit of his fertile
+imagination and untiring pen.  Ten of these were given to the world soon
+after Bunyan's death, by one of Bunyan's most devoted followers, Charles
+Doe, the combmaker of London Bridge (who naively tells us how one day
+between the stairhead and the middle of the stairs, he resolved that the
+best work he could do for God was to get Bunyan's books printed and sell
+them--adding, "I have sold about 3,000"), and others, a few years later,
+including one of the raciest of his compositions, "The Heavenly Footman,"
+bought by Doe of Bunyan's eldest son, and, he says, "put into the World
+in Print Word for Word as it came from him to Me."
+
+At the time that death surprised him, Bunyan had gained no small
+celebrity in London as a popular preacher, and approached the nearest to
+a position of worldly honour.  Though we must probably reject the idea
+that he ever filled the office of Chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London,
+Sir John Shorter, the fact that he is styled "his Lordship's teacher"
+proves that there was some relation more than that of simple friendship
+between the chief magistrate and the Bedford minister.  But the society
+of the great was never congenial to him.  If they were godly as well as
+great, he would not shrink from intercourse, with those of a rank above
+his own, but his heart was with his own humble folk at Bedford.  Worldly
+advancement he rejected for his family as well as for himself.  A London
+merchant, it is said, offered to take his son Joseph into his house of
+business without the customary premium.  But the offer was declined with
+what we may consider an overstrained independence.  "God," he said, "did
+not send me to advance my family but to preach the gospel."  "An instance
+of other-worldliness," writes Dr. Brown, "perhaps more consistent with
+the honour of the father than with the prosperity of the son."
+
+Bunyan's end was in keeping with his life.  He had ever sought to be a
+peacemaker and to reconcile differences, and thus had "hindered many
+mishaps and saved many families from ruin."  His last effort of the kind
+caused his death.  The father of a young man in whom he took an interest,
+had resolved, on some offence, real or supposed, to disinherit his son.
+The young man sought Bunyan's mediation.  Anxious to heal the breach,
+Bunyan mounted his horse and took the long journey to the father's house
+at Reading--the scene, as we have noticed, of his occasional
+ministrations--where he pleaded the offender's cause so effectually as to
+obtain a promise of forgiveness.  Bunyan returned homewards through
+London, where he was appointed to preach at Mr. Gamman's meeting-house
+near Whitechapel.  His forty miles' ride to London was through heavy
+driving rain.  He was weary and drenched to the skin when he reached the
+house of his "very loving friend," John Strudwick, grocer and chandler,
+at the sign of the Star, Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Snow Hill, and
+deacon of the Nonconformist meeting in Red Cross Street.  A few months
+before Bunyan had suffered from the sweating sickness.  The exposure
+caused a return of the malady, and though well enough to fulfil his
+pulpit engagement on Sunday, the 19th of August, on the following Tuesday
+dangerous symptoms declared themselves, and in ten days the disease
+proved fatal.  He died within two months of completing his sixtieth year,
+on the 31st of August, 1688, just a month before the publication of the
+Declaration of the Prince of Orange opened a new era of civil and
+religious liberty, and between two and three months before the Prince's
+landing in Torbay.  He was buried in Mr. Strudwick's newly-purchased
+vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the
+burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field,
+from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of
+St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549.  At a later period it served as a place of
+interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665.  The day after
+Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor,
+had a fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, and "followed him across
+the river."
+
+By his first wife, whose Christian name is nowhere recorded, Bunyan had
+four children--two sons and two daughters; and by his second wife, the
+heroic Elizabeth, one son and one daughter.  All of these survived him
+except his eldest daughter Mary, his tenderly-loved blind child, who died
+before him.  His wife only survived him for a brief period, "following
+her faithful pilgrim from this world to the other whither he was gone
+before her" either in 1691 or 1692.  Forgetful of the "deed of gift," or
+ignorant of its bearing, Bunyan's widow took out letters of
+administration of her late husband's estate, which appears from the
+Register Book to have amounted to no more than, 42 pounds 19s.  On this,
+and the proceeds of his books, she supported herself till she rejoined
+him.
+
+Bunyan's character and person are thus described by Charles Doe: "He
+appeared in countenance to be of a stern and rough temper.  But in his
+conversation he was mild and affable, not given to loquacity or much
+discourse in company, unless some urgent occasion required it.  Observing
+never to boast of himself or his parts, but rather to seem low in his own
+eyes and submit himself to the judgment of others.  Abhorring lying and
+swearing, being just, in all that lay in his power, to his word.  Not
+seeming to revenge injuries; loving to reconcile differences and make
+friendship with all.  He had a sharp, quick eye, with an excellent
+discerning of persons, being of good judgment and quick wit.  He was tall
+of stature, strong-boned, though not corpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face,
+with sparkling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper lip after the old
+British fashion.  His hair reddish, but in his later days time had
+sprinkled it with grey.  His nose well set, but not declining or bending.
+His mouth moderately large, his forehead something high, and his habit
+always plain and modest.  Not puffed up in prosperity, nor shaken in
+adversity, always holding the golden mean."
+
+We may add the portrait drawn by one who had been his companion and
+fellow-sufferer for many years, John Nelson: "His countenance was grave
+and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame of his
+heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and did strike something
+of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God."
+
+The same friend speaks thus of Bunyan's preaching: "As a minister of
+Christ he was laborious in his work of preaching, diligent in his
+preparation for it, and faithful in dispensing the Word, not sparing
+reproof whether in the pulpit or no, yet ready to succour the tempted; a
+son of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunder to secure
+and dead sinners.  His memory was tenacious, it being customary with him
+to commit his sermons to writing after he had preached them.  A rich
+anointing of the Spirit was upon him, yet this great saint was always in
+his own eyes the chiefest of sinners and the least of saints."
+
+An anecdote is told which, Southey says, "authenticates itself," that one
+day when he had preached "with peculiar warmth and enlargement," one of
+his hearers remarked "what a sweet sermon he had delivered."  "Ay," was
+Bunyan's reply, "you have no need to tell me that, for the devil
+whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit."  As an evidence
+of the estimation in which Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it is
+recorded that Charles the Second expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen that
+"a learned man such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker."
+"May it please your Majesty," Owen replied.  "I would gladly give up all
+my learning if I could preach like that tinker."
+
+Although much of Bunyan's literary activity was devoted to controversy,
+he had none of the narrowness or bitter spirit of a controversialist.  It
+is true that his zeal for what he deemed to be truth led him into
+vehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as its
+perverters.  But this intensity of speech was coupled with the utmost
+charity of spirit towards those who differed from him.  Few ever had less
+of the sectarian temper which lays greater stress on the infinitely small
+points on which all true Christians differ than on the infinitely great
+truths on which they are agreed.  Bunyan inherited from his spiritual
+father, John Gifford, a truly catholic spirit.  External differences he
+regarded as insignificant where he found real Christian faith and love.
+"I would be," he writes, "as I hope I am, a Christian.  But for those
+factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I
+conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from
+Hell or from Babylon."  "He was," writes one of his early biographers, "a
+true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus, and did often bewail the
+different and distinguishing appellations that are among the godly,
+saying he did believe a time would come when they should be all buried."
+The only persons he scrupled to hold communion with were those whose
+lives were openly immoral.  "Divisions about non-essentials," he said,
+"were to churches what wars were to countries.  Those who talked most
+about religion cared least for it; and controversies about doubtful
+things and things of little moment, ate up all zeal for things which were
+practical and indisputable."  His last sermon breathed the same catholic
+spirit, free from the trammels of narrow sectarianism.  "If you are the
+children of God live together lovingly.  If the world quarrel with you it
+is no matter; but it is sad if you quarrel together.  If this be among
+you it is a sign of ill-breeding.  Dost thou see a soul that has the
+image of God in him?  Love him, love him.  Say, 'This man and I must go
+to heaven one day.'  Serve one another.  Do good for one another.  If any
+wrong you pray to God to right you, and love the brotherhood."  The
+closing words of this his final testimony are such as deserve to be
+written in letters of gold as the sum of all true Christian teaching: "Be
+ye holy in all manner of conversation: Consider 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 with comfort another day."  "There
+is," writes Dean Stanley, "no compromise in his words, no faltering in
+his convictions; but his love and admiration are reserved on the whole
+for that which all good men love, and his detestation on the whole is
+reserved for that which all good men detest."  By the catholic spirit
+which breathes through his writings, especially through "The Pilgrim's
+Progress," the tinker of Elstow "has become the teacher not of any
+particular sect, but of the Universal Church."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+We have, in this concluding chapter, to take a review of Bunyan's merits
+as a writer, with especial reference to the works on which his fame
+mainly rests, and, above all, to that which has given him his chief title
+to be included in a series of Great Writers, "The Pilgrim's Progress."
+Bunyan, as we have seen, was a very copious author.  His works, as
+collected by the late industrious Mr. Offor, fill three bulky quarto
+volumes, each of nearly eight hundred double-columned pages in small
+type.  And this copiousness of production is combined with a general
+excellence in the matter produced.  While few of his books approach the
+high standard of "The Pilgrim's Progress" or "Holy War," none, it may be
+truly said, sink very far below that standard.  It may indeed be affirmed
+that it was impossible for Bunyan to write badly.  His genius was a
+native genius.  As soon as he began to write at all, he wrote well.
+Without any training, is he says, in the school of Aristotle or Plato, or
+any study of the great masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a
+high level of thought and composition.  His earliest book, "Some Gospel
+Truths Opened," "thrown off," writes Dr. Brown, "at a heat," displays the
+same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted
+phraseology which he maintained to the end.  The great charm which
+pervades all Bunyan's writings is their naturalness.  You never feel that
+he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of
+task-work.  He writes because he had something to say which was worth
+saying, a message to deliver on which the highest interests of others
+were at stake, which demanded nothing more than a straightforward
+earnestness and plainness of speech, such as coming from the heart might
+best reach the hearts of others.  He wrote as he spoke, because a
+necessity was laid upon him which he dared not evade.  As he says in a
+passage quoted in a former chapter, he might have stepped into a much
+higher style, and have employed more literary ornament.  But to attempt
+this would be, to one of his intense earnestness, to degrade his calling.
+He dared not do it.  Like the great Apostle, "his speech and preaching
+was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the
+Spirit and in power."  God had not played with him, and he dared not play
+with others.  His errand was much too serious, and their need and danger
+too urgent to waste time in tricking out his words with human skill.  And
+it is just this which, with all their rudeness, their occasional bad
+grammar, and homely colloquialisms, gives to Bunyan's writings a power of
+riveting the attention and stirring the affections which few writers have
+attained to.  The pent-up fire glows in every line, and kindles the
+hearts of his readers.  "Beautiful images, vivid expressions, forcible
+arguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings, solemn warnings, make
+those who read him all eye, all ear, all soul."  This native vigour is
+attributable, in no small degree, to the manner in which for the most
+part Bunyan's works came into being.  He did not set himself to compose
+theological treatises upon stated subjects, but after he had preached
+with satisfaction to himself and acceptance with his audience, he usually
+wrote out the substance of his discourse from memory, with the
+enlargements and additions it might seem to require.  And thus his
+religious works have all the glow and fervour of the unwritten utterances
+of a practised orator, united with the orderliness and precision of a
+theologian, and are no less admirable for the excellence of their
+arrangement than for their evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine.
+Originally meant to be heard, they lose somewhat by being read.  But few
+can read them without being delighted with the opulence of his
+imagination and impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions.
+Like the subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the
+Interpreter, he stands "like one who pleads with men, the law of truth
+written upon his lips, the world behind his back, and a crown of gold
+above his head."
+
+These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer from most of
+his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the works by which he
+is chiefly known, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the "Holy War," the "Grace
+Abounding," and we may add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject
+the book is now scarcely read at all, the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman."
+
+One great charm of these works, especially of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
+lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are written, which render
+them models of the English speech, plain but never vulgar, homely but
+never coarse, and still less unclean, full of imagery but never obscure,
+always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to the point in the
+fewest and simplest words; "powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam,
+"from concise simplicity."  Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord
+Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide
+command over his mother tongue.  Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
+common people.  "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
+Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of
+theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant."  We may, look through
+whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables.  Nor is the
+source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.
+Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best,
+not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the
+English Bible.  "In no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more
+clearly than in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginative force which
+had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the
+Bible.  Bunyan's English is the simplest and homeliest English that has
+ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English of the
+Bible.  His images are the images of prophet and evangelist.  So
+completely had the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases
+as the natural expression of his thoughts.  He had lived in the Bible
+till its words became his own."
+
+All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius
+call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power.  Few
+writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree.  In
+nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of
+its impersonations.  The _dramatis persons_ are not shadowy abstractions,
+moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with
+certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living
+in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves.  Many of
+them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to
+meet any day.  This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the
+highest degree to "The Pilgrim's Progress."  It is hardly inferior in
+"The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of "Mansoul" have
+failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of
+the earlier allegory have done.  The secret of this graphic power, which
+gives "The Pilgrim's Progress" its universal popularity, is that Bunyan
+describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen
+them.  They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits.  Though the
+features may be exaggerated, and the colours laid on with an unsparing
+brush, the outlines of his bold personifications are truthfully drawn
+from his own experience.  He had had to do with every one of them.  He
+could have given a personal name to most of them, and we could do the
+same to many.  We are not unacquainted with Mr Byends of the town of Fair
+Speech, who "always has the luck to jump in his judgment with the way of
+the times, and to get thereby," who is zealous for Religion "when he goes
+in his silver slippers," and "loves to walk with him in the streets when
+the sun shines and the people applaud him."  All his kindred and
+surroundings are only too familiar to us--his wife, that very virtuous
+woman my Lady Feigning's daughter, my Lord Fair-speech, my Lord
+Time-server, Mr. Facingbothways, Mr. Anything, and the Parson of the
+Parish, his mother's own brother by the father's side, Mr. Twotongues.
+Nor is his schoolmaster, one Mr. Gripeman, of the market town of
+Lovegain, in the county of Coveting, a stranger to us.  Obstinate, with
+his dogged determination and stubborn common-sense, and Pliable with his
+shallow impressionableness, are among our acquaintances.  We have, before
+now, come across "the brisk lad Ignorance from the town of Conceit," and
+have made acquaintance with Mercy's would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk, "a man of
+some breeding and that pretended to religion, but who stuck very close to
+the world."  The man Temporary who lived in a town two miles off from
+Honesty, and next door to Mr. Turnback; Formalist and Hypocrisy, who were
+"from the land of Vainglory, and were going for praise to Mount Sion";
+Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, "fast asleep by the roadside with fetters
+on their heels," and their companions, Shortwind, Noheart,
+Lingerafterlust, and Sleepyhead, we know them all.  "The young woman
+whose name was Dull" taxes our patience every day.  Where is the town
+which does not contain Mrs. Timorous and her coterie of gossips, Mrs.
+Bats-eyes, Mrs. Inconsiderate, Mrs. Lightmind, and Mrs. Knownothing, "all
+as merry as the maids," with that pretty fellow Mr. Lechery at the house
+of Madam Wanton, that "admirably well-bred gentlewoman"?  Where shall we
+find more lifelike portraits than those of Madam Bubble, a "tall, comely
+dame, somewhat of a swarthy complexion, speaking very smoothly with a
+smile at the end of each sentence, wearing a great purse by her side,
+with her hand often in it, fingering her money as if that was her chief
+delight;" of poor Feeblemind of the town of Uncertain, with his "whitely
+look, the cast in his eye, and his trembling speech;" of Littlefaith, as
+"white as a clout," neither able to fight nor fly when the thieves from
+Dead Man's Lane were on him; of Ready-to-halt, at first coming along on
+his crutches, and then when Giant Despair had been slain and Doubting
+Castle demolished, taking Despondency's daughter Much-afraid by the hand
+and dancing with her in the road?  "True, he could not dance without one
+crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well.  Also the girl
+was to be commanded, for she answered the musick handsomely."  In
+Bunyan's pictures there is never a superfluous detail.  Every stroke
+tells, and helps to the completeness of the portraiture.
+
+The same reality characterizes the descriptive part of "The Pilgrim's
+Progress."  As his characters are such as he must meet with every day in
+his native town, so also the scenery and surroundings of his allegory are
+part of his own everyday life, and reproduce what he had been brought up
+amidst in his native county, or had noticed in his tinker's wanderings.
+"Born and bred," writes Kingsley, "in the monotonous Midland, he had no
+natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country
+houses, he saw about him."  The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous
+quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might
+heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire;
+Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the
+other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, green
+all the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrown
+with briars and thorns, where one tumbled over a bush, another stuck fast
+in the dirt, some lost their shoes in the mire, and others were fastened
+from behind with the brambles; the high wall by the roadside over which
+the fruit trees shot their boughs and tempted the boys with their unripe
+plums; the arbour with its settle tempting the footsore traveller to
+drowsiness; the refreshing spring at the bottom of Hill Difficulty; all
+are evidently drawn from his own experience.  Bunyan, in his long tramps,
+had seen them all.  He had known what it was to be in danger of falling
+into a pit and being dashed to pieces with Vain Confidence, of being
+drowned in the flooded meadows with Christian and Hopeful; of sinking in
+deep water when swimming over a river, going down and rising up half
+dead, and needing all his companion's strength and skill to keep his head
+above the stream.  Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life.  The
+great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had
+probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths
+filled with "wares of all kinds from all countries," its "shows,
+jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that
+of every kind," its "great one of the fair," its court of justice and
+power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture.
+Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines.  When he had to
+describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy and cold.
+Never having been very far from home, he had had no experience of the
+higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and his pen moves in
+fetters when he attempts to describe them.  When his pilgrims come to the
+Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, the difference is at once
+seen.  All his nobler imagery is drawn from Scripture.  As Hallam has
+remarked, "There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old
+Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in 'The
+Pilgrim's Progress,' and this has made his imagination appear more
+creative than it really is."
+
+It would but weary the reader to follow the details of a narrative which
+is so universally known.  Who needs to be told that in the pilgrimage
+here described is represented in allegorical dress the course of a human
+soul convinced of sin, struggling onwards to salvation through the trials
+and temptations that beset its path to its eternal home?  The book is so
+completely wrought into the mind and memory, that most of us can at once
+recall the incidents which chequer the pilgrim's way, and realize their
+meaning; the Slough of Despond, in which the man convinced of his guilt
+and fleeing from the wrath to come, in his agonizing self-consciousness
+is in danger of being swallowed up in despair; the Wicket Gate, by which
+he enters on the strait and narrow way of holiness; the Interpreter's
+House, with his visions and acted parables; the Wayside Cross, at the
+sight of which the burden of guilt falls from the pilgrim's back, and he
+is clothed with change of raiment; the Hill Difficulty, which stands
+right in his way, and which he must surmount, not circumvent; the lions
+which he has to pass, not knowing that they are chained; the Palace
+Beautiful, where he is admitted to the communion of the faithful, and
+sits down to meat with them; the Valley of Humiliation, the scene of his
+desperate but victorious encounter with Apollyon; the Valley of the
+Shadow of Death, with its evil sights and doleful sounds, where one of
+the wicked ones whispers into his ear thoughts of blasphemy which he
+cannot distinguish from the suggestions of his own mind; the cave at the
+valley's mouth, in which, Giant Pagan having been dead this many a day,
+his brother, Giant Pope, now sits alone, grinning at pilgrims as they
+pass by, and biting his nails because he cannot get at them; Vanity Fair,
+the picture of the world, as St. John describes it, hating the light that
+puts to shame its own self-chosen darkness, and putting it out if it can,
+where the Pilgrim's fellow, Faithful, seals his testimony with his death,
+and the Pilgrim himself barely escapes; the "delicate plain" called Ease,
+and the little hill, Lucre, where Demas stood "gentlemanlike," to invite
+the passersby to come and dig in his silver mine; Byepath Meadow, into
+which the Pilgrim and his newly-found companion stray, and are made
+prisoners by Giant Despair and shut up in the dungeons of Doubting
+Castle, and break out of prison by the help of the Key of Promise; the
+Delectable Mountains in Immanuel's Land, with their friendly shepherds
+and the cheering prospect of the far-off heavenly city; the Enchanted
+Land, with its temptations to spiritual drowsiness at the very end of the
+journey; the Land of Beulah, the ante-chamber of the city to which they
+were bound; and, last stage of all, the deep dark river, without a
+bridge, which had to be crossed before the city was entered; the entrance
+into its heavenly gates, the pilgrim's joyous reception with all the
+bells in the city ringing again for joy; the Dreamer's glimpse of its
+glories through the opened portals--is not every stage of the journey,
+every scene of the pilgrimage, indelibly printed on our memories, for our
+warning, our instruction, our encouragement in the race we, as much as
+they, have each one to run?  Have we not all, again and again, shared the
+Dreamer's feelings--"After that they shut up the Gates; which, when I had
+seen, I wished myself among them," and prayed, God helping us, that our
+"dangerous journey"--ever the most dangerous when we see its dangers the
+least--might end in our "safe arrival at the desired country"?
+
+"The Pilgrim's Progress" exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he
+would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential
+of Christian preachers.  Hallam, however, claims for him another
+distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him,
+as the father of our English novelists.  As an allegorist Bunyan had many
+predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the
+natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their
+works.  But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way.  Bunyan was
+the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so
+overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness;
+while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have
+ever proved so universally entertaining.  Intensely religious as it is in
+purpose, "The Pilgrim's Progress" may be safely styled the first English
+novel.  "The claim to be the father of English romance," writes Dr.
+Allon, "which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to
+Bunyan.  Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the
+creator of the genus."  As the parent of fictitious biography it is that
+Bunyan has charmed the world.  On its vivid interest as a story, its
+universal interest and lasting vitality rest.  "Other allegorises,"
+writes Lord Macaulay, "have shown great ingenuity, but no other
+allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its
+abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love."  Whatever its
+deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in
+the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological
+deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept
+Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae
+Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even
+if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of
+the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its
+universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of
+intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction.  "I have,"
+says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a long interval, "always been
+struck by its piety.  I am now struck equally or even more by its
+profound wisdom.  It seems to be a complete reflexion of Scripture."  And
+to turn to a critic of very different character, Dean Swift: "I have been
+better entertained and more improved," writes that cynical pessimist, "by
+a few pages of this book than by a long discourse on the will and
+intellect."  The favourite of our childhood, as "the most perfect and
+complex of fairy tales, so human and intelligible," read, as Hallam says,
+"at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or
+little regarded," the "Pilgrim's Progress" becomes the chosen companion
+of our later years, perused with ever fresh appreciation of its teaching,
+and enjoyment of its native genius; "the interpreter of life to all who
+are perplexed with its problems, and the practical guide and solace of
+all who need counsel and sympathy."
+
+The secret of this universal acceptableness of "The Pilgrim's Progress"
+lies in the breadth of its religious sympathies.  Rigid Puritan as Bunyan
+was, no book is more completely free from sectarian narrowness.  Its
+reach is as wide as Christianity itself, and it takes hold of every human
+heart because it is so intensely human.  No apology is needed for
+presenting Mr. Froude's eloquent panegyric: "The Pilgrim, though in
+Puritan dress, is a genuine man.  His experience is so truly human
+experience that Christians of every persuasion can identify themselves
+with him; and even those who regard Christianity itself as but a natural
+outgrowth of the conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly
+and make the best of themselves, can recognize familiar footprints in
+every step of Christian's journey.  Thus 'The Pilgrim's Progress' is a
+book which when once read can never be forgotten.  We too, every one of
+us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back
+to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and
+learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them.
+Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease
+to be true to experience."  Dr. Brown's appreciative words may be added:
+"With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of
+us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline
+of life.  It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold
+which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book
+above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them.  And it is
+this which makes it one of the first books translated by the missionary
+who seeks to give true thoughts of God and life to heathen men."
+
+The Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" partakes of the character of
+almost all continuations.  It is, in Mr. Froude's words, "only a feeble
+reverberation of the first part, which has given it a popularity it would
+have hardly attained by its own merits.  Christiana and her children are
+tolerated for the pilgrim's sake to whom they belong."  Bunyan seems not
+to have been insensible of this himself, when in his metrical preface he
+thus introduces his new work:
+
+   "Go now my little book to every place
+   Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face.
+   Call at their door; if any say 'Who's there?'
+   Then answer thus, 'Christiana is here.'
+   If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
+   With all thy boys.  And then, as thou know'st how,
+   Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
+   Perhaps they'll know them by their looks or name."
+
+But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on the whole,
+to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphic power,
+such as Bunyan alone could have written.  Everywhere we find strokes of
+his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it
+has added not a few portraits to Bunyan's spiritual picture gallery we
+should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to
+the memory.  The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle
+feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still
+thoroughly womanly character of Christiana.  Great-Heart is too much of
+an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly
+champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants.  But the other
+new characters have generally a vivid personality.  Who can forget Old
+Honesty, the dull good man with no mental gifts but of dogged sincerity,
+who though coming from the Town of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the
+City of Destruction, was "known for a cock of the right kind," because he
+said the truth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing, that most
+troublesome of pilgrims, stumbling at every straw, lying roaring at the
+Slough of Despond above a month together, standing shaking and shrinking
+at the Wicket Gate, but making no stick at the Lions, and at last getting
+over the river not much above wetshod; or Mr. Valiant for Truth, the
+native of Darkland, standing with his sword drawn and his face all bloody
+from his three hours' fight with Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick;
+Mr. Standfast, blushing to be found on his knees in the Enchanted Ground,
+one who loved to hear his Lord spoken of, and coveted to set his foot
+wherever he saw the print of his shoe; Mr. Feeblemind, the sickly,
+melancholy pilgrim, at whose door death did usually knock once a day,
+betaking himself to a pilgrim's life because he was never well at home,
+resolved to run when he could, and go when he could not run, and creep
+when he could not go, an enemy to laughter and to gay attire, bringing up
+the rear of the company with Mr. Readytohalt hobbling along on his
+crutches; Giant Despair's prisoners, Mr. Despondency, whom he had all but
+starved to death--and Mistress Much-afraid his daughter, who went through
+the river singing, though none could understand what she said?  Each of
+these characters has a distinct individuality which lifts them from
+shadowy abstractions into living men and women.  But with all its
+excellencies, and they are many, the general inferiority of the history
+of Christiana and her children's pilgrimage to that of her husband's must
+be acknowledged.  The story is less skilfully constructed; the interest
+is sometimes allowed to flag; the dialogues that interrupt the narrative
+are in places dry and wearisome--too much of sermons in disguise.  There
+is also a want of keeping between the two parts of the allegory.  The
+Wicket Gate of the First Part has become a considerable building with a
+summer parlour in the Second; the shepherds' tents on the Delectable
+Mountains have risen into a palace, with a dining-room, and a looking-
+glass, and a store of jewels; while Vanity Fair has lost its former bad
+character, and has become a respectable country town, where Christiana
+and her family, seeming altogether to forget their pilgrimage, settled
+down comfortably, enjoy the society of the good people of the place, and
+the sons marry and have children.  These same children also cause the
+reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course of the
+supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are terrified with the
+Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch at the boughs for the
+unripe plums and cry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are stroked
+by the Interpreter; who are catechised and called "good boys" by
+Prudence; who sup on bread crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to
+bed by Mercy--into strong young men, able to go out and fight with a
+giant, and lend a hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and
+becoming husbands and fathers.  We cannot but feel the want of
+_vraisemblance_ which brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks
+of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession,
+following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City.  The
+four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile,
+but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
+has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
+pilgrimage.  Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and
+making his band of pilgrims so large.  He could get them together and
+make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth,
+which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their
+dismissal.  The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the
+river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the
+impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together,
+and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic
+picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
+edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.
+Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one
+but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr.
+Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a
+tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish.  "Giants, dragons, and angelic
+champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a
+preacher in disguise.  Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously
+chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the
+soul and sin."  With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
+"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
+carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:
+"Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it
+an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my
+reader--Adieu."
+
+Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not detain
+us long.  Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful
+attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the plan of salvation"
+in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of
+description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque
+nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily
+wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man,
+like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career.  In
+fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race
+are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole.  Sin, its
+origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that
+remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
+all time.  The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
+intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan--John Milton--to
+bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render
+it more perplexing.  The proverbial line tells us that--
+
+   "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
+
+Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but when
+both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up into the Council
+Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of the ever-blessed
+Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving, like a sovereign
+and his ministers when a revolted province has to be brought back to its
+allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us down to the infernal regions,
+and makes us privy to the plots and counterplots of the rebel leaders and
+hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feel that, in spite of the
+magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely
+picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded
+if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their
+essential mysteries.  In point of individual personal interest, "The Holy
+War" contrasts badly with "The Pilgrim's Progress."  The narrative moves
+in a more shadowy region.  We may admire the workmanship; but the same
+undefined sense of unreality pursues us through Milton's noble epic, the
+outcome of a divinely-fired genius, and Bunyan's humble narrative,
+drawing its scenes and circumstances, and to some extent its _dramatis
+personae_, from the writer's own surroundings in the town and corporation
+of Bedford, and his brief but stirring experience as a soldier in the
+great Parliamentary War.  The catastrophe also is eminently
+unsatisfactory.  When Christian and Hopeful enter the Golden Gates we
+feel that the story has come to its proper end, which we have been
+looking for all along.  But the conclusion of "The Holy War" is too much
+like the closing chapter of "Rasselas"--"a conclusion in which nothing is
+concluded."  After all the endless vicissitudes of the conflict, and the
+final and glorious victory of Emmanuel and his forces, and the execution
+of the ringleaders of the mutiny, the issue still remains doubtful.  The
+town of Mansoul is left open to fresh attacks.  Diabolus is still at
+large.  Carnal Sense breaks prison and continues to lurk in the town.
+Unbelief, that "nimble Jack," slips away, and can never be laid hold of.
+These, therefore, and some few others of the more subtle of the
+Diabolonians, continue to make their home in Mansoul, and will do so
+until Mansoul ceases to dwell in the kingdom of Universe.  It is true
+they turn chicken-hearted after the other leaders of their party have
+been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close, lurking in
+dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel's men.  If
+Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselves in the streets,
+the whole town is up in arms against them; the very children raise a hue
+and cry against them and seek to stone them.  But all in vain.  Mansoul,
+it is true, enjoys some good degree of peace and quiet.  Her Prince takes
+up his residence in her borders.  Her captains and soldiers do their
+duties.  She minds her trade with the heavenly land afar off; also she is
+busy in her manufacture.  But with the remnants of the Diabolonians still
+within her walls, ready to show their heads on the least relaxation of
+strict watchfulness, keeping up constant communication with Diabolus and
+the other lords of the pit, and prepared to open the gates to them when
+opportunity offers, this peace can not be lasting.  The old battle will
+have to be fought over again, only to end in the same undecisive result.
+And so it must be to the end.  If untrue to art, Bunyan is true to fact.
+Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individual or as the
+whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so long as it abides
+in "the country of Universe."  The flesh will lust against the spirit,
+the regenerated man will be in danger of being brought into captivity to
+the law of sin and death unless he keeps up his watchfulness and
+maintains the struggle to the end.
+
+And it is here, that, for purposes of art, not for purposes of truth, the
+real failing of "The Holy War" lies.  The drama of Mansoul is incomplete,
+and whether individually or collectively, must remain incomplete till man
+puts on a new nature, and the victory, once for all gained on Calvary, is
+consummated, in the fulness of time, at the restitution of all things.
+There is no uncertainty what the end will be.  Evil must be put down, and
+good must triumph at last.  But the end is not yet, and it seems as far
+off as ever.  The army of Doubters, under their several captains,
+Election Doubters, Vocation Doubters, Salvation Doubters, Grace Doubters,
+with their general the great Lord Incredulity at their head, reinforced
+by many fresh regiments under novel standards, unknown and unthought of
+in Bunyan's days, taking the place of those whose power is past, is ever
+making new attacks upon poor Mansoul, and terrifying feeble souls with
+their threatenings.  Whichever way we look there is much to puzzle, much
+to grieve over, much that to our present limited view is entirely
+inexplicable.  But the mind that accepts the loving will and wisdom of
+God as the law of the Universe, can rest in the calm assurance that all,
+however mysteriously, is fulfilling His eternal designs, and that though
+He seems to permit "His work to be spoilt, His power defied, and even His
+victories when won made useless," it is but seeming,--that the triumph of
+evil is but temporary, and that these apparent failures and
+contradictions, are slowly but surely working out and helping forward
+
+   "The one unseen divine event
+   To which the whole creation moves."
+
+"The mysteries and contradictions which the Christian revelation leaves
+unsolved are made tolerable by Hope."  To adopt Bunyan's figurative
+language in the closing paragraph of his allegory, the day is certainly
+coming when the famous town of Mansoul shall be taken down and
+transported "every stick and stone" to Emmanuel's land, and there set up
+for the Father's habitation in such strength and glory as it never saw
+before.  No Diabolonian shall be able to creep into its streets, burrow
+in its walls, or be seen in its borders.  No evil tidings shall trouble
+its inhabitants, nor sound of Diabolian drum be heard there.  Sorrow and
+grief shall be ended, and life, always sweet, always new, shall last
+longer than they could even desire it, even all the days of eternity.
+Meanwhile let those who have such a glorious hope set before them keep
+clean and white the liveries their Lord has given them, and wash often in
+the open fountain.  Let them believe in His love, live upon His word;
+watch, fight, and pray, and hold fast till He come.
+
+One more work of Bunyan's still remains to be briefly noticed, as bearing
+the characteristic stamp of his genius, "The Life and Death of Mr.
+Badman."  The original idea of this book was to furnish a contrast to
+"The Pilgrim's Progress."  As in that work he had described the course of
+a man setting out on his course heavenwards, struggling onwards through
+temptation, trials, and difficulties, and entering at last through the
+golden gates into the city of God, so in this later work his purpose was
+to depict the career of a man whose face from the first was turned in the
+opposite direction, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and
+more irretrievably evil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his
+life full of sin and his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of
+his sins in hopeless sinfulness.  That this was the original purpose of
+the work, Bunyan tells us in his preface.  It came into his mind, he
+says, as in the former book he had written concerning the progress of the
+Pilgrim from this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the
+life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to
+hell.  The new work, however, as in almost every respect it differs from
+the earlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it.  It is totally unlike
+"The Pilgrim's Progress" both in form and execution.  The one is an
+allegory, the other a tale, describing without imagery or metaphor, in
+the plainest language, the career of a "vulgar, middle-class,
+unprincipled scoundrel."  While "The Pilgrim's Progress" pursues the
+narrative form throughout, only interrupted by dialogues between the
+leading characters, "Mr. Badman's career" is presented to the world in a
+dialogue between a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive.  Mr. Wiseman
+tells the story, and Mr. Attentive supplies appropriate reflections on
+it.  The narrative is needlessly burdened with a succession of short
+sermons, in the form of didactic discourses on lying, stealing, impurity,
+and the other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and which
+brought him to his miserable end.  The plainness of speech with which
+some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman's indulgence
+in them described, makes portions of the book very disagreeable, and
+indeed hardly profitable reading.  With omissions, however, the book well
+deserves perusal, as a picture such as only Bunyan or his rival in
+lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in
+the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town
+such as Bedford.  It is not at all a pleasant picture.  The life
+described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean and commonplace.
+But as a description of English middle-class life at the epoch of the
+Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable for those who wish to put
+themselves in touch with that period.  The anecdotes introduced to
+illustrate Bunyan's positions of God's judgment upon swearers and
+sinners, convicting him of a credulity and a harshness of feeling one is
+sorry to think him capable of, are very interesting for the side-lights
+they throw upon the times and the people who lived in them.  It would
+take too long to give a sketch of the story, even if a summary could give
+any real estimate of its picturesque and vivid power.  It is certainly a
+remarkable, if an offensive book.  As with "Robinson Crusoe" and Defoe's
+other tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history before
+us.  We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded should not
+have happened.  There are no surprises; no unlooked-for catastrophes; no
+providential interpositions to punish the sinner or rescue the good man.
+Badman's pious wife is made to pay the penalty of allowing herself to be
+deceived by a tall, good-looking, hypocritical scoundrel.  He himself
+pursues his evil way to the end, and "dies like a lamb, or as men call
+it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear," but the selfsame Mr.
+Badman still, not only in name, but in condition; sinning onto the last,
+and dying with a heart that cannot repent.
+
+Mr. Froude's summing up of this book is so masterly that we make no
+apology for presenting it to our readers.  "Bunyan conceals nothing,
+assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing.  He makes his bad man sharp and
+shrewd.  He allows sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the reward which
+such qualities in fact command.  Badman is successful; is powerful; he
+enjoys all the pleasures which money can bring; his bad wife helps him to
+ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace.  Bunyan has
+made him a brute, because such men do become brutes.  It is the real
+punishment of brutal and selfish habits.  There the figure stands--a
+picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most
+familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,
+as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the Slough of Despond and the
+Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Pleasures are to be found among the
+primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by.  Yet the reader
+feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would still prefer to be with
+Christian."
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  A small enclosure behind a cottage.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN***
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