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diff --git a/1037-h/1037-h.htm b/1037-h/1037-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f406edd --- /dev/null +++ b/1037-h/1037-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,4988 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html + PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" /> +<title>The Life of John Bunyan</title> + <style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1, H2 { + text-align: center; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + } + H3, H4 { + text-align: left; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ + </style> +</head> +<body> +<h2> +<a href="#startoftext">The Life of John Bunyan, by Edmund Venables</a> +</h2> +<pre> +The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Life of John Bunyan, by Edmund Venables + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: The Life of John Bunyan + + +Author: Edmund Venables + +Release Date: April 21, 2005 [eBook #1037] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN*** +</pre> +<p><a name="startoftext"></a></p> +<p>Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition by David Price, email +ccx074@coventry.ac.uk</p> +<h1>THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN<br /> +by Edmund Venables, M.A.</h1> +<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a> +with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land.” This small +residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still further +diminished by sale. The field already referred to, known as “Bonyon’s +End,” was sold by “Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer,” +son of William Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepers +of a small roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-baked +bread and home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into trouble +with the petty local courts of the day. Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan’s +father, was born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February +24, 1603, exactly a month before the great queen passed away. +The mother of the immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like +her husband, was a native of Elstow and only a few months his junior. +The details of her mother’s will, which is still extant, drawn +up by the vicar of Elstow, prove that, like her husband, she did not, +in the words of Bunyan’s latest and most complete biographer, +the Rev. Dr. Brown, “come of the very squalid poor, but of people +who, though humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways.” +John Bunyan’s mother was his father’s second wife. +The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily consoled themselves +on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a successor. +Bunyan’s grandmother cannot have died before February 24, 1603, +the date of his father’s baptism. But before the year was +out his grandfather had married again. His father, too, had not +completed his twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, +January 10, 1623. She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving +children, and before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the +following May, he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. +At the end of seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, +and within two months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant +place with a third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much +more than twenty when he married. We have no particulars of the +death of his first wife. But he had been married two years to +his noble-minded second wife at the time of the assizes in 1661, and +the ages of his children by his first wife would indicate that no long +interval elapsed between his being left a widower and his second marriage.</p> +<p>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 <i>stow</i> 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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed +the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the +subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was of +gipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, +and which has more recently received elaborate support from writers +on the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. +Even if Bunyan’s inquiry of his father “whether the family +was of Israelitish descent or no,” which has been so strangely +pressed into the service of the theory, could be supposed to have anything +to do with the matter, the decided negative with which his question +was met—“he told me, ‘No, we were not’”—would, +one would have thought, have settled the point. But some fictions +die hard. However low the family had sunk, so that in his own +words, “his father’s house was of that rank that is meanest +and most despised of all the families in the land,” “of +a low and inconsiderable generation,” the name, as we have seen, +was one of long standing in Bunyan’s native county, and had once +taken far higher rank in it. And his parents, though poor, were +evidently worthy people, of good repute among their village neighbours. +Bunyan seems to be describing his own father and his wandering life +when he speaks of “an honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam +unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in, and was very careful +to maintain his family.” He and his wife were also careful +with a higher care that their children should be properly educated. +“Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents,” +writes Bunyan, “it pleased God to put it into their hearts to +put me to school, to learn both to read and write.” If we +accept the evidence of the “Scriptural Poems,” published +for the first time twelve years after his death, the genuineness of +which, though questioned by Dr. Brown, there seems no sufficient reason +to doubt, the little education he had was “gained in a grammar +school.” This would have been that founded by Sir William +Harpur in Queen Mary’s reign in the neighbouring town of Bedford. +Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along the +mile and a half of footpath and road from his father’s cottage +by the brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, +to “go to school to Aristotle or Plato,” but to be taught +“according to the rate of other poor men’s children.” +The Bedford schoolmaster about this time, William Barnes by name, was +a negligent sot, charged with “night-walking” and haunting +“taverns and alehouses,” and other evil practices, as well +as with treating the poor boys “when present” with a cruelty +which must have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, +had been more protracted. Whether this man was his master or no, +it was little that Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses +with shame he soon lost “almost utterly.” He was before +long called home to help his father at the Harrowden forge, where he +says he was “brought up in a very mean condition among a company +of poor countrymen.” Here, with but little to elevate or +refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and grew up +what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls “a bitter blackguard.” +According to his own remorseful confession, he was “filled with +all unrighteousness,” having “from a child” in his +“tender years,” “but few equals both for cursing, +swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of God.” Sins +of this kind he declares became “a second nature to him;” +he “delighted in all transgression against the law of God,” +and as he advanced in his teens he became a “notorious sinbreeder,” +the “very ringleader,” he says, of the village lads “in +all manner of vice and ungodliness.” But the unsparing condemnation +passed by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his former self, must not +mislead us into supposing him ever, either as boy or man, to have lived +a vicious life. “The wickedness of the tinker,” writes +Southey, “has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the language +of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he +was at any time depraved.” The justice of this verdict of +acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge. “Bunyan,” +he says, “was never in our received sense of the word ‘wicked.’ +He was chaste, sober, and honest.” He hints at youthful +escapades, such, perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, +poaching, and the like, which might have brought him under “the +stroke of the laws,” and put him to “open shame before the +face of the world.” But he confesses to no crime or profligate +habit. We have no reason to suppose that he was ever drunk, and +we have his own most solemn declaration that he was never guilty of +an act of unchastity. “In our days,” to quote Mr. +Froude, “a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after +he had grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint. +If in Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious +than Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth +century must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleased +to allow.” How then, it may be asked, are we to explain +the passionate language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which +would hardly seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and +licentious? We are confident that Bunyan meant what he said. +So intensely honest a nature could not allow his words to go beyond +his convictions. When he speaks of “letting loose the reins +to his lusts,” and sinning “with the greatest delight and +ease,” we know that however exaggerated they may appear to us, +his expressions did not seem to him overstrained. Dr. Johnson +marvelled that St. Paul could call himself “the chief of sinners,” +and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly. But a highly-strung +spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called into +exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different estimate +of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in general. +It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others, as sins +against infinite love—a love unto death—and in the light +of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, +and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The +sinfulness of sin—more especially their own sin—is the intensest +of all possible realities to them. No language is too strong to +describe it. We may not unreasonably ask whether this estimate, +however exaggerated it may appear to those who are strangers to these +spiritual experiences, is altogether a mistaken one?</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <i>injusta +noverca</i> 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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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!”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <i>would</i> 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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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”—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,<br /> +And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy<br /> +Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword<br /> +To force our consciences that Christ set free!”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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, <i>in opposition</i> 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 <i>within</i> 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 “<i>Summa Theologiæ +Evangelicæ</i>,” which, notwithstanding its obsolete style +and old-fashioned arrangement, may be read even now with advantage.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>The rapidity of Bunyan’s literary work is amazing, especially +when we take his antecedents into account. Within a few weeks +he published his rejoinder to Friend Burrough, under the title of “A +Vindication of Gospel Truths Opened.” In this work, which +appeared in 1667, Bunyan repays Burrough in his own coin, styling him +“a proved enemy to the truth,” a “grossly railing +Rabshakeh, who breaks out with a taunt and a jeer,” is very “censorious +and utters many words without knowledge.” In vigorous, nervous +language, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself from +Burrough’s charges, and proves that the Quakers are “deceivers.” +“As for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbands +is not walking after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do make +a religion out of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walking +after their own lusts, and not after the Spirit of God.” +Burrough had most unwarrantably stigmatized Bunyan as one of “the +false prophets, who love the wages of unrighteousness, and through covetousness +make merchandise of souls.” Bunyan calmly replies, “Friend, +dost thou speak this as from thy own knowledge, or did any other tell +thee so? However that spirit that led thee out this way is a lying +spirit. For though I be poor and of no repute in the world as +to outward things, yet through grace I have learned by the example of +the Apostle to preach the truth, and also to work with my hands both +for mine own living, and for those that are with me, when I have opportunity. +And I trust that the Lord Jesus who hath helped me to reject the wages +of unrighteousness hitherto, will also help me still so that I shall +distribute that which God hath given me freely, and not for filthy lucre’s +sake.” The fruitfulness of his ministry which Burrough had +called in question, charging him with having “run before he was +sent,” he refuses to discuss. Bunyan says, “I shall +leave it to be taken notice of by the people of God and the country +where I dwell, who will testify the contrary for me, setting aside the +carnal ministry with their retinue who are so mad against me as thyself.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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 Cæsar 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.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2> +<p>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 +mediæval 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.”</p> +<p>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.’”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>“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.”</p> +<p>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!”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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 “limæ 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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“These lines I at this time present<br /> +To all that will them heed,<br /> +Wherein I show to what intent<br /> +God saith, ‘Convert with speed.’<br /> +For these four things come on apace,<br /> +Which we should know full well,<br /> +Both death and judgment, and, in place<br /> +Next to them, heaven and hell.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>The following lines are from “Ebal and Gerizim”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Thou art like one that hangeth by a thread<br /> +Over the mouth of hell, as one half dead;<br /> +And oh, how soon this thread may broken be,<br /> +Or cut by death, is yet unknown to thee.<br /> +But sure it is if all the weight of sin,<br /> +And all that Satan too hath doing been<br /> +Or yet can do, can break this crazy thread,<br /> +’Twill not be long before among the dead<br /> +Thou tumble do, as linkèd fast in chains,<br /> +With them to wait in fear for future pains.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<blockquote><p>“For though men keep my outward man<br /> +Within their locks and bars,<br /> +Yet by the faith of Christ, I can<br /> +Mount higher than the stars.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Meanwhile his captivity is sweetened by the thought of what it was +that brought him there:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“I here am very much refreshed<br /> +To think, when I was out,<br /> +I preachèd life, and peace, and rest,<br /> +To sinners round about.</p> +<p>My business then was souls to save<br /> +By preaching grace and faith,<br /> +Of which the comfort now I have<br /> +And have it shall till death.</p> +<p>That was the work I was about<br /> +When hands on me they laid.<br /> +’Twas this for which they plucked me out<br /> +And vilely to me said,</p> +<p>‘You heretic, deceiver, come,<br /> +To prison you must go,<br /> +You preach abroad, and keep not home,<br /> +You are the Church’s foe.’</p> +<p>Wherefore to prison they me sent,<br /> +Where to this day I lie,<br /> +And can with very much content<br /> +For my profession die.</p> +<p>The prison very sweet to me<br /> +Hath been since I came here,<br /> +And so would also hanging be<br /> +If God would there appear.</p> +<p>To them that here for evil lie<br /> +The place is comfortless;<br /> +But not to me, because that I<br /> +Lie here for righteousness.</p> +<p>The truth and I were both here cast<br /> +Together, and we do<br /> +Lie arm in arm, and so hold fast<br /> +Each other, this is true.</p> +<p>Who now dare say we throw away<br /> +Our goods or liberty,<br /> +When God’s most holy Word doth say<br /> +We gain thus much thereby?”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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?”—</p> +<blockquote><p>“He that is down need fear no fall;<br /> +He that is low, no pride;<br /> +He that is humble, ever shall<br /> +Have God to be his guide.</p> +<p>I am content with what I have,<br /> +Little be it or much,<br /> +And, Lord, contentment still I crave,<br /> +Because Thou savest such.</p> +<p>Fulness to such a burden is<br /> +That go on Pilgrimage,<br /> +Here little, and hereafter Bliss<br /> +Is best from age to age.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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,”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Under the greenwood tree,<br /> +Who loves to lie with me. . .<br /> +Come hither, come hither,”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Who would true Valour see,<br /> +Let him come hither,<br /> +One here will constant be,<br /> +Come wind, come weather.<br /> +There’s no discouragement<br /> +Shall make him once relent<br /> +His first avowed intent<br /> +To be a Pilgrim.</p> +<p>Who so beset him round<br /> +With dismal stories,<br /> +Do but themselves confound<br /> +His strength the more is.<br /> +No lion can him fright,<br /> +He’ll with a giant fight,<br /> +But he will have a right<br /> +To be a Pilgrim.</p> +<p>Hobgoblin nor foul fiend<br /> +Can daunt his spirit,<br /> +He knows he at the end<br /> +Shall life inherit.<br /> +Then fancies fly away<br /> +He’ll fear not what men say,<br /> +He’ll labour night and day<br /> +To be a Pilgrim.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Well, when I had then put mine ends together,<br /> +I show’d them others that I might see whether<br /> +They would condemn them, or them justify;<br /> +And some said Let them live; some, Let them die.<br /> +Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so;<br /> +Some said it might do good; others said No.<br /> +Now was I in a strait, and did not see<br /> +Which was the best thing to be done by me;<br /> +At last I thought since you are thus divided<br /> +I print it will; and so the case decided;”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>or the lines in which he introduces the Second Part of the Pilgrim +to the readers of the former part:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Go now, my little Book, to every place<br /> +Where my first Pilgrim hath but shown his face:<br /> +Call at their door: If any say, ‘Who’s there?’<br /> +Then answer that Christiana is here.<br /> +If they bid thee come in, then enter thou<br /> +With all thy boys. And then, as thou knowest how,<br /> +Tell who they are, also from whence they came;<br /> +Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.<br /> +But if they should not, ask them yet again<br /> +If formerly they did not entertain<br /> +One Christian, a pilgrim. If they say<br /> +They did, and were delighted in his way:<br /> +Then let them know that these related are<br /> +Unto him, yea, his wife and children are.<br /> +Tell them that they have left their house and home,<br /> +Are turned Pilgrims, seek a world to come;<br /> +That they have met with hardships on the way,<br /> +That they do meet with troubles night and day.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.”</p> +<blockquote><p>“Some say the Pilgrim’s Progress is not mine,<br /> +Insinuating as if I would shine<br /> +In name or fame by the worth of another,<br /> +Like some made rich by robbing of their brother;<br /> +Or that so fond I am of being sire<br /> +I’ll father bastards; or if need require,<br /> +I’ll tell a lie or print to get applause.<br /> +I scorn it. John such dirt-heap never was<br /> +Since God converted him. . .<br /> +Witness my name, if anagram’d to thee<br /> +The letters make <i>Nu hony in a B</i>.<br /> +IOHN BUNYAN.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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”!—</p> +<blockquote><p>“For my part I, myself, was in the town,<br /> +Both when ’twas set up, and when pulling down;<br /> +I saw Diabolus in possession,<br /> +And Mansoul also under his oppression.<br /> +Yes, I was there when she crowned him for lord,<br /> +And to him did submit with one accord.<br /> +When Mansoul trampled upon things divine,<br /> +And wallowed in filth as doth a swine,<br /> +When she betook herself unto her arms,<br /> +Fought her Emmanuel, despised his charms:<br /> +Then I was there, and did rejoice to see<br /> +Diabolus and Mansoul so agree.<br /> +I saw the prince’s armed men come down<br /> +By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town,<br /> +I saw the captains, heard the trumpets sound,<br /> +And how his forces covered all the ground,<br /> +Yea, how they set themselves in battle array,<br /> +I shall remember to my dying day.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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”:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Ruth replied,<br /> +Intreat me not to leave thee or return;<br /> +For where thou goest I’ll go, where thou sojourn<br /> +I’ll sojourn also—and what people’s thine,<br /> +And who thy God, the same shall both be mine.<br /> +Where thou shalt die, there will I die likewise,<br /> +And I’ll be buried where thy body lies.<br /> +The Lord do so to me and more if I<br /> +Do leave thee or forsake thee till I die.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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!—</p> +<blockquote><p>“The Frog by nature is but damp and cold,<br /> +Her mouth is large, her belly much will hold,<br /> +She sits somewhat ascending, loves to be<br /> +Croaking in gardens, though unpleasantly.</p> +<p>The hypocrite is like unto this Frog,<br /> +As like as is the puppy to the dog.<br /> +He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide<br /> +To prate, and at true goodness to deride.<br /> +And though this world is that which he doth love,<br /> +He mounts his head as if he lived above.<br /> +And though he seeks in churches for to croak,<br /> +He neither seeketh Jesus nor His yoke.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There is some real poetry in those on the Cuckoo, though we may be +inclined to resent his harsh treatment of our universal favourite:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Thou booby says’t thou nothing but Cuckoo?<br /> +The robin and the wren can that outdo.<br /> +They to us play thorough their little throats<br /> +Not one, but sundry pretty tuneful notes.<br /> +But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do<br /> +Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.</p> +<p>Thy notes do not first welcome in our spring,<br /> +Nor dost thou its first tokens to us bring.<br /> +Birds less than thee by far like prophets do<br /> +Tell us ’tis coming, though not by Cuckoo,<br /> +Nor dost thou summer bear away with thee<br /> +Though thou a yawling bawling Cuckoo be.<br /> +When thou dost cease among us to appear,<br /> +Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year.<br /> +But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do<br /> +Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.</p> +<p>Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring<br /> +Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in,<br /> +And since while here, she only makes a noise<br /> +So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,<br /> +The Formalist we may compare her to,<br /> +For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 “<i>Dirt wip’t off</i>; 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.</p> +<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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 <i>Gazette</i> +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.</p> +<p>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:—</p> +<blockquote><p>“To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them</p> +<p>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</p> +<p>J Napier W Beecher +G Blundell Hum: Monoux<br /> +Will ffranklin John Ventris<br /> +Will Spencer<br /> +Will Gery St Jo Chernocke +Wm Daniels<br /> +T Browne W ffoster<br /> +Gaius Squire”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<blockquote><p>“Now was I in a strait, and did not see<br /> +Which was the best thing to be done by me;<br /> +At last I thought, Since you are so divided,<br /> +I print it will, and so the case decided.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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 19s. On this, and the proceeds +of his books, she supported herself till she rejoined him.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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 <i>dramatis persons</i> are not shadowy +abstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures +ticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh +and blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions with +ourselves. Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one +we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of +characterization belongs in the highest degree to “The Pilgrim’s +Progress.” It is hardly inferior in “The Holy War,” +though with some exceptions the people of “Mansoul” have +failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters +of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic +power, which gives “The Pilgrim’s Progress” its universal +popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such +as he had known and seen them. They are not fancy pictures, but +literal portraits. Though the features may be exaggerated, and +the colours laid on with an unsparing brush, the outlines of his bold +personifications are truthfully drawn from his own experience. +He had had to do with every one of them. He could have given a +personal name to most of them, and we could do the same to many. +We are not unacquainted with Mr Byends of the town of Fair Speech, who +“always has the luck to jump in his judgment with the way of the +times, and to get thereby,” who is zealous for Religion “when +he goes in his silver slippers,” and “loves to walk with +him in the streets when the sun shines and the people applaud him.” +All his kindred and surroundings are only too familiar to us—his +wife, that very virtuous woman my Lady Feigning’s daughter, my +Lord Fair-speech, my Lord Time-server, Mr. Facingbothways, Mr. Anything, +and the Parson of the Parish, his mother’s own brother by the +father’s side, Mr. Twotongues. Nor is his schoolmaster, +one Mr. Gripeman, of the market town of Lovegain, in the county of Coveting, +a stranger to us. Obstinate, with his dogged determination and +stubborn common-sense, and Pliable with his shallow impressionableness, +are among our acquaintances. We have, before now, come across +“the brisk lad Ignorance from the town of Conceit,” and +have made acquaintance with Mercy’s would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk, +“a man of some breeding and that pretended to religion, but who +stuck very close to the world.” The man Temporary who lived +in a town two miles off from Honesty, and next door to Mr. Turnback; +Formalist and Hypocrisy, who were “from the land of Vainglory, +and were going for praise to Mount Sion”; Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, +“fast asleep by the roadside with fetters on their heels,” +and their companions, Shortwind, Noheart, Lingerafterlust, and Sleepyhead, +we know them all. “The young woman whose name was Dull” +taxes our patience every day. Where is the town which does not +contain Mrs. Timorous and her coterie of gossips, Mrs. Bats-eyes, Mrs. +Inconsiderate, Mrs. Lightmind, and Mrs. Knownothing, “all as merry +as the maids,” with that pretty fellow Mr. Lechery at the house +of Madam Wanton, that “admirably well-bred gentlewoman”? +Where shall we find more lifelike portraits than those of Madam Bubble, +a “tall, comely dame, somewhat of a swarthy complexion, speaking +very smoothly with a smile at the end of each sentence, wearing a great +purse by her side, with her hand often in it, fingering her money as +if that was her chief delight;” of poor Feeblemind of the town +of Uncertain, with his “whitely look, the cast in his eye, and +his trembling speech;” of Littlefaith, as “white as a clout,” +neither able to fight nor fly when the thieves from Dead Man’s +Lane were on him; of Ready-to-halt, at first coming along on his crutches, +and then when Giant Despair had been slain and Doubting Castle demolished, +taking Despondency’s daughter Much-afraid by the hand and dancing +with her in the road? “True, he could not dance without +one crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well. Also +the girl was to be commanded, for she answered the musick handsomely.” +In Bunyan’s pictures there is never a superfluous detail. +Every stroke tells, and helps to the completeness of the portraiture.</p> +<p>The same reality characterizes the descriptive part of “The +Pilgrim’s Progress.” As his characters are such as +he must meet with every day in his native town, so also the scenery +and surroundings of his allegory are part of his own everyday life, +and reproduce what he had been brought up amidst in his native county, +or had noticed in his tinker’s wanderings. “Born and +bred,” writes Kingsley, “in the monotonous Midland, he had +no natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country +houses, he saw about him.” The Slough of Despond, with its +treacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer +might heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire; +Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the +other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, green +all the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrown +with briars and thorns, where one tumbled over a bush, another stuck +fast in the dirt, some lost their shoes in the mire, and others were +fastened from behind with the brambles; the high wall by the roadside +over which the fruit trees shot their boughs and tempted the boys with +their unripe plums; the arbour with its settle tempting the footsore +traveller to drowsiness; the refreshing spring at the bottom of Hill +Difficulty; all are evidently drawn from his own experience. Bunyan, +in his long tramps, had seen them all. He had known what it was +to be in danger of falling into a pit and being dashed to pieces with +Vain Confidence, of being drowned in the flooded meadows with Christian +and Hopeful; of sinking in deep water when swimming over a river, going +down and rising up half dead, and needing all his companion’s +strength and skill to keep his head above the stream. Vanity Fair +is evidently drawn from the life. The great yearly fair of Stourbridge, +close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinker +days, with its streets of booths filled with “wares of all kinds +from all countries,” its “shows, jugglings, cheats games, +plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind,” +its “great one of the fair,” its court of justice and power +of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture. +Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines. When he +had to describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy +and cold. Never having been very far from home, he had had no +experience of the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and +his pen moves in fetters when he attempts to describe them. When +his pilgrims come to the Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, +the difference is at once seen. All his nobler imagery is drawn +from Scripture. As Hallam has remarked, “There is scarcely +a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find +a place bodily and literally in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ +and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it really +is.”</p> +<p>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”?</p> +<p>“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 Theologiæ +Evangelicæ’ 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.”</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<p>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:</p> +<blockquote><p>“Go now my little book to every place<br /> +Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face.<br /> +Call at their door; if any say ‘Who’s there?’<br /> +Then answer thus, ‘Christiana is here.’<br /> +If they bid thee come in, then enter thou<br /> +With all thy boys. And then, as thou know’st how,<br /> +Tell who they are, also from whence they came;<br /> +Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <i>vraisemblance</i> 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.”</p> +<p>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—</p> +<blockquote><p>“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>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 <i>dramatis +personæ</i>, 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.</p> +<p>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</p> +<blockquote><p>“The one unseen divine event<br /> +To which the whole creation moves.”</p> +</blockquote> +<p>“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.</p> +<p>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.</p> +<p>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.”</p> +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> +<p><a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> A small +enclosure behind a cottage.</p> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN***</p> +<pre> + + +***** This file should be named 1037-h.htm or 1037-h.zip****** + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/3/1037 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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