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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Life of John Bunyan by Venables
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+The Life of John Bunyan
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+by Edmund Venables, M.A.
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+September, 1997  [Etext #1037]
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Life of John Bunyan by Venables
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+
+
+The Life of John Bunyan
+
+
+
+
+
+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 road-side 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 school-master 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 THEOLOIAE
+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 bath
+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
+life-like 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
+Muchafraid 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 every-day 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 Project Gutenberg's Etext of The Life of John Bunyan by Venables
+
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