The Life of John Bunyan

Published：2026-08-02 06:39:21 Source: gift plush pillows for 12 months Author: Classroom Currency

Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition by David Price,educational foam building blocks for 7 year olds [email protected]

THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN
by Edmund Venables, M.A.

CHAPTER I.

John Bunyan, the author of the book which has probably passed throughmore editions, had a greater number of readers, and been translatedinto more languages than any other book in the English tongue, was bornin the parish of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in the latter part of theyear 1628, and was baptized in the parish church of the village on thelast day of November of that year.

The year of John Bunyan’s birth was a momentous one both forthe nation and for the Church of England.  Charles I., by the extortedassent to the Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himselfof the irresponsible authority he had claimed, and had taken the firststep in the struggle between King and Parliament which ended in theHouse 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 monarchand his people, and having accepted a peerage and the promise of thePresidency of the Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policyof “Thorough,” which was destined to bring both his ownhead and that of his weak master to the block.  The Remonstranceof Parliament against the toleration of Roman Catholics and the growthof Arminianism, had been presented to the indignant king, who, wilfullyblinded, had replied to it by the promotion to high and lucrative postsin the Church of the very men against whom it was chiefly directed. The most outrageous upholders of the royal prerogative and the irresponsiblepower of the sovereign, Montagu and Mainwaring, had been presented,the one to the see of Chichester, the other—the impeached andcondemned of the Commons—to the rich living Montagu’s consecrationhad vacated.  Montaigne, the licenser of Mainwaring’s incriminatedsermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of York, while Neile and Laud,who were openly named in the Remonstrance as the “troublers ofthe English Israel,” were rewarded respectively with the richsee of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese of London. Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap the whirlwindwhich was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the monarchy andthe Church in the same overthrow.  Three months before Bunyan’sbirth Buckingham, on the eve of his departure for the beleaguered andfamine-stricken city of Rochelle, sanguinely hoping to conclude a peacewith the French king beneath its walls, had been struck down by theknife 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 Protestantstronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long anxiously fixed.

The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the cominghurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable aname in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottagein 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”; “amender of pots and kettles,” according to Bunyan’s contemporarybiographer, Charles Doe.  He was not, however, a mere tramp orvagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually are still, much lessa disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare’s ChristopherSly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled home andan acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow.  Thefamily was of long standing there, but had for some generations beengoing down in the world.  Bunyan’s grandfather, Thomas Bunyan,as we learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation ofa “petty chapman,” or small retail dealer, in his own freeholdcottage, 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, persistenttradition, confirmed by the testimony of local names, warrants us inplacing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile to the east of the villageof 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 appearsto have been all that remained, at the death of John Bunyan’sgrandfather, of a property once considerable enough to have given thename of its possessor to the whole locality.

The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan(the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways,of which the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent)is one that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times. The first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill,about nine miles from Elstow.  In 1199, the year of King John’saccession, 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, probablyhis descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden,close to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan’sbirthplace, and was the owner of property there.  We have no furthernotices of the Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century.  Wethen find them greatly fallen.  Their ancestral property seemslittle by little to have passed into other hands, until in 1542 nothingwas left but “a messuage and pightell { 1}with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land.”  This smallresidue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still furtherdiminished by sale.  The field already referred to, known as “Bonyon’sEnd,” was sold by “Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer,”son of William Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepersof a small roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-bakedbread and home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into troublewith the petty local courts of the day.  Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan’sfather, was born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February24, 1603, exactly a month before the great queen passed away. The mother of the immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, likeher husband, was a native of Elstow and only a few months his junior. The details of her mother’s will, which is still extant, drawnup 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 peoplewho, 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 themselveson 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 wasout his grandfather had married again.  His father, too, had notcompleted his twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney,January 10, 1623.  She died in 1627, apparently without any survivingchildren, and before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of thefollowing 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 vacantplace with a third wife.  Bunyan himself cannot have been muchmore than twenty when he married.  We have no particulars of thedeath of his first wife.  But he had been married two years tohis noble-minded second wife at the time of the assizes in 1661, andthe ages of his children by his first wife would indicate that no longinterval elapsed between his being left a widower and his second marriage.

Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of “The Pilgrim’sProgress,” has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet littlevillage, which, though not much more than a mile from the populous andbusy town of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modernlife, preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree.  Its namein its original form of “Helen-stow,” or “Ellen-stow,”the stowor stockaded place of St. Helena, is derived from aBenedictine nunnery founded in 1078 by Judith, niece of William theConqueror, 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 personalhistory, is a fragment of the church of the nunnery, with a detachedcampanile, or “steeple-house,” built to contain the bellsafter the destruction of the central tower and choir of the conventualchurch.  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 bemuch what they were in Bunyan’s days.  A village street,with detached cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowersJohn Bunyan knew and loved, leads to the village green, fringed withchurchyard elms, in the middle of which is the pedestal or stump ofthe 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 afterwardsthe Court House of the manor when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses—“thescene,” writes Dr. Brown “of village festivities, statutehirings, and all the public occasions of village life.” The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little altered from thetime when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of the place in thedances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it so hard to giveup, and in “tip-cat,” and the other innocent games whichhis 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 whichrebuked him for his sins, and “returned desperately to his sportagain.”  On the south side of the green, as we have said,stands the church, a fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapelof 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 fiercespiritual conflicts so vividly depicted by Bunyan in his “GraceAbounding.”  On entering every object speaks of Bunyan. The pulpit—if it has survived the recent restoration—isthe 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 andmother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-lovedblind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, onApril 14, 1654.  An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of thousandsof visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the tinkerof Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy whenhe “went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremostcounting all things holy that were therein contained.”  Thefive bells which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan somuch delighted, the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was usedto ring.  The rough flagged floor, “all worn and broken withthe hobnailed boots of generations of ringers,” remains undisturbed. One cannot see the door, set in its solid masonry, without recallingthe figure of Bunyan standing in it, after conscience, “beginningto be tender,” told him that “such practice was but vain,”but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of seeing others ring, hopingthat, “if a bell should fall,” he could “slip out”safely “behind the thick walls,” and so “be preservednotwithstanding.”  Behind the church, on the south side,stand some picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansionof the Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings inthe early part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed toInigo Jones, which may have given Bunyan the first idea of “thevery stately Palace, the name of which was Beautiful.”

The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in thefields at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledgeof 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 haverobbed it of all interest.

From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passedthe earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to thesubject of our biography himself.  The notion that Bunyan was ofgipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott,and which has more recently received elaborate support from writerson the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless. Even if Bunyan’s inquiry of his father “whether the familywas of Israelitish descent or no,” which has been so strangelypressed into the service of the theory, could be supposed to have anythingto do with the matter, the decided negative with which his questionwas met—“he told me, ‘No, we were not’”—would,one would have thought, have settled the point.  But some fictionsdie hard.  However low the family had sunk, so that in his ownwords, “his father’s house was of that rank that is meanestand most despised of all the families in the land,” “ofa low and inconsiderable generation,” the name, as we have seen,was one of long standing in Bunyan’s native county, and had oncetaken far higher rank in it.  And his parents, though poor, wereevidently worthy people, of good repute among their village neighbours. Bunyan seems to be describing his own father and his wandering lifewhen he speaks of “an honest poor labouring man, who, like Adamunparadised, had all the world to get his bread in, and was very carefulto maintain his family.”  He and his wife were also carefulwith 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 toput me to school, to learn both to read and write.”  If weaccept the evidence of the “Scriptural Poems,” publishedfor the first time twelve years after his death, the genuineness ofwhich, though questioned by Dr. Brown, there seems no sufficient reasonto doubt, the little education he had was “gained in a grammarschool.”  This would have been that founded by Sir WilliamHarpur in Queen Mary’s reign in the neighbouring town of Bedford. Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along themile and a half of footpath and road from his father’s cottageby 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, wasa negligent sot, charged with “night-walking” and haunting“taverns and alehouses,” and other evil practices, as wellas with treating the poor boys “when present” with a crueltywhich 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 confesseswith shame he soon lost “almost utterly.”  He was beforelong called home to help his father at the Harrowden forge, where hesays he was “brought up in a very mean condition among a companyof poor countrymen.”  Here, with but little to elevate orrefine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and grew upwhat Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls “a bitter blackguard.” According to his own remorseful confession, he was “filled withall unrighteousness,” having “from a child” in his“tender years,” “but few equals both for cursing,swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of God.”  Sinsof 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 “inall manner of vice and ungodliness.”  But the unsparing condemnationpassed by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his former self, must notmislead us into supposing him ever, either as boy or man, to have liveda vicious life.  “The wickedness of the tinker,” writesSouthey, “has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the languageof self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that hewas at any time depraved.”  The justice of this verdict ofacquittal 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 youthfulescapades, such, perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older,poaching, and the like, which might have brought him under “thestroke of the laws,” and put him to “open shame before theface of the world.”  But he confesses to no crime or profligatehabit.  We have no reason to suppose that he was ever drunk, andwe have his own most solemn declaration that he was never guilty ofan act of unchastity.  “In our days,” to quote Mr.Froude, “a rough tinker who could say as much for himself afterhe 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 viciousthan Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenthcentury must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleasedto allow.”  How then, it may be asked, are we to explainthe passionate language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, whichwould hardly seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate andlicentious?  We are confident that Bunyan meant what he said. So intensely honest a nature could not allow his words to go beyondhis convictions.  When he speaks of “letting loose the reinsto his lusts,” and sinning “with the greatest delight andease,” we know that however exaggerated they may appear to us,his expressions did not seem to him overstrained.  Dr. Johnsonmarvelled that St. Paul could call himself “the chief of sinners,”and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly.  But a highly-strungspiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called intoexercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different estimateof 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 sinsagainst infinite love—a love unto death—and in the lightof the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt,and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned.  Thesinfulness of sin—more especially their own sin—is the intensestof all possible realities to them.  No language is too strong todescribe it.  We may not unreasonably ask whether this estimate,however exaggerated it may appear to those who are strangers to thesespiritual experiences, is altogether a mistaken one?

The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan.  Whilestill a child “but nine or ten years old,” he tells us hewas racked with convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears. He was scared with “fearful dreams,” and “dreadfulvisions,” and haunted in his sleep with “apprehensions ofdevils and wicked spirits” coming to carry him away, which madehis bed a place of terrors.  The thought of the Day of Judgmentand of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over hismind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble. But though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while theylasted, they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased“as if they had never been,” and he gave himself up withoutrestraint to the youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature madehim ever the ringleader.  The “thoughts of religion”became very grievous to him.  He could not endure even to see othersread pious books; “it would be as a prison to me.” The awful realities of eternity which had once been so crushing to hisspirit were “both out of sight and mind.”  He saidto God, “depart from me.”  According to the later morbidestimate which stigmatized as sinful what were little more than thewild acts of a roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spiritsand with an unusually active imagination, he “could sin with thegreatest delight and ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of hiscompanions.”  But that the sense of religion was not whollydead in him even then, and that while discarding its restraints he hadan inward reverence for it, is shown by the horror he experienced ifthose 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 sogreat a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache.”

This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providentialescapes from accidents which threatened his life—“judgmentsmixed with mercy” he terms them,—which made him feel thathe was not utterly forsaken of God.  Twice he narrowly escapeddrowning; 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 theneighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stourand Orwell to the east.  At another time, in his wild contemptof danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on with admiration,what he mistakenly supposed to be an adder’s sting.

These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in hisbrief career as a soldier which his anonymous biographer tells us “madeso deep an impression upon him that he would never mention it, whichhe often did, without thanksgiving to God.”  But for thisoccurrence, indeed, we should have probably never known that he hadever served in the army at all.  The story is best told in hisown provokingly brief words—“When I was a soldier I withothers were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it.  Butwhen I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in myroom; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming to thesiege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket bulletand died.”  Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan’sautobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details. This is characteristic of the man.  The religious import of theoccurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; theirtemporal setting, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of noaccount to him.  He gives us not the slightest clue to the nameof 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 howeverwe are able to determine with something like accuracy.  November,1644, was the earliest period at which Bunyan could have entered thearmy, for it was not till then that he reached the regulation age ofsixteen.  Domestic circumstances had then recently occurred whichmay have tended to estrange him from his home, and turn his thoughtsto 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, hadmarried again, and whether the new wife had proved the proverbial injustanovercaor not, his home must have been sufficiently altered bythe double, if we may not say triple, calamity, to account for his leavingthe dull monotony of his native village for the more stirring careerof a soldier.  Which of the two causes then distracting the nationclaimed his adherence, Royalist or Parliamentarian, can never be determined. As Mr. Froude writes, “He does not tell us himself.  Hisfriends 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 worthmentioning with exactness.”  The only evidence is internal,and the deductions from it vary with the estimate of the counter-balancingprobabilities taken by Bunyan’s various biographers.  LordMacaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly supportedby 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 withthe Royalists.”  Bedfordshire, however, was one of the “AssociatedCounties” from which the Parliamentary army drew its main strength,and it was shut in by a strong line of defence from any combinationwith the Royalist army.  In 1643 the county had received an orderrequiring it to furnish “able and armed men” to the garrisonat Newport Pagnel, which was then the base of operations against theKing in that part of England.  All probability therefore pointsto John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of Elstow, the leader in allmanly sports and adventurous enterprises among his mates, and probablycaring very little on what side he fought, having been drafted to Newportto 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, whichLord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the certainty of fact, namesLeicester.  The only direct evidence for this is the statementof an anonymous biographer, who professes to have been a personal friendof Bunyan’s, that he was present at the siege of Leicester, in1645, as a soldier in the Parliamentary army.  This statement,however, is in direct defiance of Bunyan’s own words.  Forthe one thing certain in the matter is that wherever the siege may havebeen, Bunyan was not at it.  He tells us plainly that he was “drawnto go,” and that when he was just starting, he gave up his placeto a comrade who went in his room, and was shot through the head. Bunyan’s presence at the siege of Leicester, which has been sooften reported that it has almost been regarded as an historical truth,must therefore take its place among the baseless creations of a fertilefancy.

Bunyan’s military career, wherever passed and under whateverstandard, was very short.  The civil war was drawing near the endof its first stage when he enlisted.  He had only been a soldiera few months when the battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, wasfought, June 14, 1645.  Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert,Sept. 10th.  Three days later Montrose was totally defeated atPhiliphaugh; and after a vain attempt to relieve Chester, Charles shuthimself up in Oxford.  The royal garrisons yielded in quick succession;in 1646 the armies on both sides were disbanded, and the first act inthe great national tragedy having come to a close, Bunyan returned toElstow, and resumed his tinker’s work at the paternal forge. His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be mentioned, lived all throughhis famous son’s twelve years’ imprisonment, witnessed hisgrowing celebrity as a preacher and a writer, and died in the earlypart of 1676, just when John Bunyan was passing through his last briefperiod of durance, which was to give birth to the work which has madehim immortal.

CHAPTER II.

It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan’sreturn home from his short experience of a soldier’s life, thathe took the step which, more than any other, influences a man’sfuture career for good or for evil.  The young tinker married. With his characteristic disregard of all facts or dates but such asconcern his spiritual history, Bunyan tells us nothing about the orphangirl he made his wife.  Where he found her, who her parents were,where they were married, even her christian name, were all deemed somany irrelevant details.  Indeed the fact of his marriage wouldprobably have been passed over altogether but for the important bearingit hid on his inner life.  His “mercy,” as he callsit, “was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly,”and who, though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they “cametogether as poor as poor might be,” as “poor as howlets,”to adopt his own simile, “without so much household stuff as adish or a spoon betwixt” them, yet brought with her to the Elstowcottage two religious books, which had belonged to her father, and whichhe “had left her when he died.”  These books were “ThePlain Man’s Pathway to Heaven,” the work of Arthur Dent,the puritan incumbent of Shoebury, in Essex—“wearisomelyheavy and theologically narrow,” writes Dr. Brown—and “ThePractise of Piety,” by Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, andpreviously chaplain to Prince Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputationwith puritans as well as with churchmen.  Together with these books,the young wife brought the still more powerful influence of a religioustraining, and the memory of a holy example, often telling her younggraceless husband “what a godly man her father was, and how hewould 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 anddeed.”  Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of the “littlehe had learnt” at school, he had not lost it “utterly.” He was still able to read intelligently.  His wife’s gentleinfluence prevailed on him to begin “sometimes to read”her father’s legacy “with her.”  This must havebeen entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly at first not muchto 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 thatteaches curious arts, that tells of old fables.”  But ashe and his young wife read these books together at their fireside, ahigher taste was gradually awakened in Bunyan’s mind; “somethings” 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 instinctwas 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 tookhis part with all outward devotion in the service, “both singingand saying as others did; yet,” as he penitently confesses, “retaininghis wicked life,” the wickedness of which, however, did not amountto 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 liturgicalforms issued in 1645, the observance of which varied with the strictnessor laxity of the local authorities, would not seem to have been putin force very rigidly at Elstow.  The vicar, Christopher Hall,was an Episcopalian, who, like Bishop Sanderson, retained his beneficeunchallenged all through the Protectorate, and held it some years afterthe Restoration and the passing of the Act of Uniformity.  He seems,like Sanderson, to have kept himself within the letter of the law bymaking trifling variations in the Prayer Book formularies, consistentwith a general conformity to the old order of the Church, “withoutpersisting to his own destruction in the usage of the entire liturgy.” The decent dignity of the ceremonial of his parish church had a powerfuleffect on Bunyan’s freshly awakened religious susceptibility—a“spirit of superstition” he called it afterwards—andhelped to its fuller development.  “I adored,” he says,“with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place”—altarsthen had not been entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire—“Priest,Clerk, Vestment, Service, and what else belonging to the church, countingall things holy that were therein contained, and especially the Priestand Clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed because theywere the servants of God and were principal in the Holy Temple, to doHis work therein, . . . their name, their garb, and work, did so intoxicateand bewitch me.”  If it is questionable whether the Act forbiddingthe use of the Book of Common Prayer was strictly observed at Elstow,it is certain that the prohibition of Sunday sports was not.  Bunyan’snarrative shows that the aspect of a village green in Bedfordshire duringthe Protectorate did not differ much from what Baxter tells us it hadbeen in Shropshire before the civil troubles began, where, “afterthe Common Prayer had been read briefly, the rest of the day even tilldark night almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under amaypole and a great tree, when all the town did meet together.” These Sunday sports proved the battle-ground of Bunyan’s spiritualexperience, the scene of the fierce inward struggles which he has describedso vividly, through which he ultimately reached the firm ground of solidpeace and hope.  As a high-spirited healthy athletic young fellow,all kinds of manly sports were Bunyan’s delight.  On weekdays his tinker’s business, which he evidently pursued industriously,left him small leisure for such amusements.  Sunday therefore wasthe day on which he “did especially solace himself” withthem.  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 aimedexpressly at him.  Sermon ended, he went home “with a greatburden upon his spirit,” “sermon-stricken” and “sermonsick” as he expresses it elsewhere.  But his Sunday’sdinner speedily drove away his self-condemning thoughts.  He “shookthe sermon out of his mind,” and went out to his sports with theElstow 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 goingto give it a second blow—the minuteness of the detail shows theunforgetable reality of the crisis—he seemed to hear a voice fromheaven asking him whether “he would leave his sins and go to heaven,or keep his sins and go to hell.”  He thought also that hesaw 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 washopeless.  “It was too late for him to look after heaven;he was past pardon.”  If his condemnation was already sealedand he was eternally lost, it would not matter whether he was condemnedfor many sins or for few.  Heaven was gone already.  The onlyhappiness he could look for was what he could get out of his sins—hismorbidly sensitive conscience perversely identifying sports with sin—sohe returned desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to “takemy fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed thatI might taste the sweetness of it.”

This desperate recklessness lasted with him “about a monthor more,” till “one day as he was standing at a neighbour’sshop-window, cursing and swearing and playing the madman after his wontedmanner, the woman of the house, though a very loose and ungodly wretch,”rebuked him so severely as “the ungodliest fellow for swearingthat ever she heard, able to spoil all the youth in a whole town,”that, self-convicted, he hung down his head in silent shame, wishinghimself a little child again that he might unlearn the wicked habitof which he thought it impossible to break himself.  Hopeless asthe effort seemed to him, it proved effectual.  He did “leaveoff his swearing” to his own “great wonder,” and foundthat he “could speak better and with more pleasantness”than when he “put an oath before and another behind, to give hiswords authority.”  Thus was one step in his reformation taken,and never retraced; but, he adds sorrowfully, “all this whileI knew not Jesus Christ, neither did I leave my sports and plays.” We might be inclined to ask, why should he leave them?  But indifferentand innocent in themselves, an overstrained spirituality had taughthim to regard them as sinful.  To indulge in them wounded his morbidlysensitive conscience, and so they were sin to him.

The next step onward in this religious progress was the study ofthe Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly neighbour. Naturally he first betook himself to the historical books, which, hetells us, he read “with great pleasure;” but, like Baxterwho, beginning his Bible reading in the same course, writes, “Ineither understood nor relished much the doctrinal part,” he franklyconfesses, “Paul’s Epistles and such like Scriptures I couldnot away with.”  His Bible reading helped forward the outwardreformation he had begun.  He set the keeping the Ten Commandmentsbefore him as his “way to Heaven”; much comforted “sometimes”when, as he thought, “he kept them pretty well,” but humbledin conscience when “now and then he broke one.”  “Butthen,” he says, “I should repent and say I was sorry forit, 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 steadilyonwards.  He had a very hard struggle in relinquishing his favouriteamusements.  But though he had much yet to learn, his feet wereset on the upward way, and he had no mind to go back, great as the temptationoften was.  He had once delighted in bell-ringing, but “hisconscience beginning to be tender”—morbid we should rathersay—“he thought such practise to be vain, and thereforeforced himself to leave it.”  But “hankering afterit still,” he continued to go while his old companions rang, andlook on at what he “durst not” join in, until the fear thatif he thus winked at what his conscience condemned, a bell, or eventhe 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.  “Itwas a full year before I could quite leave that.”  But thistoo was at last renounced, and finally.  The power of Bunyan’sindomitable will was bracing itself for severe trials yet to come.

Meanwhile Bunyan’s neighbours regarded with amazement the changedlife of the profane young tinker.  “And truly,” hehonestly confesses, “so they well might for this my conversionwas as great as for Tom of Bedlam to become a sober man.” Bunyan’s reformation was soon the town’s talk; he had “becomegodly,” “become a right honest man.”  These commendationsflattered is vanity, and he laid himself out for them.  He wasthen but a “poor painted hypocrite,” he says, “proudof his godliness, and doing all he did either to be seen of, or wellspoken of by man.”  This state of self-satisfaction, he tellsus, lasted “for about a twelvemonth or more.”  Duringthis deceitful calm he says, “I had great peace of conscience,and should think with myself, ‘God cannot choose but now be pleasedwith me,’ yea, to relate it in mine own way, I thought no manin England could please God better than I.”  But no outwardreformation can bring lasting inward peace.  When a man is honestwith himself, the more earnestly he struggles after complete obedience,the more faulty does his obedience appear.  The good opinion ofothers will not silence his own inward condemnation.  He needsa higher righteousness than his own; a firmer standing-ground than theshifting 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 perishedtherein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by nature.”

This revolution was nearer than he imagined.  Bunyan’sself-satisfaction was rudely shaken, and his need of something deeperin the way of religion than he had yet experienced was shown him bythe conversation of three or four poor women whom, one day, when pursuinghis tinker’s calling at Bedford, he came upon “sitting ata door in the sun, and talking of the things of God.”  Thesewomen were members of the congregation of “the holy Mr. John Gifford,”who, at that time of ecclesiastical confusion, subsequently became rectorof St. John’s Church, in Bedford, and master of the hospital attachedto it.  Gifford’s career had been a strange one.  Wehear of him first as a young major in the king’s army at the outsetof the Civil War, notorious for his loose and debauched life, takenby Fairfax at Maidstone in 1648, and condemned to the gallows. By his sister’s help he eluded his keepers’ vigilance, escapedfrom prison, and ultimately found his way to Bedford, where for a timehe practised as a physician, though without any change of his loosehabits.  The loss of a large sum of money at gaming awoke a disgustat his dissolute life.  A few sentences of a pious book deepenedthe impression.  He became a converted man, and joined himselfto a handful of earnest Christians in Bedford, who becoming, in thelanguage of the day, “a church,” he was appointed its firstminister.  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 ofthe poor women who were destined to exercise so momentous an influenceon Bunyan’s spiritual life, evidenced how thoroughly they haddrunk in their pastor’s teaching.  Bunyan himself was atthis time a “brisk talker in the matters of religion,” suchas he drew from the life in his own Talkative.  But the words ofthese poor women were entirely beyond him.  They opened a new andblessed land to which he was a complete stranger.  “Theyspoke of their own wretchedness of heart, of their unbelief, of theirmiserable state by nature, of the new birth, and the work of God intheir souls, and how the Lord refreshed them, and supported them againstthe temptations of the Devil by His words and promises.” But what seems to have struck Bunyan the most forcibly was the happinesswhich their religion shed in the hearts of these poor women.  Religionup 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 otherthings.  Of religion as a Divine life kindled in the soul, andflooding 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 asif joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripturelanguage, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that theywere to me as if they had found a new world,” a veritable “ElDorado,” stored with the true riches.  Bunyan, as he says,after he had listened awhile and wondered at their words, left themand went about his work again.  But their words went with him. He could not get rid of them.  He saw that though he thought himselfa godly man, and his neighbours thought so too, he wanted the true tokensof godliness.  He was convinced that godliness was the only truehappiness, and he could not rest till he had attained it.  So hemade it his business to be going again and again into the company ofthese good women.  He could not stay away, and the more he talkedwith them the more uneasy he became—“the more I questionedmy own condition.”  The salvation of his soul became allin all to him.  His mind “lay fixed on eternity like a horse-leechat the vein.”  The Bible became precious to him.  Heread it with new eyes, “as I never did before.”  “Iwas 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 toHeaven and glory.”  Having no one to guide him in his studyof the most difficult of all books, it is no wonder that he misinterpretedand misapplied its words in a manner which went far to unsettle hisbrain.  He read that without faith he could not be saved, and thoughhe did not clearly know what faith was, it became a question of supremeanxiety to him to determine whether he had it or not.  If not,he was a castaway indeed, doomed to perish for ever.  So he determinedto put it to the test.  The Bible told him that faith, “evenas a grain of mustard seed,” would enable its possessor to workmiracles.  So, as Mr. Froude says, “not understanding Orientalmetaphors,” he thought he had here a simple test which would atonce solve the question.  One day as he was walking along the miryroad between Elstow and Bedford, which he had so often paced as a schoolboy,“the temptation came hot upon him” to put the matter tothe proof, by saying to the puddles that were in the horse-pads “bedry,” 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 Godwould enable him?  This pause saved him from a rash venture, whichmight have landed him in despair.  For he concluded that if hetried after praying and nothing came of it, it would prove that he hadno faith, but was a castaway.  “Nay, thought I, if it beso, I will never try yet, but will stay a little longer.” “Then,” he continues, “I was so tossed betwixt theDevil 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 greatlyharassed by the insoluble problems of predestination and election. The question was not now whether he had faith, but “whether hewas one of the elect or not, and if not, what then?”  “Hemight as well leave off and strive no further.”  And thenthe strange fancy occurred to him, that the good people at Bedford whoseacquaintance he had recently made, were all that God meant to save inthat part of the country, and that the day of grace was past and gonefor him; that he had overstood the time of mercy.  “Oh thathe had turned sooner!” was then his cry.  “Oh thathe had turned seven years before!  What a fool he had been to trifleaway his time till his soul and heaven were lost!”  The text,“compel them to come in, and yet there is room,” came tohis rescue when he was so harassed and faint that he was “scarceable to take one step more.”  He found them “sweetwords,” for they showed him that there was “place enoughin heaven for him,” and he verily believed that when Christ spokethem He was thinking of him, and had them recorded to help him to overcomethe vile fear that there was no place left for him in His bosom. But soon another fear succeeded the former.  Was he truly calledof Christ?  “He called to them when He would, and they cameto Him.”  But they could not come unless He called them. Had He called him?  Would He call him?  If He did how gladlywould he run after Him.  But oh, he feared that He had no likingto him; that He would not call him.  True conversion was what helonged for.  “Could it have been gotten for gold,”he said, “what could I have given for it!  Had I a wholeworld, it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soulmight have been in a converted state.”  All those whom hethought to be truly converted were now lovely in his eyes.  “Theyshone, they walked like people that carried the broad seal of heavenabout them.  Oh that he were like them, and shared in their goodlyheritage!”

About this time Bunyan was greatly troubled, though at the same timeencouraged in his endeavours after the blessedness he longed for soearnestly but could not yet attain to, by “a dream or vision”which presented itself to him, whether in his waking or sleeping hourshe does not tell us.  He fancied he saw his four Bedford friendsrefreshing themselves on the sunny side of a high mountain while hewas shivering with dark and cold on the other side, parted from themby a high wall with only one small gap in it, and that not found butafter long searching, and so strait and narrow withal that it neededlong and desperate efforts to force his way through.  At last hesucceeded.  “Then,” he says, “I was exceedingglad, and went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comfortedwith the light and heat of their sun.”

But this sunshine shone but in illusion, and soon gave place to theold sad questioning, which filled his soul with darkness.  Washe already called, or should he be called some day?  He would giveworlds to know.  Who could assure him?  At last some wordsof the prophet Joel (chap. iii, 21) encouraged him to hope that if notconverted already, the time might come when he should be converted toChrist.  Despair began to give way to hopefulness.

At this crisis Bunyan took the step which he would have been wiseif he had taken long before.  He sought the sympathy and counselof others.  He began to speak his mind to the poor people in Bedfordwhose words of religious experiences had first revealed to him his truecondition.  By them he was introduced to their pastor, “thegodly Mr. Gifford,” who invited him to his house and gave himspiritual counsel.  He began to attend the meetings of his disciples.

The teaching he received here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan’smorbid sensitiveness.  For it was based upon a constant introspectionand a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturingsuspicion of its motive, which made a man’s ever-varying spiritualfeelings the standard of his state before God, instead of leading himoff from self to the Saviour.  It is not, therefore, at all surprisingthat a considerable period intervened before, in the language of hisschool, “he found peace.”  This period, which seemsto have embraced two or three years, was marked by that tremendous inwardstruggle which he has described, “as with a pen of fire,”in that marvellous piece of religious autobiography, without a counterpartexcept in “The Confessions of St. Augustine,” his “GraceAbounding to the Chief of Sinners.”  Bunyan’s firstexperiences after his introduction to Mr. Gifford and the inner circleof his disciples were most discouraging.  What he heard of God’sdealings with their souls showed him something of “the vanityand inward wretchedness of his wicked heart,” and at the sametime roused all its hostility to God’s will.  “It didwork at that rate for wickedness as it never did before.” “The Canaanites woulddwell in the land.”  “Hisheart hankered after every foolish vanity, and hung back both to andin 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.”  Thoughhe longed to let Christ into his heart, “his unbelief would, asit were, set its shoulder to the door to keep Him out.”

Yet all the while he was tormented with the most perverse scrupulosityof conscience.  “As to the act of sinning, I never was moretender than now; I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so bigas a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at everytwist.  I could not now tell how to speak my words, for fear Ishould misplace them.  Oh! how gingerly did I then go in all Idid 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 allgood things.”  All the misdoings of his earlier years roseup against him.  There they were, and he could not rid himselfof them.  He thought that no one could be so bad as he was; “noteven the Devil could be his equal: he was more loathsome in his owneyes than a toad.”  What then must God think of him? Despair seized fast hold of him.  He thought he was “forsakenof God and given up to the Devil, and to a reprobate mind.” Nor was this a transient fit of despondency.  “Thus,”he writes, “I continued a long while, even for some years together.”

This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan’s religioushistory through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fiercetemptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolatedscraps of Bible language—texts torn from their context—theharassing doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despairand the elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitablegraphic power.  It is a picture of fearful fascination that hedraws.  “A great storm” at one time comes down uponhim, “piece by piece,” which “handled him twenty timesworse than all he had met with before,” while “floods ofblasphemies were poured upon his spirit,” and would “boltout of his heart.”  He felt himself driven to commit theunpardonable sin and blaspheme the Holy Ghost, “whether he wouldor no.”  “No sin would serve but that.” He was ready to “clap his hand under his chin,” to keephis mouth shut, or to leap head-foremost “into some muckhill-hole,”to prevent his uttering the fatal words.  At last he persuadedhimself 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 achild “carried off under her apron by a gipsy.”  “Kicksometimes I did, and also shriek and cry, but yet I was as bound inthe wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away.” He wished himself “a dog or a toad,” for they “hadno soul to be lost as his was like to be;” and again a hopelesscallousness seemed to settle upon him.  “If I would havegiven a thousand pounds for a tear I could not shed one; no, nor sometimesscarce desire to shed one.”  And yet he was all the whilebewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought himself singular. “This much sunk me.  I thought my condition was alone; buthow to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not.” Again the very ground of his faith was shaken.  “Was theBible true, or was it not rather a fable and cunning story?” All thought “their own religion true.  Might not the Turkshave as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet Saviour as Christianshad for Christ?  What if all we believed in should be but ‘athink-so’ too?”  So powerful and so real were his illusionsthat 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 Satanhimself.  He heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desiredto have him, and that “so loud and plain that he would turn hishead to see who was calling him;” when on his knees in prayerhe fancied he felt the foul fiend pull his clothes from behind, biddinghim “break off, make haste; you have prayed enough.”

This “horror of great darkness” was not always upon him. Bunyan had his intervals of “sunshine-weather” when GiantDespair’s fits came on him, and the giant “lost the useof his hand.”  Texts of Scripture would give him a “sweetglance,” and flood his soul with comfort.  But these intervalsof happiness were but short-lived.  They were but “hints,touches, and short visits,” sweet when present, but “likePeter’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 couldspecify the place where these beams of sunlight fell on him—“sittingin a neighbour’s house,”—“travelling into thecountry,”—as he was “going home from sermon.” And the joy was real while it lasted.  The words of the preacher’stext, “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 sotaken with the love and mercy of God that I thought I could have spokenof it even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands beforeme, 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 allagain.”  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 morefully and graciously discover Himself unto him.”  “Oneday,” he writes, “as I was musing on the wickedness andblasphemy of my heart, that scripture came into my mind, ‘He hathmade peace by the Blood of His Cross.’  By which I was madeto see, both again and again and again that day, that God and my soulwere friends by this blood: Yea, I saw the justice of God and my sinfulsoul could embrace and kiss each other.  This was a good day tome.  I hope I shall not forget it.”  At another timethe “glory and joy” of a passage in the Hebrews (ii. 14-15)were “so weighty” that “I was once or twice readyto swoon as I sat, not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy andpeace.”  “But, oh! now how was my soul led on fromtruth 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 wouldlong that the last day were come, or that I were fourscore years old,that I might die quickly that my soul might be at rest.”

At this time he fell in with an old tattered copy of Luther’s“Commentary on the Galatians,” “so old that it wasready to fall piece from piece if I did but turn it over.” As he read, to his amazement and thankfulness, he found his own spiritualexperience described.  “It was as if his book had been writtenout of my heart.”  It greatly comforted him to find thathis condition was not, as he had thought, solitary, but that othershad known the same inward struggles.  “Of all the books thatever he had seen,” he deemed it “most fit for a woundedconscience.”  This book was also the means of awakening anintense love for the Saviour.  “Now I found, as I thought,that I loved Christ dearly.  Oh, methought my soul cleaved untoHim, my affections cleaved unto Him; I felt love to Him as hot as fire.”

And very quickly, as he tells us, his “love was tried to somepurpose.”  He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation—“afreak of fancy,” Mr. Froude terms it—“fancy resentingthe minuteness with which he watched his own emotions.” He had “found Christ” and felt Him “most preciousto his soul.”  He was now tempted to give Him up, “tosell and part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for thethings of this life; for anything.”  Nor was this a merepassing, intermittent delusion.  “It lay upon me for thespace of a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not ridof it one day in a month, no, not sometimes one hour in many days together,except when I was asleep.”  Wherever he was, whatever hewas doing day and night, in bed, at table, at work, a voice kept soundingin 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 couldspeak, ‘sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,’” and, likehis own Christian in the dark valley, he could not determine whetherthey were suggestions of the Wicked One, or came from his own heart. The agony was so intense, while, for hours together, he struggled withthe temptation, that his whole body was convulsed by it.  It wasno metaphorical, but an actual, wrestling with a tangible enemy. He “pushed and thrust with his hands and elbows,” and keptstill 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.  Butthe fatal moment at last came, and the weakened will yielded, againstitself.  One morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came againwith redoubled force, and would not be silenced.  He fought againstit as long as he could, “even until I was almost out of breath,”when “without any conscious action of his will” the suicidalwords shaped themselves in his heart, “Let Him go if He will.”

Now all was over.  He had spoken the words and they could notbe recalled.  Satan had “won the battle,” and “asa bird that is shot from the top of a tree, down fell he into greatguilt and fearful despair.”  He left his bed, dressed, andwent “moping into the field,” where for the next two hourshe was “like a man bereft of life, and as one past all recoveryand bound to eternal punishment.”  The most terrible examplesin the Bible came trooping before him.  He had sold his birthrightlike Esau.  He a betrayed his Master like Judas—“Iwas ashamed that I should be like such an ugly man as Judas.” There was no longer any place for repentance.  He was past allrecovery; shut up unto the judgment to come.  He dared hardly pray. When he tried to do so, he was “as with a tempest driven awayfrom God,” while something within said, “’Tis toolate; I am lost; God hath let me fall.”  The texts whichonce had comforted him gave him no comfort now; or, if they did, itwas but for a brief space.  “About ten or eleven o’clockone day, as I was walking under a hedge and bemoaning myself for thishard hap that such a thought should arise within me, suddenly this sentencebolted upon me, ‘The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin,’”and gave me “good encouragement.”  But in two or threehours all was gone.  The terrible words concerning Esau’sselling his birthright took possession of his mind, and “heldhim down.”  This “stuck with him.”  Thoughhe “sought it carefully with tears,” there was no restorationfor him.  His agony received a terrible aggravation from a highlycoloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira, an Italianlawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having embracedthe Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to return tothe Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and despair, fromwhich Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of “the man inthe 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 knivesand daggers in his soul.”  We cannot wonder that his healthbegan to give way under so protracted a struggle.  His naturallysturdy frame was “shaken by a continual trembling.” He would “wind and twine and shrink under his burden,” theweight of which so crushed him that he “could neither stand, norgo, nor lie, either at rest or quiet.”  His digestion becamedisordered, and a pain, “as if his breastbone would have splitasunder,” made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas’sin, so he was to perish by Judas’ end, and “burst asunderin the midst.”  In the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain’smark set upon him; God had marked him out for his curse.  No onewas ever so bad as he.  No one had ever sinned so flagrantly. When he compared his sins with those of David and Solomon and Manassehand others which had been pardoned, he found his sin so much exceededtheirs that he could have no hope of pardon.  Theirs, “itwas true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour.  But none ofthem were of the nature of his.  He had sold his Saviour. His sin was point blank against Christ.”  “Oh, methoughtthis sin was bigger than the sins of a country, of a kingdom, or ofthe whole world; not all of them together was able to equal mine; mineoutwent them every one.”

It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of hisself-torturing illusions.  Fierce as the storm was, and long inits duration—for it was more than two years before the storm becamea calm—the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossingswhich threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong onthe rocks of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the “havenwhere 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 heheard God “with a great voice, as it were, over his shoulder behindhim,” 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 fromit, 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 powerhe describes the zigzag path by which he made his way.  His hotand cold fits alternated with fearful suddenness.  “As Esaubeat him down, Christ raised him up.”  “His life hungin doubt, not knowing which way he should tip.”  More sensibleevidence came.  “One day,” he tells us, “as Iwalked to and fro in a good man’s shop”—we can hardlybe wrong in placing it in Bedford—“bemoaning myself forthis hard hap of mine, for that I should commit so great a sin, greatlyfearing 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 noiseof wind upon me, but very pleasant, and I heard a voice speaking, ‘Did’stever refuse to be justified by the Blood of Christ?’” Whether the voice were supernatural or not, he was not, “in twentyyears’ time,” able to determine.  At the time he thoughtit was.  It was “as if an angel had come upon me.” “It commanded a great calm upon me.  It persuaded me theremight 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 Godwas weary of him; had been weary for years past; that he wanted to getrid of him and his “bawlings in his ears,” and thereforeHe 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 nohope for him.  Christ might indeed pity him and wish to help him;but He could not, for this sin was unpardonable.  He had said “letHim 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, havingwalked 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 destructionof so vile a sinner.  The “sun grudged him its light, thevery stones in the streets and the tiles on the house-roofs seemed tobend themselves against him.”  He burst forth with a grievoussigh, “How can God comfort such a wretch as I?”  Comfortwas nearer than he imagined.  “No sooner had I said it, butthis returned to me, as an echo doth answer a voice, ‘This sinis not unto death.’”  This breathed fresh life intohis 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 myformer storm.”  But though the storm was allayed it was byno 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 millpostat my back.”  But after two days the old despairing thoughtsreturned, “nor could his faith retain the word.”  Afew hours, however, saw the return of his hopes.  As he was onhis knees before going to bed, “seeking the Lord with strong cries,”a voice echoed his prayer, “I have loved Thee with an everlastinglove.”  “Now I went to bed at quiet, and when I awakedthe next morning it was fresh upon my soul and I believed it.”

These voices from heaven—whether real or not he could not tell,nor did he much care, for they were real to him—were continuallysounding in his ears to help him out of the fresh crises of his spiritualdisorder.  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 withinhis heart; at another, that “piece of a sentence,” “Mygrace is sufficient,” darted in upon him “three times together,”and he was “as though he had seen the Lord Jesus look down throughthe tiles upon him,” and was sent mourning but rejoicing home. But it was still with him like an April sky.  At one time brightsunshine, at another lowering clouds.  The terrible words aboutEsau “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 lastlonger than before, and the clouds were less heavy.  The “visage”of the threatening texts was changed; “they looked not on himso grimly as before;” “that about Esau’s birthrightbegan to wax weak and withdraw and vanish.”  “Now remainedonly the hinder part of the tempest.  The thunder was gone; onlya few drops fell on him now and then.”

The long-expected deliverance was at hand.  As he was walkingin the fields, still with some fears in his heart, the sentence fellupon his soul, “Thy righteousness is in heaven.”  Helooked up and “saw with the eyes of his soul our Saviour at God’sright hand.”  “There, I say, was my righteousness;so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-doing, God could not sayof me, ‘He wants my righteousness,’ for that was just beforeHim.  Now did the chains fall off from my legs.  I was loosedfrom my affliction and irons.  My temptations also fled away, sothat from that time those dreadful Scriptures left off to trouble me. Oh methought Christ, Christ, there was nothing but Christ that was beforemine eyes.  I could look from myself to Him, and should reckonthat all those graces of God that now were green upon me, were yet butlike those crack-groats, and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carryin 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 andSaviour.  Further the Lord did lead me into the mystery of unionwith the Son of God.  His righteousness was mine, His merits mine,His victory also mine.  Now I could see myself in heaven and earthat once; in heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness andLife, though on earth by my body or person.  These blessed considerationswere made to spangle in mine eyes.  Christ was my all; all my Wisdom,all my Righteousness, all my Sanctification, and all my Redemption.”

CHAPTER III.

The Pilgrim, having now floundered through the Slough of Despond,passed through the Wicket Gate, climbed the Hill Difficulty, and gotsafe by the Lions, entered the Palace Beautiful, and was “hadin to the family.”  In plain words, Bunyan united himselfto the little Christian brotherhood at Bedford, of which the formerloose-living royalist major, Mr. Gifford, was the pastor, and was formallyadmitted into their society.  In Gifford we recognize the prototypeof the Evangelist of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” whilethe Prudence, Piety, and Charity of Bunyan’s immortal narrativehad 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 thethings of God, as they sat at a doorway in the sun, “as if joydid make them speak,” had first opened Bunyan’s eyes tohis spiritual ignorance.  He was received into the church by baptism,which, according to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe “theStruggler,” was performed publicly by Mr. Gifford, in the riverOuse, the “Bedford river” into which Bunyan tells us heonce fell out of a boat, and barely escaped drowning.  This wasabout the year 1653.  The exact date is uncertain.  Bunyannever mentions his baptism himself, and the church books of Gifford’scongregation do not commence till May, 1656, the year after Gifford’sdeath.  He was also admitted to the Holy Communion, which for want,as he deemed, of due reverence in his first approach to it, became theoccasion of a temporary revival of his old temptations.  Whileactually at the Lord’s Table he was “forced to bend himselfto pray” to be kept from uttering blasphemies against the ordinanceitself, and cursing his fellow communicants.  For three-quartersof a year he could “never have rest or ease” from this shockingperversity.  The constant strain of beating off this persistenttemptation 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 provea fatal illness.  Again and again, during his period of indisposition,the Tempter took advantage of his bodily weakness to ply him with hisformer despairing questionings as to his spiritual state.  Thatseemed as bad as bad could be.  “Live he must not; die hedare not.”  He was repeatedly near giving up all for lost. But a few words of Scripture brought to his mind would revive his droopingspirits, with a natural reaction on his physical health, and he became“well both in body and mind at once.”  “My sicknessdid presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again.” At another time, after three or four days of deep dejection, some wordsfrom the Epistle to the Hebrews “came bolting in upon him,”and sealed his sense of acceptance with an assurance he never afterwardsentirely lost.  “Then with joy I told my wife, ‘NowI know, I know.’  That night was a good night to me; I neverhad but few better.  I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peaceand triumph through Christ.”

During this time Bunyan, though a member of the Bedford congregation,continued to reside at Elstow, in the little thatched wayside tenement,with its lean-to forge at one end, already mentioned, which is stillpointed out as “Bunyan’s Cottage.”  There histwo children, Mary, his passionately loved blind daughter, and Elizabethwere born; the one in 1650, and the other in 1654.  It was probablyin the next year, 1655, that he finally quitted his native village andtook 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 fromthe conversation of his second wife, Elizabeth, with Sir Matthew Hale. He sustained also an even greater loss in the death of his friend andcomrade, Mr. Gifford, who died in September, 1655.  The latterwas 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 Monarchyand 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 thebeginning of Bunyan’s ministerial life.  Bunyan was now inhis twenty-seventh year, in the prime of his manly vigour, with a vividimagination, ready speech, minute textual knowledge of the Bible, andan experience of temptation and the wiles of the evil one, such as fewChristians of double his years have ever reached.  “His giftscould not long be hid.”  The beginnings of that which wasto prove the great work of his life were slender enough.  As Mr.Froude says, “he was modest, humble, shrinking.”  Themembers of his congregation, recognizing that he had “the giftof utterance” asked him to speak “a word of exhortation”to them.  The request scared him.  The most truly gifted areusually the least conscious of their gifts.  At first it did much“dash and abash his spirit.”  But after earnest entreatyhe gave way, and made one or two trials of his gift in private meetings,“though with much weakness and infirmity.”  The resultproved the correctness of his brethren’s estimate.  The youngtinker showed himself no common preacher.  His words came homewith power to the souls of his hearers, who “protested solemnly,as in the sight of God, that they were both affected and comforted bythem, and gave thanks to the Father of mercies for the grace bestowedon him.”  After this, as the brethren went out on their itineratingrounds to the villages about, they began to ask Bunyan to accompanythem, and though he “durst not make use of his gift in an openway,” he would sometimes, “yet more privately still, speaka 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 beingtaken off by the preaching of the gospel” from his duties as deacon,another member was appointed in his room.  His appointment to theministry was not long delayed.  After “some solemn prayerwith fasting,” he was “called forth and appointed a preacherof the word,” not, however, so much for the Bedford congregationas 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 andsuccess.  “God,” writes an early biographer, “hadincreased his stores so that he lived in great credit among his neighbours.” He speedily became famous as a preacher.  People “came inby hundreds to hear the word, and that from all parts, though upon sundryand divers accounts,”—“some,” as Southey writes,“to marvel, and some perhaps to mock.”  Curiosity tohear the once profane tinker preach was not one of the least prevalentmotives.  But his word proved a word of power to many.  Those“who came to scoff remained to pray.”  “I hadnot preached long,” he says, “before some began to be touchedand to be greatly afflicted in their minds.”  His successhumbled and amazed him, as it must every true man who compares the workwith the worker.  “At first,” he says, “I couldnot believe that God should speak by me to the heart of any man, stillcounting myself unworthy; and though I did put it from me that theyshould be awakened by me, still they would confess it and affirm itbefore the saints of God.  They would also bless God for me—unworthywretch that I am—and count me God’s instrument that showedto them the way of salvation.”  He preached wherever he foundopportunity, 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 hecould give the fullest scope to “the awakening and convertingpower” he possessed.  His success as a preacher might havetempted him to vanity.  But the conviction that he was but an instrumentin the hand of a higher power kept it down.  He saw that if hehad 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, “asit were, a maul on the head of the pride and vainglory” whichhe found “easily blown up at the applause and commendation ofevery unadvised christian.”  His experiences, like thoseof 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 ofspeech,” but, before he had done, he found himself “so straitenedin his speech before the people,” that he “scarce knew orremembered what he had been about,” and felt “as if hishead had been in a bag all the time of the exercise.”  Hefeared that he would not be able to “speak sense to the hearers,”or he would be “seized with such faintness and strengthlessnessthat his legs were hardly able to carry him to his place of preaching.” Old temptations too came back.  Blasphemous thoughts formed themselvesinto words, which he had hard work to keep himself from uttering fromthe pulpit.  Or the tempter tried to silence him by telling himthat 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 preachthis?  Of this your own soul is guilty.  Preach not of itat 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 hehad made him emperor of the Christian world.”  Bunyan wasno preacher of vague generalities.  He knew that sermons miss theirmark if they hit no one.  Self-application is their object. “Wherefore,” he says, “I laboured so to speak theword, 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 whathe read in books, but what he had himself experienced.  Like Dantehe 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 personand work of Christ.  And this consciousness gave him confidenceand courage in declaring his message.  It was “as if an angelof God had stood at my back.”  “Oh it hath been withsuch power and heavenly evidence upon my own soul while I have beenlabouring to fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could notbe contented with saying, ‘I believe and am sure.’ Methought I was more than sure, if it be lawful so to express myself,that the things I asserted were true.”

Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointmentswhich wrung his heart.  He could be satisfied with nothing lessthan the conversion and sanctification of his hearers.  “IfI were fruitless, it mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful,I cared not who did condemn.”  And the result of a sermonwas often very different from what he anticipated: “When I thoughtI had done no good, then I did the most; and when I thought I shouldcatch them, I fished for nothing.”  “A word cast inby-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 tothe grave.  Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it wasthe fear of the loss of the salvation of my own soul.”

A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted, illustratesthe power of his preaching even in the early days of his ministry. “Being to preach in a church in a country village in Cambridgeshire”—itwas before the Restoration—“and the public being gatheredtogether in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the soberestneither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people was (itbeing a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was topreach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he wasresolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church tohear him.  But God met him there by His ministry, so that he cameout much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinkerfor a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher inthat country afterwards.”  “This story,” continuesthe anonymous biographer, “I know to be true, having many timesdiscoursed with the man.”  To the same ante-Restoration period,Dr. Brown also assigns the anecdote of Bunyan’s encounter, onthe road near Cambridge, with the university man who asked him how hedared to preach not having the original Scriptures.  With readywit, Bunyan turned the tables on the scholar by asking whether he hadthe actual originals, the copies written by the apostles and prophets. The scholar replied, “No,” but they had what they believedto be a true copy of the original.  “And I,” said Bunyan,“believe the English Bible to be a true copy, too.” “Then away rid the scholar.”

The fame of such a preacher, naturally, soon spread far and wide;all the countryside flocked eagerly to hear him.  In some places,as at Meldreth in Cambridgeshire, and Yelden in his own county of Bedfordshire,the pulpits of the parish churches were opened to him.  At Yelden,the Rector, Dr. William Dell, the Puritan Master of Caius College, Cambridge,formerly Chaplain to the army under Fairfax, roused the indignationof his orthodox parishioners by allowing him—“one Bunyonof Bedford, a tinker,” as he is ignominiously styled in the petitionsent up to the House of Lords in 1660—to preach in his parishchurch on Christmas Day.  But, generally, the parochial clergywere his bitterest enemies.  “When I first went to preachthe word abroad,” he writes, “the Doctors and priests ofthe country did open wide against me.”  Many were enviousof his success where they had so signally failed.  In the wordsof Mr. Henry Deane, when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr.T. Smith, Professor of Arabic and Keeper of the University Library atCambridge, who had come upon Bunyan preaching in a barn at Toft, theywere “angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls aswell as kettles and pans,” and proved himself more skilful inhis craft than those who had graduated at a university.  Envy isever the mother of detraction.  Slanders of the blackest dye againsthis moral character were freely circulated, and as readily believed. It was the common talk that he was a thorough reprobate.  Nothingwas too bad for him.  He was “a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman,and the like.”  It was reported that he had “his missesand his bastards; that he had two wives at once,” &c. Such charges roused all the man in Bunyan.  Few passages in hiswritings show more passion than that in “Grace Abounding,”in which he defends himself from the “fools or knaves” whowere their authors.  He “begs belief of no man, and if theybelieve him or disbelieve him it is all one to him.  But he wouldhave them know how utterly baseless their accusations are.” “My foes,” he writes, “have missed their mark in theiropen shooting at me.  I am not the man.  If all the fornicatorsand adulterers in England were hanged by the neck till they be dead,John Bunyan would be still alive.  I know not whether there issuch a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of the whole heavenbut 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 testimonyto his innocence in this respect.  But though they were so absolutelybaseless, nay, the rather because they were so baseless, the grossnessof these charges evidently stung Bunyan very deeply.

So bitter was the feeling aroused against him by the marvellous successof his irregular ministry, that his enemies, even before the restorationof the Church and Crown, endeavoured to put the arm of the law in motionto 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 “preachingat Eaton Socon.”  Of this indictment we hear no more; soit was probably dropped.  But it is an instructive fact that, evenduring the boasted religious liberty of the Protectorate, irregularpreaching, especially that of the much dreaded Anabaptists, was an indictableoffence.  But, as Dr. Brown observes, “religious libertyhad not yet come to mean liberty all round, but only liberty for a certainrecognized section of Christians.”  That there was no lackof persecution during the Commonwealth is clear from the cruel treatmentto which Quakers were subjected, to say nothing of the intolerance shownto Episcopalians and Roman Catholics.  In Bunyan’s own countyof Bedford, Quakeresses were sentenced to be whipped and sent to Bridewellfor reproving a parish priest, perhaps well deserving of it, and exhortingthe folks on a market day to repentance and amendment of life. “The simple truth is,” writes Robert Southey, “allparties were agreed on the one catholic opinion that certain doctrineswere not to be tolerated:” the only points of difference betweenthem were “what those doctrines were,” and how far intolerancemight be carried.  The withering lines are familiar to us, in whichMilton denounces the “New Forcers of Conscience,” who bytheir intolerance and “super-metropolitan and hyperarchiepiscopaltyranny,” proved that in his proverbial words, “New Presbyteris but old Priest writ large”—

“Because you have thrown off your prelate lord,
And with stiff vows renounce his liturgy
Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
To force our consciences that Christ set free!”

How Bunyan came to escape we know not.  But the danger he wasin was imminent enough for the church at Bedford to meet to pray “forcounsail what to doe” in respect of it.

It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan madehis first essay at authorship.  He was led to it by a long andtiresome controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found theirway to Bedford.  The foundations of the faith, he thought, werebeing undermined.  The Quakers’ teaching as to the inwardlight seemed to him a serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures,while their mystical view of the spiritual Christ revealed to the souland dwelling in the heart, came perilously near to a denial of the historicreality of the personal Christ.  He had had public disputationswith male and female Quakers from time to time, at the Market Crossat Bedford, at “Paul’s Steeple-house in Bedford town,”and other places.  One of them, Anne Blackley by name, openly badehim throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, “No; forthen the devil would be too hard for me.”  The same enthusiastcharged him with “preaching up an idol, and using conjurationand witchcraft,” because of his assertion of the bodily presenceof Christ in heaven.

The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author,cannot but be viewed with much interest.  It was a little volumein duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled “Some GospelTruths 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 Londonand published at Newport Pagnel.  Bunyan being entirely unknownto 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 histwenty-ninth year—as one who had “neither the greatnessnor the wisdom of the world to commend him,” “not beingchosen out of an earthly but out of a heavenly university, the Churchof Christ,” where “through grace he had taken three heavenlydegrees, to wit, union with Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, andexperience of the temptations of Satan,” and as one of whose “soundnessin the faith, godly conversation, and his ability to preach the Gospel,not by human aid, but by the Spirit of the Lord,” he “withmany other saints had had experience.”  This book must bepronounced a very remarkable production for a young travelling tinker,under thirty, and without any literary or theological training but suchas he had gained for himself after attaining to manhood.  Its arrangementis excellent, the arguments are ably marshalled, the style is clear,the language pure and well chosen.  It is, in the main, a well-reasoneddefence of the historical truth of the Articles of the Creed relatingto the Second Person of the Trinity, against the mystical teaching ofthe followers of George Fox, who, by a false spiritualism, sublimatedthe whole Gospel narrative into a vehicle for the representation oftruths relating to the inner life of the believer.  No one everhad a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the factsof the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men.  But he wouldnot suffer their “subjectivity”—to adopt modern terms—todestroy their “objectivity.”  If the Son of God wasnot actually born of the Virgin Mary, if He did not live in a real humanbody, and in that body die, lie in the grave, rise again, and ascendup into heaven, whence He would return—and that Bunyan believedshortly—in the same Body He took of His mortal mother, His preachingwas vain; their faith was vain; they were yet in their sins.  Thosewho “cried up a Christ within, in oppositionto a Christwithout,” who asserted that Christ had no other Body but the Church,that the only Crucifixion, rising again, and ascension of Christ wasthat withinthe believer, and that every man had, as an innerlight, a measure of Christ’s Spirit within him sufficient to guidehim to salvation, he asserted were “possessed with a spirit ofdelusion;” deceived themselves, they were deceiving others totheir eternal ruin.  To the refutation of such fundamental errors,substituting a mystical for an historical faith, Bunyan’s littletreatise is addressed; and it may be truly said the work is done effectually. To adopt Coleridge’s expression concerning Bunyan’s greaterand world-famous work, it is an admirable “Summa TheologiæEvangelicæ,” which, notwithstanding its obsolete styleand old-fashioned arrangement, may be read even now with advantage.

Bunyan’s denunciation of the tenets of the Quakers speedilyelicited a reply.  This was written by a certain Edward Burrough,a young man of three and twenty, fearless, devoted, and ardent in thepropagation of the tenets of his sect.  Being subsequently throwninto Newgate with hundreds of his co-religionists, at the same timethat his former antagonist was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, Burroughmet the fate Bunyan’s stronger constitution enabled him to escape;and in the language of the times, “rotted in prison,” avictim to the loathsome foulness of his place of incarceration, in theyear of the “Bartholomew Act,” 1662.

Burrough entitled his reply, “The Gospel of Peace, contendedfor in the Spirit of Meekness and Love against the secret oppositionof John Bunyan, a professed minister in Bedfordshire.”  Hisopening words, too characteristic of the entire treatise, display butlittle of the meekness professed.  “How long, ye crafty fowlers,will ye prey upon the innocent?  How long shall the righteous bea 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 ofMagog, and have showed themselves in the defence of the dragon againstthe Lamb in the day of war betwixt them.”  We may well echoDr. Brown’s wish that “these two good men could have hada little free and friendly talk face to face.  There would probablyhave been better understanding, and fewer hard words, for they werereally not so far apart as they thought.  Bunyan believed in theinward light, and Burrough surely accepted an objective Christ. But failing to see each other’s exact point of view, Burroughthunders at Bunyan, and Bunyan swiftly returns the shot.”

The rapidity of Bunyan’s literary work is amazing, especiallywhen we take his antecedents into account.  Within a few weekshe published his rejoinder to Friend Burrough, under the title of “AVindication of Gospel Truths Opened.”  In this work, whichappeared in 1667, Bunyan repays Burrough in his own coin, styling him“a proved enemy to the truth,” a “grossly railingRabshakeh, who breaks out with a taunt and a jeer,” is very “censoriousand utters many words without knowledge.”  In vigorous, nervouslanguage, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself fromBurrough’s charges, and proves that the Quakers are “deceivers.” “As for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbandsis not walking after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do makea religion out of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walkingafter their own lusts, and not after the Spirit of God.” Burrough had most unwarrantably stigmatized Bunyan as one of “thefalse prophets, who love the wages of unrighteousness, and through covetousnessmake merchandise of souls.”  Bunyan calmly replies, “Friend,dost thou speak this as from thy own knowledge, or did any other tellthee so?  However that spirit that led thee out this way is a lyingspirit.  For though I be poor and of no repute in the world asto outward things, yet through grace I have learned by the example ofthe Apostle to preach the truth, and also to work with my hands bothfor 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 wagesof unrighteousness hitherto, will also help me still so that I shalldistribute that which God hath given me freely, and not for filthy lucre’ssake.”  The fruitfulness of his ministry which Burrough hadcalled in question, charging him with having “run before he wassent,” he refuses to discuss.  Bunyan says, “I shallleave it to be taken notice of by the people of God and the countrywhere I dwell, who will testify the contrary for me, setting aside thecarnal ministry with their retinue who are so mad against me as thyself.”

In his third book, published in 1658, at “the King’sHead, in the Old Bailey,” a few days before Oliver Cromwell’sdeath, Bunyan left the thorny domain of polemics, for that of Christianexhortation, in which his chief work was to be done.  This workwas an exposition of the parable of “the Rich Man and Lazarus,”bearing the horror-striking title, “A Few Sighs from Hell, orthe Groans of a Damned Soul.”  In this work, as its titlewould suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the parableas a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave, givesfull scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of thelost.  It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in thesimiles, and is written in the nervous homespun English of which hewas master.  Its popularity is shown by its having gone throughnine editions in the author’s lifetime.  To take an exampleor two of its style: dealing with the excuses people make for not hearingthe 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 decaymy calling.  O, saith another, I would willingly go in this waybut for my father; he chides me and tells me he will not stand my friendwhen 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 thehindered to the hinderers: “Oh, what red lines will there be againstall those rich ungodly landlords that so keep under their poor tenantsthat they dare not go out to hear the word for fear that their rentshould be raised or they turned out of their houses.  Think onthis, you drunken proud rich, and scornful landlords; think on this,you madbrained blasphemous husbands, that are against the godly andchaste conversation of your wives; also you that hold your servantsso hard to it that you will not spare them time to hear the Word, unlessit will be where and when your lusts will let you.”  He bidsthe ungodly consider that “the profits, pleasures, and vanitiesof the world” will one day “give thee the slip, and leavethee in the sands and the brambles of all that thou hast done.” The careless man lies “like the smith’s dog at the footof the anvil, though the fire sparks flee in his face.” The rich man remembers how he once despised Lazarus, “scrubbedbeggarly Lazarus.  What, shall I dishonour my fair sumptuous andgay house with such a scabbed creephedge as he?  The Lazarusesare not allowed to warn them of the wrath to come, because they arenot gentlemen, because they cannot with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew,Greek, and Latin.  Nay, they must not, shall not, speak to them,and all because of this.”

The fourth production of Bunyan’s pen, his last book beforehis twelve years of prison life began, is entitled, “The Doctrineof Law and Grace Unfolded.”  With a somewhat overstrainedhumility which is hardly worthy of him, he describes himself in thetitle-page as “that poor contemptible creature John Bunyan, ofBedford.”  It was given to the world in May, 1659, and issuedfrom the same press in the Old Bailey as his last work.  It cannotbe 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 andaccuracy of arrangement which belongs to him, and that marvellous acquaintancewith Scripture language which he had gained by his constant study ofthe 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 describesthe book as “marked by a firm grasp of faith and a strong viewof the reality of Christ’s person and work as the one Priest andMediator for a sinful world.”  To quote a passage, “Isthere righteousness in Christ? that is mine.  Is there perfectionin 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 aconqueror through Him that hath loved me. . . Lord, show me continuallyin the light of Thy Spirit, through Thy word, that Jesus that was bornin 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 evenby 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 thepassage already referred to describing his education.  “Inever went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at myfather’s house in a very mean condition, among a company of poorcountrymen.”  Of his own religious state before his conversionhe thus speaks: “When it pleased the Lord to begin to instructmy soul, He found me one of the black sinners of the world.  Hefound me making a sport of oaths, and also of lies; and many a soul-poisoningmeal 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 mysins, that thought I to myself, ‘I will have them though I losemy soul.’”  And then, after narrating the struggleshe had had with his conscience, the alternations of hope and fear whichhe passed through, which are more fully described in his “GraceAbounding,” he thus vividly depicts the full assurance of faithhe had attained to: “I saw through grace that it was the Bloodshed on Mount Calvary that did save and redeem sinners, as clearly andas really with the eyes of my soul as ever, methought, I had seen apenny loaf bought with a penny. . . O let the saints know that unlessthe devil can pluck Christ out of heaven he cannot pull a true believerout of Christ.”  In a striking passage he shows how, by turningSatan’s temptations against himself, Christians may “Getthe art as to outrun him in his own shoes, and make his own darts piercehimself.”  “What! didst thou never learn to outshootthe devil in his own bow, and cut off his head with his own sword asDavid served Goliath?”  The whole treatise is somewhat wearisome,but the pious reader will find much in it for spiritual edification.

CHAPTER IV.

We cannot doubt that one in whom loyalty was so deep and fixed aprinciple as Bunyan, would welcome with sincere thankfulness the terminationof the miserable interval of anarchy which followed the death of theProtector and the abdication of his indolent and feeble son, by therestoration of monarchy in the person of Charles the Second.  Evenif some forebodings might have arisen that with the restoration of theold monarchy the old persecuting laws might be revived, which made itcriminal for a man to think for himself in the matters which most nearlyconcerned his eternal interests, and to worship in the way which hefound most helpful to his spiritual life, they would have been silencedby the promise, contained in Charles’s “Declaration fromBreda,” of liberty to tender consciences, and the assurance thatno one should be disquieted for differences of opinion in religion,so long as such differences did not endanger the peace and well-beingof the realm.  If this declaration meant anything, it meant a breadthof toleration larger and more liberal than had been ever granted byCromwell.  Any fears of the renewal of persecution must be groundless.

But if such dreams of religious liberty were entertained they werespeedily and rudely dispelled, and Bunyan was one of the first to feelthe shock of the awakening.  The promise was coupled with a referenceto the “mature deliberation of Parliament.”  With sucha promise Charles’s easy conscience was relieved of all responsibility. Whatever he might promise, the nation, and Parliament which was itsmouthpiece, might set his promise aside.  And if he knew anythingof the temper of the people he was returning to govern, he must havefelt assured that any scheme of comprehension was certain to be rejectedby them.  As Mr. Froude has said, “before toleration is possible,men must have learnt to tolerate toleration,” and this was a lessonthe English nation was very far from having learnt; at no time, perhaps,were they further from it.  Puritanism had had its day, and hadmade itself generally detested.  Deeply enshrined as it was inmany earnest and devout hearts, such as Bunyan’s, it was necessarilythe religion not of the many, but of the few; it was the religion notof the common herd, but of a spiritual aristocracy.  Its sterncondemnation of all mirth and pastime, as things in their nature sinful,of which we have so many evidences in Bunyan’s own writings; itsrepression of all that makes life brighter and more joyous, and thesour sanctimoniousness which frowned upon innocent relaxation, had renderedits yoke unbearable to ordinary human nature, and men took the earliestopportunity of throwing the yoke off and trampling it under foot. They hailed with rude and boisterous rejoicings the restoration of theMonarchy which they felt, with a true instinct, involved the restorationof the old Church of England, the church of their fathers and of theolder among themselves, with its larger indulgence for the instinctsof humanity, its wider comprehensiveness, and its more dignified anddecorous ritual.

The reaction from Puritanism pervaded all ranks.  In no class,however, was its influence more powerful than among the country gentry. Most of them had been severe sufferers both in purse and person duringthe Protectorate.  Fines and sequestrations had fallen heavilyupon 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, theCommonwealthsman, all were at their feet. . . Their whole policy appearedto be dictated by a passionate spirit of reaction. . . The oppressorsof the parson had been the oppressors of the squire.  The sequestratorwho had driven the one from his parsonage had driven the other fromhis manor-house.  Both had been branded with the same charge ofmalignity.  Both had suffered together, and the new Parliamentwas resolved that both should triumph together.”

The feeling thus eloquently expressed goes far to explain the harshnesswhich Bunyan experienced at the hands of the administrators of justiceat the crisis of his life at which we have now arrived.  Thosebefore 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 Puritanbody.  Nor were reasons wanting to justify their severity. The circumstances of the times were critical.  The public mindwas still in an excitable state, agitated by the wild schemes of politicaland religious enthusiasts plotting to destroy the whole existing frameworkboth of Church and State, and set up their own chimerical fabric. We cannot be surprised that, as Southey has said, after all the nationhad suffered from fanatical zeal, “The government, rendered suspiciousby the constant sense of danger, was led as much by fear as by resentmentto 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 lawinto their own hands, and manifesting their orthodoxy by harrying Quakersand Nonconformists.  In the May and June of this year, we hearof sectaries being taken from their beds and haled to prison, and broughtmanacled to the Quarter Sessions and committed to loathsome dungeons. Matters had advanced since then.  The Church had returned in itsfull power and privileges together with the monarchy, and everythingwent back into its old groove.  Every Act passed for the disestablishmentand disendowment of the Church was declared a dead letter.  Thoseof the ejected incumbents who remained alive entered again into theirparsonages, and occupied their pulpits as of old; the surviving bishopsreturned to their sees; and the whole existing statute law regardingthe Church revived from its suspended animation.  No new enactmentwas required to punish Nonconformists and to silence their ministers;though, to the disgrace of the nation and its parliament, many new oneswere subsequently passed, with ever-increasing disabilities.  Thevarious Acts of Elizabeth supplied all that was needed.  Underthese Acts all who refused to attend public worship in their parishchurches were subject to fines; while those who resorted to conventicleswere to be imprisoned till they made their submissions; if at the endof three months they refused to submit they were to be banished therealm, and if they returned from banishment, without permission of theCrown, they were liable to execution as felons.  This long-disusedsword was now drawn from its rusty sheath to strike terror into thehearts of Nonconformists.  It did not prove very effectual. All the true-hearted men preferred to suffer rather than yield in sosacred a cause.  Bunyan was one of the earliest of these, as heproved one of the staunchest.

Early in October, 1660, the country magistrates meeting in Bedfordissued an order for the public reading of the Liturgy of the Churchof England.  Such an order Bunyan would not regard as concerninghim.  Anyhow he would not give obeying it a thought.  Oneof the things we least like in Bunyan is the feeling he exhibits towardsthe Book of Common Prayer.  To him it was an accursed thing, thebadge and token of a persecuting party, a relic of popery which he exhortedhis adherents to “take heed that they touched not” if theywould be “steadfast in the faith of Jesus Christ.” Nothing could be further from his thoughts than to give any heed tothe magistrates’ order to go to church and pray “after theform of men’s inventions.”

The time for testing Bunyan’s resolution was now near at hand. Within six months of the king’s landing, within little more thana month of the issue of the magistrate’s order for the use ofthe Common Prayer Book, his sturdy determination to yield obedienceto no authority in spiritual matters but that of his own consciencewas put to the proof.  Bunyan may safely be regarded as at thattime 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 herecognized the direct agency of Satan to stop the course of the truth:“That old enemy of man’s salvation,” he says, “tookhis opportunity to inflame the hearts of his vassals against me, insomuchthat at the last I was laid out for the warrant of a justice.” The circumstances were these, on November 12, 1660, Bunyan had engagedto go to the little hamlet of Lower Samsell near Harlington, to holda religious service.  His purpose becoming known, a neighbouringmagistrate, Mr. Francis Wingate, of Harlington House, was instructedto issue a warrant for his apprehension under the Act of Elizabeth. The meeting being represented to him as one of seditious persons bringingarms, with a view to the disturbance of the public peace, he orderedthat a strong watch should be kept about the house, “as if,”Bunyan says, “we did intend to do some fearful business to thedestruction of the country.”  The intention to arrest himoozed out, and on Bunyan’s arrival the whisperings of his friendswarned him of his danger.  He might have easily escaped if he “hadbeen minded to play the coward.”  Some advised it, especiallythe 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 togaol.  The man himself, as a “harbourer of a conventicle,”would also run no small danger of the same fate, but Bunyan generouslyacquits him of any selfish object in his warning: “he was, I think,more afraid of (for) me, than of (for) himself.”  The matterwas clear enough to Bunyan.  At the same time it was not to bedecided in a hurry.  The time fixed for the service not being yetcome, Bunyan went into the meadow by the house, and pacing up and downthought the question well out.  “If he who had up to thistime showed himself hearty and courageous in his preaching, and hadmade it his business to encourage others, were now to run and make anescape, it would be of an ill savour in the country.  If he werenow to flee because there was a warrant out for him, would not the weakand newly-converted brethren be afraid to stand when great words onlywere spoken to them.  God had, in His mercy, chosen him to go onthe forlorn hope; to be the first to be opposed for the gospel; whata 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 enemyto blaspheme the gospel.”  So back to the house he came withhis mind made up.  He had come to hold the meeting, and hold themeeting he would.  He was not conscious of saying or doing anyevil.  If he had to suffer it was the Lord’s will, and hewas prepared for it.  He had a full hour before him to escape ifhe had been so minded, but he was resolved “not to go away.” He calmly waited for the time fixed for the brethren to assemble, andthen, without hurry or any show of alarm, he opened the meeting in theusual manner, with prayer for God’s blessing.  He had givenout his text, the brethren had just opened their Bibles and Bunyan wasbeginning to preach, when the arrival of the constable with the warrantput an end to the exercise.  Bunyan requested to be allowed tosay a few parting words of encouragement to the terrified flock. This was granted, and he comforted the little company with the reflectionthat it was a mercy to suffer in so good a cause; and that it was betterto be the persecuted than the persecutors; better to suffer as Christiansthan as thieves or murderers.  The constable and the justice’sservant soon growing weary of listening to Bunyan’s exhortations,interrupted him and “would not be quiet till they had him away”from the house.

The justice who had issued the warrant, Mr. Wingate, not being athome that day, a friend of Bunyan’s residing on the spot offeredto house him for the night, undertaking that he should be forthcomingthe next day.  The following morning this friend took him to theconstable’s house, and they then proceeded together to Mr. Wingate’s. A few inquiries showed the magistrate that he had entirely mistakenthe character of the Samsell meeting and its object.  Instead ofa gathering of “Fifth Monarchy men,” or other turbulentfanatics as he had supposed, for the disturbance of the public peace,he learnt from the constable that they were only a few peaceable, harmlesspeople, met together “to preach and hear the word,” withoutany political meaning.  Wingate was now at a nonplus, and “couldnot well tell what to say.”  For the credit of his magisterialcharacter, however, he must do something to show that he had not madea mistake in issuing the warrant.  So he asked Bunyan what businesshe had there, and why it was not enough for him to follow his own callinginstead of breaking the law by preaching.  Bunyan replied thathis only object in coming there was to exhort his hearers for theirsouls’ sake to forsake their sinful courses and close in withChrist, and this he could do and follow his calling as well.  Wingate,now feeling himself in the wrong, lost his temper, and declared angrilythat he would “break the neck of these unlawful meetings,”and that Bunyan must find securities for his good behaviour or go togaol.  There was no difficulty in obtaining the security. Bail was at once forthcoming.  The real difficulty lay with Bunyanhimself.  No bond was strong enough to keep him from preaching. If his friends gave them, their bonds would be forfeited, for he “wouldnot leave speaking the word of God.”  Wingate told him thatthis being so, he must be sent to gaol to be tried at the next QuarterSessions, and left the room to make out his mittimus.  While thecommittal was preparing, one whom Bunyan bitterly styles “an oldenemy to the truth,” Dr. Lindall, Vicar of Harlington, Wingate’sfather-in-law, came in and began “taunting at him with many revilingterms,” demanding what right he had to preach and meddle withthat for which he had no warrant, charging him with making long prayersto devour widows houses, and likening him to “one Alexander theCoppersmith he had read of,” “aiming, ’tis like,”says Bunyan, “at me because I was a tinker.”  The mittimuswas now made out, and Bunyan in the constable’s charge was onhis way to Bedford, when he was met by two of his friends, who beggedthe constable to wait a little while that they might use their interestwith the magistrate to get Bunyan released.  After a somewhat lengthenedinterview with Wingate, they returned with the message that if Bunyanwould wait on the magistrate and “say certain words” tohim, he might go free.  To satisfy his friends, Bunyan returnedwith them, though not with any expectation that the engagement proposedto him would be such as he could lawfully take.  “If thewords were such as he could say with a good conscience he would saythem, or else he would not.”

After all this coming and going, by the time Bunyan and his friendsgot back to Harlington House, night had come on.  As he enteredthe hall, one, he tells us, came out of an inner room with a lightedcandle in his hand, whom Bunyan recognized as one William Foster, alawyer of Bedford, Wingate’s brother-in-law, afterwards a fiercepersecutor of the Nonconformists of the district.  With a simulatedaffection, “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 “aclose opposer of the ways of God,” he adopted the tone of onewho had Bunyan’s interest at heart, and begged him as a friendto yield a little from his stubbornness.  His brother-in-law, hesaid, was very loath to send him to gaol.  All he had to do wasonly to promise that he would not call people together, and he shouldbe set at liberty and might go back to his home.  Such meetingswere plainly unlawful and must be stopped.  Bunyan had better followhis calling and leave off preaching, especially on week-days, whichmade other people neglect their calling too.  God commanded mento work six days and serve Him on the seventh.  It was vain forBunyan to reply that he never summoned people to hear him, but thatif they came he could not but use the best of his skill and wisdom tocounsel them for their soul’s salvation; that he could preachand the people could come to hear without neglecting their callings,and that men were bound to look out for their souls’ welfare onweek-days as well as Sundays.  Neither could convince the other. Bunyan’s stubbornness was not a little provoking to Foster, andwas equally disappointing to Wingate.  They both evidently wishedto dismiss the case, and intentionally provided a loophole for Bunyan’sescape.  The promise put into his mouth—“that he wouldnot call the people together”—was purposely devised to meethis scrupulous conscience.  But even if he could keep the promisein the letter, Bunyan knew that he was fully purposed to violate itsspirit.  He was the last man to forfeit self-respect by playingfast and loose with his conscience.  All evasion was foreign tohis nature.  The long interview came to an end at last.  Onceagain Wingate and Foster endeavoured to break down Bunyan’s resolution;but when they saw he was “at a point, and would not be moved orpersuaded,” the mittimus was again put into the constable’shands, 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 hintwhether the walk was taken in the dark or in the daylight.  Therewas however no need for haste.  Bedford was thirteen miles away,and the constable would probably wait till the morning to set out forthe prison which was to be Bunyan’s home for twelve long years,to which he went carrying, he says, the “peace of God along withme, and His comfort in my poor soul.”

CHAPTER V.

A long-standing tradition has identified Bunyan’s place ofimprisonment with a little corporation lock-up-house, some fourteenfeet square, picturesquely perched on one of the mid-piers of the many-archedmediæval bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse atBedford, and as Mr. Froude has said, has “furnished a subjectfor pictures,” both of pen and pencil, “which if correctwould be extremely affecting.”  Unfortunately, however, forthe lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not “correct,”but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a desire toheap contumely on Bunyan’s enemies by exaggerating the severityof his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment.  Being arrestedby the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan’splace of incarceration was naturally the county gaol.  There heundoubtedly passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there theroyal warrant for his release found him “a prisoner in the commongaol for our county of Bedford.”  But though far differentfrom the pictures which writers, desirous of exhibiting the sufferingsof the Puritan confessor in the most telling form, have drawn—ifnot “a damp and dreary cell” into which “a narrowchink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the prisoner,pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his daily taskto earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his confinementtogether,”—“the common gaol” of Bedford musthave been a sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially forone, like the travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater partof his days in the open-air in unrestricted freedom.  Prisons inthose days, and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark,miserable places.  A century later Howard found Bedford gaol, thoughbetter than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as “anuncomfortable and close prison.”  Bunyan however himself,in the narrative of his imprisonment, makes no complaint of it, nordo we hear of his health having in any way suffered from the conditionsof his confinement, as was the case with not a few of his fellow-sufferersfor the sake of religion in other English gaols, some of them even untodeath.  Bad as it must have been to be a prisoner, as far as hisown testimony goes, there is no evidence that his imprisonment, thoughvarying in its strictness with his various gaolers, was aggravated byany special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, “it is unlikelythat at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships than wereabsolutely inevitable.”

The arrest of one whose work as a preacher had been a blessing toso many, was not at once tamely acquiesced in by the religious bodyto which he belonged.  A few days after Bunyan’s committalto gaol, some of “the brethren” applied to Mr. Crompton,a young magistrate at Elstow, to bail him out, offering the requiredsecurity for his appearance at the Quarter Sessions.  The magistratewas at first disposed to accept the bail; but being a young man, newin his office, and thinking it possible that there might be more againstBunyan than the “mittimus” expressed, he was afraid of compromisinghimself by letting him go at large.  His refusal, though it senthim back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm trustin God’s overruling providence.  “I was not at alldaunted, but rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heardme.”  Before he set out for the justice’s house, hetells us he had committed the whole event to God’s ordering, withthe prayer that “if he might do more good by being at libertythan 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 thatthe untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations,“might be an awaking to the saints in the country,” andwhile “the slender answer of the justice,” which sent himback to his prison, stirred something akin to contempt, his soul wasfull of gladness.  “Verily I did meet my God sweetly again,comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that it was His will and mindthat I should be there.”  The sense that he was being conformedto the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul.  “Thisword,” he continues, “did drop in upon my heart with somelife, for he knew that ‘for envy they had delivered him.’”

Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the QuarterSessions came on, and “John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,”was indicted in the customary form for having “devilishly andperniciously 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 thekingdom.”  The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blusteringSir John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan’s Lord Hategood in Faithful’strial at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to aninfamous government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice’s seat,over the head of Sir Matthew Hale.  Keeling had suffered much fromthe Puritans during the great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon,he was “always in gaol,” and was by no means disposed todeal leniently with an offender of that persuasion.  His brethrenof 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 leniencywas to be anticipated.  But Bunyan’s attitude forbade anyleniency.  As the law stood he had indisputably broken it, andhe expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take thefirst opportunity of breaking it again.  “I told them thatif I was let out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrowby the help of God.”  We may dislike the tone adopted bythe magistrates towards the prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearingand contemptuous; we may smile at Keeling’s expositions of Scriptureand his stock arguments against unauthorized prayer and preaching, thoughwe may charitably believe that Bunyan misunderstood him when he makeshim say that “the Book of Common Prayer had been ever since theapostles’ time”; we may think that the prisoner, in his“canting pedlar’s French,” as Keeling called it, hadthe 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 theirwisdom in silencing him in court—“Let him speak no further,”said one of them, “he will do harm,”—since they couldnot 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 prayto God and to exhort one another.  I confessed myself guilty nootherwise.”  Such meetings were forbidden by the law, whichit was the duty of the justices to administer, and they had no choicewhether they would convict or no.  Perhaps they were not sorrythey had no such choice.  Bunyan was a most “impracticable”prisoner, and as Mr. Froude says, the “magistrates being but unregeneratemortals may be pardoned if they found him provoking.”  Thesentence necessarily followed.  It was pronounced, not, we aresure reluctantly, by Keeling, in the terms of the Act.  “Hewas 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 leavehis preaching, he was to be banished the realm,”—in modernlanguage “transported,” and if “he came back againwithout special royal license,” he must “stretch by theneck for it.”

“This,” said Keeling, “I tell you plainly.” Bunyan’s reply that “as to that matter he was at a pointwith the judge,” for “that he would repeat the offence thefirst 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 tobe gone,” had him back to prison, where he says, and “blessesthe Lord Jesus Christ for it,” his heart was as “sweetlyrefreshed” in returning to it as it had “been during hisexamination.  So that I find Christ’s words more than baretrifles, where He saith, He will give a mouth and wisdom, even suchas all the adversaries shall not gainsay or resist.  And that Hispeace no man can take from us.”

The magistrates, however, though not unnaturally irritated by whatseemed to them Bunyan’s unreasonable obstinacy, were not desirousto push matters to extremity.  The three months named in his sentence,at the expiration of which he was either to conform or be banished therealm, were fast drawing to an end, without any sign of submission onhis part.  As a last resort Mr. Cobb, the Clerk of the Peace, wassent 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 tobe “a man that could dispute,” and Bunyan had the betterof 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 fanaticalgatherings to assemble unchecked.  Bunyan, whose loyalty was unquestioned,must acknowledge the prudence of suppressing meetings which, howevergood their ostensible aim, might issue in nothing less than the ruinof the kingdom and commonwealth.  Bunyan had confessed his readinessto obey the apostolic precept by submitting himself to the king as supreme. The king forbade the holding of private meetings, which, under colourof religion, might be prejudicial to the State.  Why then did henot submit?  This need not hinder him from doing good in a neighbourlyway.  He might continue to use his gifts and exhort his neighboursin private discourse, provided he did not bring people together in publicassemblies.  The law did not abridge him of this liberty. Why should he stand so strictly on public meetings?  Or why shouldhe not come to church and hear?  Was his gift so far above thatof others that he could learn of no one?  If he could not be persuaded,the judges were resolved to prosecute the law against him.  Hewould be sent away beyond the seas to Spain or Constantinople—eitherCobb’s or Bunyan’s colonial geography was rather at faulthere—or some other remote part of the world, and what good couldhe do to his friends then?  “Neighbour Bunyan” hadbetter consider these things seriously before the Quarter Session, andbe ruled by good advice.  The gaoler here put in his word in supportof Cobb’s arguments: “Indeed, sir, I hope he will be ruled.” But all Cobb’s friendly reasonings and expostulations were ineffectualto bend Bunyan’s sturdy will.  He would yield to no-one inhis loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law. But, he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantlycondemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, “oneto obey actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively;to lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him.”  TheClerk of the Peace saw that it was no use to prolong the argument anyfurther.  “At this,” writes Bunyan, “he sat down,and said no more; which, when he had done, I did thank him for his civiland meek discoursing with me; and so we parted: O that we might meetin heaven!”

The Coronation which took place very soon after this interview, April13, 1661, afforded a prospect of release without unworthy submission. The customary proclamation, which allowed prisoners under sentence forany offence short of felony to sue out a pardon for twelve months fromthat date, suspended the execution of the sentence of banishment andgave a hope that the prison doors might be opened for him.  Thelocal authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royalclemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders,his second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,—no slightventure for a young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on whichthe first news of her husband’s arrest had laid her,—andwith dauntless courage made her way to the House of Lords, where shepresented her petition to one of the peers, whom she calls Lord Barkwood,but whom unfortunately we cannot now identify.  He treated herkindly, and showed her petition to other peers, who appear to have beenacquainted with the circumstances of Bunyan’s case.  Theyreplied that the matter was beyond their province, and that the questionof her husband’s release was committed to the judges at the nextassizes.  These assizes were held at Bedford in the following August. The judges of the circuit were Twisden and Sir Matthew Hale.  Fromthe latter—the friend of Richard Baxter, who, as Burnet records,took great care to “cover the Nonconformists, whom he thoughttoo hardly used, all he could from the seventies some designed; anddiscouraged those who were inclined to stretch the laws too much againstthem”—Bunyan’s case would be certain to meet withsympathetic consideration.  But being set to administer the law,not according to his private wishes, but according to its letter andits spirit, he was powerless to relieve him.  Three several timesdid Bunyan’s noble-hearted wife present her husband’s petitionthat he might be heard, and his case taken impartially into consideration. But the law forbad what Burnet calls Sir Matthew Hale’s “tenderand compassionate nature” to have free exercise.  He “receivedthe petition very mildly at her hand, telling her that he would do herand 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 husbandwas a convicted person, and could not be released unless he would promiseto 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 beforethey left the town.  So she made her way, “with abashed faceand trembling heart,” to the large chamber at the Old Swan Innat the Bridge Foot, where the two judges were receiving a large numberof the justices of the peace and other gentry of the county.  AddressingSir Matthew Hale she said, “My lord, I make bold to come againto your lordship to know what may be done with my husband.” Hale received her with the same gentleness as before, repeated whathe had said previously, that as her husband had been legally convicted,and his conviction was recorded, unless there was something to undothat he could do her no good.  Twisden, on the other hand, gotviolently angry, charged her brutally with making poverty her cloak,told her that her husband was a breaker of the peace, whose doctrinewas 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 histinker’s craft.  At last he waxed so violent that “withalshe thought he would have struck her.”  In the midst of allhis 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 allwith the prisoner, after calling for the Statute Book, thus summingup 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 tothe king, or sue out his pardon, or get a writ of error,” whichlast, he told her, would be the cheapest course—we may feel surethat Bunyan’s Petition was not granted because it could not begranted legally.  The blame of his continued imprisonment lay,if anywhere, with the law, not with its administrators.  This isnot always borne in mind as it ought to be.  As Mr. Froude remarks,“Persons often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administerthe law which they find, and rail at them as if the sentences whichthey 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 atwhat she thought the judges’ “hardheartedness to her andher husband,” as at the thought of “the sad account suchpoor creatures would have to give” hereafter, for what she deemedtheir “opposition to Christ and His gospel.”

No steps seem to have been taken by Bunyan’s wife, or any ofhis influential friends, to carry out either of the expedients namedby Hale.  It may have been that the money needed was not forthcoming,or, what Southey remarks is “quite probable,”—“becauseit is certain that Bunyan, thinking himself in conscience bound to preachin defiance of the law, would soon have made his case worse than itthen was.”

At the next assizes, which were held in January, 1662, Bunyan againmade strenuous efforts to get his name put on the calendar of felons,that he might have a regular trial before the king’s judges andbe able to plead his cause in person.  This, however, was effectuallythwarted by the unfriendly influence of the county magistrates by whomhe had been committed, and the Clerk of the Peace, Mr. Cobb, who havingfailed in his kindly meant attempt to induce “Neighbour Bunyan”to conform, had turned bitterly against him and become one of his chiefenemies.  “Thus,” writes Bunyan, “was I hinderedand prevented at that time also from appearing before the judge, andleft in prison.”  Of this prison, the county gaol of Bedford,he remained an inmate, with one, short interval in 1666, for the nexttwelve years, till his release by order of the Privy Council, May 17,1672.

CHAPTER VI.

The exaggeration of the severity of Bunyan’s imprisonment longcurrent, now that the facts are better known, has led, by a very intelligiblereaction, to an undue depreciation of it.  Mr. Froude thinks thathis incarceration was “intended to be little more than nominal,”and was really meant in kindness by the authorities who “respectedhis character,” as the best means of preventing him from gettinghimself into greater trouble by “repeating an offence that wouldcompel them to adopt harsh measures which they were earnestly tryingto 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 considerationfor the tinker-preacher which kept the prison doors closed on Bunyan. To the justices he was simply an obstinate law-breaker, who must bekept in prison as long as he refused compliance with the Act. If he rotted in gaol, as so many of his fellow sufferers for conscience’sake did in those unhappy times, it was no concern of theirs. He and his stubbornness would be alone to blame.

It is certainly true that during a portion of his captivity, Bunyan,in Dr. Brown’s words, “had an amount of liberty which inthe case of a prisoner nowadays would be simply impossible.” But the mistake has been made of extending to the whole period an indulgencewhich 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, andlike one “on parole,” free to come and go as he pleased,even as far as London, we must remember that Bunyan’s own wordsexpressly restrict this indulgence to the six months between the AutumnAssizes of 1661 and the Spring Assizes of 1662.  “Betweenthese two assizes,” he says, “I had by my jailer some libertygranted me more than at the first.”  This liberty was certainlyof 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, evenhis preaching, which was the cause of his imprisonment, was not forbidden. “I followed,” he says, writing of this period, “mywonted course of preaching, taking all occasions that were put intomy hand to visit the people of God.”  But this indulgencewas very brief and was brought sharply to an end.  It was plainlyirregular, and depended on the connivance of his jailer.  We cannotbe surprised that when it came to the magistrates’ ears—“myenemies,” Bunyan rather unworthily calls them—they wereseriously displeased.  Confounding Bunyan with the Fifth Monarchymen and other turbulent sectaries, they imagined that his visits toLondon had a political object, “to plot, and raise division, andmake insurrections,” which, he honestly adds, “God knowswas a slander.”  The jailer was all but “cast out ofhis place,” and threatened with an indictment for breach of trust,while his own liberty was so seriously “straitened” thathe was prohibited even “to look out at the door.” The last time Bunyan’s name appears as present at a church meetingis October 28, 1661, nor do we see it again till October 9, 1668, onlyfour years before his twelve years term of imprisonment expired.

But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quiteso narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, duringthe greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painfulone, especially when spent, as it sometimes was, “under crueland oppressive jailers.”  The enforced separation from hiswife and children, especially his tenderly loved blind daughter, Mary,was a continually renewed anguish to his loving heart.  “Theparting with them,” he writes, “hath often been to me aspulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only because I am somewhattoo fond of these great mercies, but also because I should often havebrought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants my poor familywas like to meet with, should I be taken from them; especially my poorblind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all beside.  Poorchild, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou must sufferhunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannotnow endure the wind should blow on thee.  O, the thoughts of thehardships 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 andchildren’s head, and yet he felt, “I must do it; O, I mustdo 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 mightend at the gallows,” not so much that he dreaded death as thathe was apprehensive that when it came to the point, even if he made“a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder,” he mightplay the coward and so do discredit to the cause of religion. “I was ashamed to die with a pale face and tottering knees forsuch a cause as this.”  The belief that his imprisonmentmight be terminated by death on the scaffold, however groundless, evidentlyweighed long on his mind.  The closing sentences of his third prisonbook, “Christian Behaviour,” published in 1663, the secondyear of his durance, clearly point to such an expectation.  “Thushave I in few words written to you before I die, . . . not knowing theshortness of my life, nor the hindrances that hereafter I may have ofserving my God and you.”  The ladder of his apprehensionswas, as Mr. Froude has said, “an imaginary ladder,” butit was very real to Bunyan.  “Oft I was as if I was on theladder with a rope about my neck.”  The thought of it, ashis autobiography shows, caused him some of his deepest searchings ofheart, and noblest ventures of faith.  He was content to sufferby the hangman’s hand if thus he might have an opportunity ofaddressing 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 myvery 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 temptedto question the reality of his Christian profession, and to doubt whetherGod would give him comfort at the hour of death, he stayed himself upwith such bold words as these.  “I was bound, but He wasfree.  Yea, ’twas my duty to stand to His word whether Hewould ever look on me or no, or save me at the last.  If God dothnot come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold intoEternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell.  Lord Jesus, ifThou wilt catch me, do.  If not, I will venture for Thy name.”

Bunyan being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his brazier’scraft for the support of his wife and family, and his active spiritcraving occupation, he got himself taught how to make “long taggedlaces,” “many hundred gross” of which, we are toldby one who first formed his acquaintance in prison, he made during hiscaptivity, 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 withSt. Paul in his Roman chains, “the word of God was not bound.” The prisoners for conscience’ sake, who like him, from time totime, were cooped up in Bedford gaol, including several of his brotherministers and some of his old friends among the leading members of hisown little church, furnished a numerous and sympathetic congregation. At one time a body of some sixty, who had met for worship at night ina neighbouring wood, were marched off to gaol, with their minister attheir head.  But while all about him was in confusion, his spiritmaintained its even calm, and he could at once speak the words of strengthand comfort that were needed.  In the midst of the hurry whichso many “newcomers occasioned,” writes the friend to whomwe are indebted for the details of his prison life, “I have heardMr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of faith andplerophory 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 fromhis pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment, relieving theotherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement.  Bunyanhimself tells us that this was the case with regard to his “HolyCity,” the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind whenaddressing “his brethren in the prison chamber,” nor canwe doubt that the case was the same with other works of his.  Tothese we shall hereafter return.  Nor was it his fellow prisonersonly who profited by his counsels.  In his “Life and Deathof Mr. Badman,” he gives us a story of a woman who came to himwhen he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her master, andto ask his help.  Hers was probably a representative case. The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious counseland exhortation, was given to study and composition.  For thishis confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would havelooked for in vain.  The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably. His library was, at least at one period, a very limited one,—“theleast and the best library,” writes a friend who visited him inprison, “that I ever saw, consisting only of two books—theBible, and Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’” “But with these two books,” writes Mr. Froude, “hehad no cause to complain of intellectual destitution.”  Bunyan’smode of composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,—thoughtssucceeding one another with a quickness akin to inspiration,—wasanything but careless.  The “limæ labor” withhim was unsparing.  It was, he tells us, “first with doing,and then with undoing, and after that with doing again,” thathis books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mineof Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from thenarrow dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine;books which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicityof language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, andearnestness of piety have never been surpassed.

Bunyan’s prison life when the first bitterness of it was past,and habit had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it wouldseem, not an unhappy one.  A manly self-respect bore him up andforbade his dwelling on the darker features of his position, or thinkingor 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 occasionrequired.  It was observed he never spoke of himself or his parents,but seemed low in his own eyes.  He was never heard to reproachor revile, whatever injury he received, but rather rebuked those whodid so.  He managed all things with such exactness as if he hadmade it his study not to give offence.”

According to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe, in 1666, the yearof the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol,“by the intercession of some interest or power that took pityon his sufferings,” he enjoyed a short interval of liberty. Who these friends and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it wouldbe vain to conjecture.  This period of freedom, however, was veryshort.  He at once resumed his old work of preaching, against whichthe laws had become even more stringent during his imprisonment, andwas 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, whenthe constable came in to take him.  Bunyan fixed his eyes on theman, who turned pale, let go his hold, and drew back, while Bunyan exclaimed,“See how this man trembles at the word of God!”  Thisis all we know of his second arrest, and even this little is somewhatdoubtful.  The time, the place, the circumstances, are as provokinglyvague as much else of Bunyan’s life.  The fact, however,is certain.  Bunyan returned to Bedford gaol, where he spent anothersix years, until the issuing of the “Declaration of Indulgence”early in 1672 opened the long-closed doors, and he walked out a freeman, and with what he valued far more than personal liberty, freedomto deliver Christ’s message as he understood it himself, nonemaking him afraid, and to declare to his brother sinners what theirSaviour had done for them, and what he expected them to do that theymight obtain the salvation He died to win.

From some unknown cause, perhaps the depressing effect of protractedconfinement, during this second six years Bunyan’s pen was farless prolific than during the former period.  Only two of his booksare dated in these years.  The last of these, “A Defenceof the Doctrine of Justification by Faith,” a reply to a workof Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, the rector of Northill,was written in hot haste immediately before his release, and issuedfrom the press contemporaneously with it, the prospect of liberty apparentlybreathing new life into his wearied soul.  When once Bunyan becamea free man again, his pen recovered its former copiousness of production,and the works by which he has been immortalized, “The Pilgrim’sProgress”—which has been erroneously ascribed to Bunyan’stwelve years’ imprisonment—and its sequel, “The HolyWar,” and the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” anda host of more strictly theological works, followed one another in rapidsuccession.

Bunyan’s second term of imprisonment was certainly less severethan 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 careand trust into his hands.”  Towards the close of his imprisonmentits rigour was still further relaxed.  The Bedford church bookbegins its record again in 1688, after an interval of ominous silenceof five years, when the persecution was at the hottest.  In itsearliest entries we find Bunyan’s name, which occurs repeatedlyup to the date of his final release in 1672.  Not one of thesenotices gives the slightest allusion of his being a prisoner. He is deputed with others to visit and remonstrate with backslidingbrethren, and fulfil other commissions on behalf of the congregation,as if he were in the full enjoyment of his liberty.  This was inthe two years’ interval between the expiration of the ConventicleAct, 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 ofespionage was set on foot and the vilest wretches drove a lucrativetrade 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, therewas “very little fruit.”  One of the first and mostnotable consequences of this change of policy was Bunyan’s release.

Mr. Offor’s patient researches in the State Paper Office haveproved that the Quakers, than whom no class of sectaries had sufferedmore severely from the persecuting edicts of the Crown, were mainlyinstrumental in throwing open the prison doors to those who, like Bunyan,were in bonds for the sake of their religion.  Gratitude to JohnGroves, the Quaker mate of Tattersall’s fishing boat, in whichCharles had escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, had something,and the untiring advocacy of George Whitehead, the Quaker, had stillmore, to do with this act of royal clemency.  We can readily believethat the good-natured Charles was not sorry to have an opportunity ofevidencing his sense of former services rendered at a time of his greatestextremity.  But the main cause lay much deeper, and is connectedwith what Lord Macaulay justly styles “one of the worst acts ofone of the worst governments that England has ever seen”—thatof 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 Frenchking, he declared himself a Roman Catholic at heart, and bound himselfto take the first opportunity of “changing the present state ofreligion in England for a better,” and restoring the authorityof the Pope.  The announcement of his conversion Charles foundit convenient to postpone.  Nor could the other part of his engagementbe safely carried into effect at once.  It called for secret andcautious preparation.  But to pave the way for it, by an unconstitutionalexercise of his prerogative he issued a Declaration of Indulgence whichsuspended all penal laws against “whatever sort of Nonconformistsor Recusants.”  The latter were evidently the real objectof the indulgence; the former class were only introduced the betterto cloke his infamous design.  Toleration, however, was thus atlast secured, and the long-oppressed Nonconformists hastened to profitby 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 wereset free to worship God after their own fashion.  John Bunyan leftthe prison which had for twelve years been his home.”  Morethan three thousand licenses to preach were at once issued.  Oneof the earliest of these, dated May 9, 1672, four months before hisformal pardon under the Great Seal, was granted to Bunyan, who in thepreceding January had been chosen their minister by the little congregationat Bedford, and “giving himself up to serve Christ and His Churchin that charge, had received of the elders the right hand of fellowship.” The place licensed for the exercise of Bunyan’s ministry was abarn standing in an orchard, once forming part of the Castle Moat, whichone of the congregation, Josias Roughead, acting for the members ofhis church, had purchased.  The license bears date May 9, 1672. This primitive place of worship, in which Bunyan preached regularlytill his death, was pulled down in 1707, when a “three-ridgedmeeting-house” was erected in its place.  This in its turngave way, in 1849, to the existing more seemly chapel, to which thepresent Duke of Bedford, in 1876, presented a pair of noble bronze doorsbearing scenes, in high relief, from “The Pilgrim’s Progress,”the work of Mr. Frederick Thrupp.  In the vestry are preservedBunyan’s chair, and other relics of the man who has made the nameof Bedford famous to the whole civilized world.

CHAPTER VII.

Mr. Green has observed that Bunyan “found compensation forthe narrow bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of his pen. Tracts, controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his ‘GraceAbounding,’ and his ‘Holy War,’ followed each otherin quick succession.”  Bunyan’s literary fertilityin the earlier half of his imprisonment was indeed amazing.  Evenif, as seems almost certain, we have been hitherto in error in assigningthe First Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” to thisperiod, while the “Holy War” certainly belongs to a later,the works which had their birth in Bedford Gaol during the first sixyears of his confinement, are of themselves sufficient to make the reputationof any ordinary writer.  As has been already remarked, for someunexplained cause, Bunyan’s gifts as an author were much moresparingly called into exercise during the second half of his captivity. Only two works appear to have been written between 1666 and his releasein 1672.

Mr. Green has spoken of “poems” as among the productsof Bunyan’s pen during this period.  The compositions inverse belonging to this epoch, of which there are several, hardly deserveto be dignified with so high a title.  At no part of his life hadBunyan much title to be called a poet.  He did not aspire beyondthe rank of a versifier, who clothed his thoughts in rhyme or metreinstead of the more congenial prose, partly for the pleasure of theexercise, partly because he knew by experience that the lessons he wishedto inculcate were more likely to be remembered in that form.  Mr.Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan’s verse than iscommonly held, remarks that though it is the fashion to apply the epithetof “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 truethan in his prose, is seldom wholly at fault, and whether in prose orverse, 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 beforehis release—his “Four Last Things,” his “Ebaland Gerizim,” and his “Prison Meditations”—canbe said to show much poetical power.  At best he is a mere rhymester,to whom rhyme and metre, even when self-chosen, were as uncongenialaccoutrements “as Saul’s armour was to David.” The first-named book, which is entitled a “Conference betweenChrist and a Sinner,” in the form of a poetical dialogue, accordingto Dr. Brown has “small literary merit of any sort.” The others do not deserve much higher commendation.  There is anindividuality about the “Prison Meditations” which impartsto it a personal interest, which is entirely wanting in the other twoworks, which may be characterized as metrical sermons, couched in verseof the Sternhold and Hopkins type.  A specimen or two will suffice. The “Four Last Things” thus opens:—

“These lines I at this time present
To all that will them heed,
Wherein I show to what intent
God saith, ‘Convert with speed.’
For these four things come on apace,
Which we should know full well,
Both death and judgment, and, in place
Next to them, heaven and hell.”

The following lines are from “Ebal and Gerizim”:—

“Thou art like one that hangeth by a thread
Over the mouth of hell, as one half dead;
And oh, how soon this thread may broken be,
Or cut by death, is yet unknown to thee.
But sure it is if all the weight of sin,
And all that Satan too hath doing been
Or yet can do, can break this crazy thread,
’Twill not be long before among the dead
Thou tumble do, as linkèd fast in chains,
With them to wait in fear for future pains.”

The poetical effusion entitled “Prison Meditations” doesnot in any way rise above the prosaic level of its predecessors. But it can be read with less weariness from the picture it presentsof Bunyan’s prison life, and of the courageous faith which sustainedhim.  Some unnamed friend, it would appear, fearing he might flinch,had written him a letter counselling him to keep “his head abovethe flood.”  Bunyan replied in seventy stanzas in balladmeasure, thanking his correspondent for his good advice, of which heconfesses 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 likea hill from which he could see beyond this world, and take his fillof the blessedness of that which remains for the Christian.  Thoughin bonds his mind is free, and can wander where it will.

“For though men keep my outward man
Within their locks and bars,
Yet by the faith of Christ, I can
Mount higher than the stars.”

Meanwhile his captivity is sweetened by the thought of what it wasthat brought him there:—

“I here am very much refreshed
To think, when I was out,
I preachèd life, and peace, and rest,
To sinners round about.

My business then was souls to save
By preaching grace and faith,
Of which the comfort now I have
And have it shall till death.

That was the work I was about
When hands on me they laid.
’Twas this for which they plucked me out
And vilely to me said,

‘You heretic, deceiver, come,
To prison you must go,
You preach abroad, and keep not home,
You are the Church’s foe.’

Wherefore to prison they me sent,
Where to this day I lie,
And can with very much content
For my profession die.

The prison very sweet to me
Hath been since I came here,
And so would also hanging be
If God would there appear.

To them that here for evil lie
The place is comfortless;
But not to me, because that I
Lie here for righteousness.

The truth and I were both here cast
Together, and we do
Lie arm in arm, and so hold fast
Each other, this is true.

Who now dare say we throw away
Our goods or liberty,
When God’s most holy Word doth say
We gain thus much thereby?”

It will be seen that though Bunyan’s verses are certainly nothigh-class poetry, they are very far removed from doggerel.  Nothingindeed that Bunyan ever wrote, however rugged the rhymes and limpingthe metre, can be so stigmatized.  The rude scribblings on themargins of the copy of the “Book of Martyrs,” which bearsBunyan’s signature on the title-pages, though regarded by Southeyas “undoubtedly” his, certainly came from a later and mustless instructed pen.  And as he advanced in his literary career,his claim to the title of a poet, though never of the highest, was muchstrengthened.  The verses which diversify the narrative in theSecond Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” are decidedlysuperior 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 theValley of Humiliation, “in very mean clothes, but with a veryfresh and well-favoured countenance, and wearing more of the herb calledHeartsease in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet?”—

“He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble, ever shall
Have God to be his guide.

I am content with what I have,
Little be it or much,
And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.

Fulness to such a burden is
That go on Pilgrimage,
Here little, and hereafter Bliss
Is best from age to age.”

Bunyan reaches a still higher flight in Valiant-for-Truth’ssong, later on, the Shakesperian ring of which recalls Amiens’in “As You Like It,”

“Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me. . .
Come hither, come hither,”

and has led some to question whether it can be Bunyan’s own. The resemblance, as Mr. Froude remarks, is “too near to be accidental.” “Perhaps he may have heard the lines, and the rhymes may haveclung to him without his knowing whence they came.”

“Who would true Valour see,
Let him come hither,
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather.
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a Pilgrim.

Who so beset him round
With dismal stories,
Do but themselves confound
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a Pilgrim.

Hobgoblin nor foul fiend
Can daunt his spirit,
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labour night and day
To be a Pilgrim.”

All readers of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and “TheHoly War” are familiar with the long metrical compositions givingthe history of these works by which they are prefaced and the latterwork is closed.  No more characteristic examples of Bunyan’smuse can be found.  They show his excellent command of his nativetongue in racy vernacular, homely but never vulgar, and his power ofexpressing his meaning “with sharp defined outlines and withoutthe waste of a word.”

Take this account of his perplexity, when the First Part of his “Pilgrim’sProgress” was finished, whether it should be given to the worldor no, and the characteristic decision with which he settled the questionfor himself:—

“Well, when I had then put mine ends together,
I show’d them others that I might see whether
They would condemn them, or them justify;
And some said Let them live; some, Let them die.
Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so;
Some said it might do good; others said No.
Now was I in a strait, and did not see
Which was the best thing to be done by me;
At last I thought since you are thus divided
I print it will; and so the case decided;”

or the lines in which he introduces the Second Part of the Pilgrimto the readers of the former part:—

“Go now, my little Book, to every place
Where my first Pilgrim hath but shown his face:
Call at their door: If any say, ‘Who’s there?’
Then answer that Christiana is here.
If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
With all thy boys.  And then, as thou knowest how,
Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.
But if they should not, ask them yet again
If formerly they did not entertain
One Christian, a pilgrim.  If they say
They did, and were delighted in his way:
Then let them know that these related are
Unto him, yea, his wife and children are.
Tell them that they have left their house and home,
Are turned Pilgrims, seek a world to come;
That they have met with hardships on the way,
That they do meet with troubles night and day.”

How racy, even if the lines are a little halting, is the defenceof the genuineness of his Pilgrim in “The Advertisement to theReader” at the end of “The Holy War.”

“Some say the Pilgrim’s Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine
In name or fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother;
Or that so fond I am of being sire
I’ll father bastards; or if need require,
I’ll tell a lie or print to get applause.
I scorn it.  John such dirt-heap never was
Since God converted him. . .
Witness my name, if anagram’d to thee
The letters make Nu hony in a B.
IOHN BUNYAN.”

How full of life and vigour his sketch of the beleaguerment and deliveranceof “Mansoul,” as a picture of his own spiritual experience,in the introductory verses to “The Holy War”!—

“For my part I, myself, was in the town,
Both when ’twas set up, and when pulling down;
I saw Diabolus in possession,
And Mansoul also under his oppression.
Yes, I was there when she crowned him for lord,
And to him did submit with one accord.
When Mansoul trampled upon things divine,
And wallowed in filth as doth a swine,
When she betook herself unto her arms,
Fought her Emmanuel, despised his charms:
Then I was there, and did rejoice to see
Diabolus and Mansoul so agree.
I saw the prince’s armed men come down
By troops, by thousands, to besiege the town,
I saw the captains, heard the trumpets sound,
And how his forces covered all the ground,
Yea, how they set themselves in battle array,
I shall remember to my dying day.”

Bunyan’s other essays in the domain of poetry need not detainus long.  The most considerable of these—at least in bulk—ifit 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 Bookof 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 andnever successfully: in the nature of things success in such a task isimpossible, nor can this attempt be regarded as happier than that ofothers.  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 collectedworks of a poet laureate, we should consider that a difficult task hadbeen accomplished successfully.”  It would seem almost doubtfulwhether Mr. Froude can have read the compositions that he commends solargely, and so much beyond their merit.  The following specimen,taken haphazard, will show how thoroughly Bunyan or the rhymester, whoeverhe may be, has overcome what Mr. Froude regards as an almost insuperabledifficulty, and has managed to “spoil completely the faultlessprose of the English translation”:—

“Ruth replied,
Intreat me not to leave thee or return;
For where thou goest I’ll go, where thou sojourn
I’ll sojourn also—and what people’s thine,
And who thy God, the same shall both be mine.
Where thou shalt die, there will I die likewise,
And I’ll be buried where thy body lies.
The Lord do so to me and more if I
Do leave thee or forsake thee till I die.”

The more we read of these poems, not given to the world till twelveyears after Bunyan’s death, and that by a publisher who was “arepeated offender against the laws of honest dealing,” the morewe are inclined to agree with Dr. Brown, that the internal evidenceof their style renders their genuineness at the least questionable. In the dull prosaic level of these compositions there is certainly notrace of the “force and power” always present in Bunyan’srudest rhymes, still less of the “dash of genius” and the“sparkle of soul” which occasionally discover the hand ofa master.

Of the authenticity of Bunyan’s “Divine Emblems,”originally published three years after his death under the title of“Country Rhymes for Children,” there is no question. The internal evidence confirms the external.  The book is thoroughlyin Bunyan’s vein, and in its homely naturalness of imagery recallsthe similitudes of the “Interpreter’s House,” especiallythose expounded to Christiana and her boys.  As in that “houseof imagery” things of the most common sort, the sweeping of aroom, the burning of a fire, the drinking of a chicken, a robin witha spider in his mouth, are made the vehicle of religious teaching; soin this “Book for Boys and Girls,” a mole burrowing in theground, a swallow soaring in the air, the cuckoo which can do nothingbut utter two notes, a flaming and a blinking candle, or a pound ofcandles falling to the ground, a boy chasing a butterfly, the cacklingof a hen when she has laid her egg, all, to his imaginative mind, setforth some spiritual truth or enforce some wholesome moral lesson. How racy, though homely, are these lines on a Frog!—

“The Frog by nature is but damp and cold,
Her mouth is large, her belly much will hold,
She sits somewhat ascending, loves to be
Croaking in gardens, though unpleasantly.

The hypocrite is like unto this Frog,
As like as is the puppy to the dog.
He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide
To prate, and at true goodness to deride.
And though this world is that which he doth love,
He mounts his head as if he lived above.
And though he seeks in churches for to croak,
He neither seeketh Jesus nor His yoke.”

There is some real poetry in those on the Cuckoo, though we may beinclined to resent his harsh treatment of our universal favourite:—

“Thou booby says’t thou nothing but Cuckoo?
The robin and the wren can that outdo.
They to us play thorough their little throats
Not one, but sundry pretty tuneful notes.
But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.

Thy notes do not first welcome in our spring,
Nor dost thou its first tokens to us bring.
Birds less than thee by far like prophets do
Tell us ’tis coming, though not by Cuckoo,
Nor dost thou summer bear away with thee
Though thou a yawling bawling Cuckoo be.
When thou dost cease among us to appear,
Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year.
But thou hast fellows, some like thee can do
Little but suck our eggs, and sing Cuckoo.

Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring
Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in,
And since while here, she only makes a noise
So pleasing unto none as girls and boys,
The Formalist we may compare her to,
For he doth suck our eggs and sing Cuckoo.”

A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness,sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesqueimages, 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 countryaccent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads.”  Butif the lines are unpolished, “they have pith and sinew, like thetalk of a shrewd peasant,” with the “strong thought andthe knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a single blow thenail home to the head.”

During his imprisonment Bunyan’s pen was much more fertilein prose than in poetry.  Besides his world-famous “GraceAbounding,” he produced during the first six years of his gaollife a treatise on prayer, entitled “Praying in the Spirit;”a book on “Christian Behaviour,” setting forth with uncompromisingplainness the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children,masters and servants, by which those who profess a true faith are boundto show forth its reality and power; the “Holy City,” anexposition 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 hisbrethren in bonds in their prison chamber; and a work on the “Resurrectionof the Dead and Eternal Judgment.”  On these works we maynot linger.  There is not one of them which is not marked by vigourof thought, clearness of language, accuracy of arrangement, and deepspiritual experience.  Nor is there one which does not here andthere exhibit specimens of Bunyan’s picturesque imaginative power,and his command of forcible and racy language.  Each will rewardperusal.  His work on “Prayer” is couched in the mostexalted strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long andagonizing experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouringout of the soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing,delayed not denied, is granted.  It is, however, unhappily deformedby much ignorant reviling of the Book of Common Prayer.  He denouncesit as “taken out of the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragmentsof some popes, some friars, and I know not what;” and ridiculesthe order of service it propounds to the worshippers.  “Theyhave 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 beforeit comes: one for Christmas, another for Easter, and six days afterthat.  They have also bounded how many syllables must be said inevery one of them at their public exercises.  For each saint’sday 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, whenyou 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 apostlescame short of, as not being able to compose so profound a manner.” This bitter satirical vein in treating of sacred things is unworthyof its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence.  It hasits excuse in the hard measure he had received from those who were sounwisely endeavouring to force the Prayer Book on a generation whichhad largely forgotten it.  In his mind, the men and the book wereidentified, and the unchristian behaviour of its advocates blinded hiseyes to its merits as a guide to devotion.  Bunyan, when denouncingforms in worship, forgot that the same apostle who directs that in ourpublic assemblies everything should be done “to edification,”directs also that everything should be done “decently and in order.”

By far the most important of these prison works—“ThePilgrim’s Progress,” belonging, as will be seen, to a laterperiod—is the “Grace Abounding,” in which with inimitableearnestness and simplicity Bunyan gives the story of his early lifeand his religious history.  This book, if he had written no other,would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest masters of the English languageof his own or any other age.  In graphic delineation of the strugglesof a conscience convicted of sin towards a hardly won freedom and peace,the alternations of light and darkness, of hope and despair, which chequeredits course, its morbid self-torturing questionings of motive and action,this work of the travelling tinker, as a spiritual history, has neverbeen surpassed.  Its equal can hardly be found, save perhaps inthe “Confessions of St. Augustine.”  These, however,though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a more culturedstyle, and rise to a higher metaphysical region than Bunyan was capableof attaining to.  His level is a lower one, but on that level Bunyanis without a rival.  Never has the history of a soul convincedof the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as themost certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger ofhopeless, irreversible doom—seeing itself, to employ his own image,hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which mightsnap any moment—been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiringlanguage.  And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth. Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, butsimply telling in plain unadorned language what he had felt.  Theexperience was a very tremendous reality to him.  Like Dante, ifhe had not actually been in hell, he had been on the very thresholdof it; he had in very deed traversed “the Valley of the Shadowof Death,” had heard its “hideous noises,” and seen“the Hobgoblins of the Pit.”  He “spake whathe knew and testified what he had seen.”  Every sentencebreathes 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 specimensof his style, that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adornedhis narrative more plentifully.  But he dared not.  “Goddid not play in convincing him.  The devil did not play in temptinghim.  He himself did not play when he sunk as into a bottomlesspit, and the pangs of hell caught hold on him.  Nor could he playin relating them.  He must be plain and simple and lay down thething as it was.  He that liked it might receive it.  He thatdid not might produce a better.”  The remembrance of “hisgreat sins, his great temptations, his great fears of perishing forever, recalled the remembrance of his great help, his great supportfrom heaven, the great grace God extended to such a wretch as he was.” Having thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritualchildren, for whose use the work was originally composed and to whomit is dedicated,—“those whom God had counted him worthyto beget to Faith by his ministry in the Word”—to surveytheir own religious history, to “work diligently and leave nocorner unsearched.”  He would have them “remember theirtears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every hedge for mercy. Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember?  Had theyforgotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where Godvisited their souls?  Let them remember the Word on which the Lordhad caused them to hope.  If they had sinned against light, ifthey were tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let themremember that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and thatout of them all the Lord had delivered him.”  This dedicationends thus: “My dear children, the milk and honey is beyond thiswilderness.  God be merciful to you, and grant you be not slothfulto go in to possess the land.”

This remarkable book, as we learn from the title-page, was “writtenby his own hand in prison.”  It was first published by GeorgeLarkin in London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the yearof the Fire of London, about the time that he experienced his firstbrief release.  As with “The Pilgrim’s Progress,”the work grew in picturesque detail and graphic power in the author’shand after its first appearance.  The later editions supply someof the most interesting personal facts contained in the narrative, whichwere wanting when it first issued from the press.  His two escapesfrom drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder; his being drawnas a soldier, and his providential deliverance from death; the graphicaccount of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at Elstow Church,and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green—these and other minor toucheswhich give a life and colour to the story, which we should be very sorryto lose, are later additions.  It is impossible to over-estimatethe value of the “Grace Abounding,” both for the facts ofBunyan’s earlier life and for the spiritual experience of whichthese facts were, in his eyes only the outward framework.  Beginningwith his parentage and boyhood, it carries us down to his marriage andlife in the wayside-cottage at Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford’scongregation at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and hissubsequent call to the work of the ministry among them, and winds upwith an account of his apprehension, examinations, and imprisonmentin Bedford gaol.  The work concludes with a report of the conversationbetween his noble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judgesat the Midsummer assizes, narrated in a former chapter, “takendown,” he says, “from her own mouth.”  The wholestory is of such sustained interest that our chief regret on finishingit 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 distinguishedfrom an author, and of the circumstances of his life, is seen by a comparisonof 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 threefacts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little or nothing of all thathappened between his final release and his death.

The value of the “Grace Abounding,” however, as a workof experimental religion may be easily over-estimated.  It is notmany who can study Bunyan’s minute history of the various stagesof his spiritual life with real profit.  To some temperaments,especially among the young, the book is more likely to prove injuriousthan beneficial; it is calculated rather to nourish morbid imaginations,and a dangerous habit of introspection, than to foster the quiet growthof the inner life.  Bunyan’s unhappy mode of dealing withthe Bible as a collection of texts, each of Divine authority and declaringa definite meaning entirely irrespective of its context, by which thewords hide the Word, is also utterly destructive of the true purposeof the Holy Scriptures as a revelation of God’s loving and holymind and will.  Few things are more touching than the eagernesswith which, in his intense self-torture, Bunyan tried to evade the forceof those “fearful and terrible Scriptures” which appearedto seal his condemnation, and to lay hold of the promises to the penitentsinner.  His tempest-tossed spirit could only find rest by doingviolence to the dogma, then universally accepted and not quite extincteven in our own days, that the authority of the Bible—that “DivineLibrary”—collectively taken, belongs to each and every sentenceof the Bible taken for and by itself, and that, in Coleridge’swords, “detached sentences from books composed at the distanceof centuries, nay, sometimes at a millenium from each other, under differentdispensations and for different objects,” are to be brought together“into logical dependency.”  But “where the Spiritof the Lord is there is liberty.”  The divinely given lifein the soul of man snaps the bonds of humanly-constructed logical systems. Only those, however, who have known by experience the force of Bunyan’sspiritual combat, can fully appreciate and profit by Bunyan’snarrative.  He tells us on the title-page that it was written “forthe support of the weak and tempted people of God.”  Forsuch the “Grace Abounding to the chief of sinners” willever prove most valuable.  Those for whom it was intended willfind in it a message—of comfort and strength.

As has been said, Bunyan’s pen was almost idle during the lastsix years of his imprisonment.  Only two of his works were producedin this period: his “Confession of Faith,” and his “Defenceof the Doctrine of Justification by Faith.”  Both were writtenvery 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 theformer 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, heasserts, are “faith, and holiness springing therefrom, with anendeavour 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 hewill 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 forhaving it not.”  “He will receive them in the Lordas becometh saints.  If they will not have communion with him,the neglect is theirs not his.  But with the openly profane andungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take thecommunion, he will have no communion.  It would be a strange community,he says, that consisted of men and beasts.  Men do not receivetheir horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room bythemselves.”  As regards forms and ceremonies, he “cannotallow his soul to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitiousinventions of this world.  He is content to stay in prison eventill the moss grows on his eyelids rather than thus make of his consciencea continual butchery and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes andcommitting himself to the blind to lead him.  Eleven years’imprisonment was a weighty argument to pause and pause again over thefoundation of the principles for which he had thus suffered.  Thoseprinciples he had asserted at his trial, and in the tedious tract oftime since then he had in cold blood examined them by the Word of Godand found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from or deny them onpain of eternal damnation.”

The second-named work, the “Defence of the Doctrine of Justificationby Faith,” is entirely controversial.  The Rev. Edward Fowler,afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had publishedin 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 deeplystirred by what he deemed its subversion of the true foundation of Evangelicalreligion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks composeda long and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, anda confutation of its teaching.  Fowler’s doctrines as Bunyanunderstood them—or rather misunderstood them—awoke the worstside of his impetuous nature.  His vituperation of the author andhis book is coarse and unmeasured.  He roundly charges Fowler withhaving “closely, privily, and devilishly turned the grace of Godinto 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 viewthe rottenness of his heart, in principle diametrically opposite tothe simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, a glorious latitudinarian thatcan, as to religion, turn and twist like an eel on the angle, or ratherlike the weathercock that stands on the steeple;” and describeshim as “contradicting the wholesome doctrine of the Church ofEngland.”  He “knows him not by face much less hispersonal practise.”  He may have “kept himself clearof the ignorant Sir Johns who had for a long time, as a judgment ofGod, been made the mouth to the people—men of debauched liveswho for the love of filthy lucre and the pampering of their idle carcaseshad made shipwreck of their former faith;” but he does know thathaving been ejected as a Nonconformist in 1662, he had afterwards goneover to the winning side, and he fears that “such an unstableweathercock spirit as he had manifested would stumble the work and giveadvantage to the adversary to speak vilifyingly of religion.” No excuse can be offered for the coarse violence of Bunyan’s languagein this book; but it was too much the habit of the time to load a theologicalopponent with vituperation, to push his assertions to the furthest extreme,and make the most unwarrantable deductions from them.  It mustbe acknowledged that Bunyan does not treat Fowler and his doctrineswith fairness, and that, if the latter may be thought to depreciateunduly the sacrifice of the Death of Christ as an expiation for man’sguilt, and to lay too great a stress on the moral faculties remainingin the soul after the Fall, Bunyan errs still more widely on the otherside in asserting the absolute, irredeemable corruption of human nature,leaving nothing for grace to work upon, but demanding an absolutelyfresh creation, not a revivification of the Divine nature grievouslymarred but not annihilated by Adam’s sin.

A reply to Bunyan’s severe strictures was not slow to appear. The book bears the title, characteristic of the tone and language ofits contents, of “Dirt wip’t off; or, a manifestdiscovery of the Gross Ignorance, Erroneousness, and most Unchristianand Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan, Lay-preacher in Bedford.” It professes to be written by a friend of Fowler’s, but Fowlerwas generally accredited with it.  Its violent tirades againstone who, he says, had been “near these twenty years or longervery infamous in the Town and County of Bedford as a very PestilentSchismatick,” and whom he suggests the authorities have done wrongin letting out of prison, and had better clap in gaol again as “animpudent and malicious Firebrand,” have long since been consignedto a merciful oblivion, where we may safely leave them.

CHAPTER VIII.

Bunyan’s protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672. The exact date of his actual liberation is uncertain.  His pardonunder the Great Seal bears date September 13th.  But we find fromthe church books that he had been appointed pastor of the congregationto which he belonged as early as the 21st of January of that year, andon the 9th of May his ministerial position was duly recognized by theGovernment, and a license was granted to him to act “as preacherin the house of Josias Roughead,” for those “of the Persuasioncommonly called Congregational.”  His release would thereforeseem to have anticipated the formal issue of his pardon by four months. Bunyan was now half way through his forty-fourth year.  Sixteenyears still remained to him before his career of indefatigable servicein the Master’s work was brought to a close.  Of these sixteenyears, as has already been remarked, we have only a very general knowledge. Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known source from whichthey 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 acircle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose pen wasso ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written many—not onehas come down to us.  The pages of the church books during hispastorate are also provokingly barren of record, and little that theycontain is in Bunyan’s handwriting.  As Dr. Brown has said,“he seems to have been too busy to keep any records of his busylife.”  Nor can we fill up the blank from external authorities. The references to Bunyan in contemporary biographies are far fewer thanwe might have expected; certainly far fewer than we could have desired. But the little that is recorded is eminently characteristic.  Wesee him constantly engaged in the great work to which he felt God hadcalled him, and for which, “with much content through grace,”he had suffered twelve years’ incarceration.  In additionto the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own congregation,he took a general oversight of the villages far and near which had beenthe scene of his earlier ministry, preaching whenever opportunity offered,and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour, making long journeysinto 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, andthat not without peril after the revival of persecution; while the congregationsin London had the benefit of his exhortations at stated intervals. Almost the first thing Bunyan did, after his liberation from gaol, wasto make others sharers in his hardly won “liberty of prophesying,”by applying to the Government for licenses for preachers and preachingplaces in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring counties, under the Declarationof Indulgence.  The still existing list sent in to the authoritiesby him, in his own handwriting, contains the names of twenty-five preachersand thirty buildings, besides “Josias Roughead’s House inhis orchard at Bedford.”  Nineteen of these were in his ownnative 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 privatehouses.  Over these religious communities, bound together by acommon faith and common suffering, Bunyan exercised a quasi-episcopalsuperintendence, which gained for him the playful title of “BishopBunyan.”  In his regular circuits,—“visitations”we may not improperly term them,—we are told that he exerted himselfto relieve the temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,—sosoon and so cruelly revived,—ministered diligently to the sickand afflicted, and used his influence in reconciling differences between“professors of the gospel,” and thus prevented the scandalof litigation among Christians.  The closing period of Bunyan’slife was laborious but happy, spent “honourably and innocently”in writing, preaching, visiting his congregations, and planting daughterchurches.  “Happy,” writes Mr. Froude, “in hiswork; happy in the sense that his influence was daily extending—spreadingover his own country and to the far-off settlements of America,—hespent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting Castle outof sight, and the towers and minarets of Immanuel’s Land growingnearer and clearer as the days went on.”

With his time so largely occupied in his spiritual functions, hecould have had but small leisure to devote to his worldly calling. This, however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure notto have neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extenthe should work for his living.  He had a family to maintain. His congregation were mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contributemuch to their pastor’s support.  Had it been otherwise, Bunyanwas the last man in the world to make a trade of the gospel, and thoughnever hesitating to avail himself of the apostolic privilege to “liveof the gospel,” he, like the apostle of the Gentiles, would neverbe ashamed to “work with his own hands,” that he might “ministerto his own necessities,” and those of his family.  But fromthe time of his release he regarded his ministerial work as the chiefwork of his life.  “When he came abroad,” says onewho 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 theworld.  But yet he was not destitute of friends, who had all alongsupported 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 givehimself wholly up to the service of God.”  The anonymouswriter to whom we are indebted for information concerning his imprisonmentand his subsequent life, says that Bunyan, “contenting himselfwith that little God had bestowed upon him, sequestered himself fromall secular employments to follow that of his call to the ministry.” The fact, however, that in the “deed of gift” of all hisproperty to his wife in 1685, he still describes himself as a “brazier,”puts it beyond all doubt that though his ministerial duties were hischief concern, he prudently kept fast hold of his handicraft as a certainmeans of support for himself and those dependent on him.  On thewhole, Bunyan’s outward circumstances were probably easy. His wants were few and easily supplied.  “Having food andraiment” for himself, his wife, and his children, he was “therewithcontent.”  The house in the parish of St. Cuthbert’swhich was his home from his release to his death (unhappily demolishedfifty years back), shows the humble character of his daily life. It was a small cottage, such as labourers now occupy, with three smallrooms on the ground floor, and a garret with a diminutive dormer windowunder the high-pitched tiled roof.  Behind stood an outbuildingwhich served as his workshop.  We have a passing glimpse of thiscottage home in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary. One Mr. Bagford, otherwise unknown to us, had once “walked intothe country” on purpose to see “the study of John Bunyan,”and the student who made it famous.  On his arrival the interviewer—aswe should now call him—met with a civil and courteous receptionfrom Bunyan; but he found the contents of his study hardly larger thanthose of his prison cell.  They were limited to a Bible, and copiesof “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 immortaldreamer than many longer and more elaborate paragraphs.

Bunyan’s celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shutup in gaol, was naturally enhanced by the circumstance of his imprisonment. The barn in Josias Roughead’s orchard, where he was licensed asa preacher, was “so thronged the first time he appeared thereto edify, that many were constrained to stay without; every one thatwas of his persuasion striving to partake of his instructions.” Wherever he ministered, sometimes, when troublous days returned, inwoods, and in dells, and other hiding-places, the announcement thatJohn Bunyan was to preach gathered a large and attentive auditory, hangingon his lips and drinking from them the word of life.  His famegrew the more he was known and reached its climax when his work wasnearest its end.  His biographer Charles Doe tells us that justbefore his death, “when Mr. Bunyan preached in London, if therewere but one day’s notice given, there would be more people cometogether than the meeting-house could hold.  I have seen, by mycomputation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by seven o’clockon a working day, in the dark winter time.  I also computed aboutthree 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 backagain for want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door tobe pulled almost over people to get upstairs to his pulpit.” This “town’s-end meeting house” has been identifiedby some with a quaint straggling long building which once stood in QueenStreet, 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-housewas not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan’sdeath, and then for Presbyterian service.  Other places in Londonconnected with his preaching are Pinners’ Hall in Old Broad Street,where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermonon “The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Lossthereof,” first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen’s meeting-housein White’s Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place fortitled folk, city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position anddegree.  At earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformistswere in vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealthin private houses and other places where he might hope to escape thelynx-eyed informer.  It was at one of these furtive meetings thathis earliest biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of LondonBridge, Charles Doe, first heard him preach.  His choice of anOld Testament text at first offended Doe, who had lately come into NewTestament light and had had enough of the “historical and doing-for-favourof the Old Testament.”  But as he went on he preached “soNew Testament like” that his hearer’s prejudices vanished,and he could only “admire, weep for joy, and give the preacherhis affections.”

Bunyan was more than once urged to leave Bedford and settle in themetropolis.  But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear. Bedford was the home of his deepest affections.  It was there theholy words of the poor women “sitting in the sun,” speaking“as if joy did make them speak,” had first “made hisheart shake,” and shown him that he was still a stranger to vitalgodliness.  It was there he had been brought out of darkness intolight himself, and there too he had been the means of imparting thesame blessing to others.  The very fact of his long imprisonmenthad identified him with the town and its inhabitants.  There hehad a large and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the tiesof a common faith and common sufferings.  Many of these recognizedin Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few “of the basersort,” reverenced him as their teacher and guide.  No prospectof a wider field of usefulness, still less of a larger income, couldtempt him to desert his “few sheep in the wilderness.” Some of them, it is true, were wayward sheep, who wounded the heartof their pastor by breaking from the fold, and displaying very un-lamb-likebehaviour.  He had sometimes to realize painfully that no paleis so close but that the enemy will creep in somewhere and seduce theflock; and that no rules of communion, however strict, can effectuallyexclude 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 dayshave been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary Foskett, for “privatelywhispering of a horrid scandal, ‘without culler of truth,’against Brother Honeylove.”  Evil-speaking and backbitingset brother against brother.  Dissensions and heartburnings grievedBunyan’s spirit.  He himself was not always spared. A letter had to be written to Sister Hawthorn “by way of reprooffor her unseemly language against Brother Scot and the whole Church.” John Wildman was had up before the Church and convicted of being “anabominable liar and slanderer,” “extraordinary guilty”against “our beloved Brother Bunyan himself.”  Andthough Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by “humble acknowledgmentof her miscariag,” the bolder misdoer only made matters worseby “a frothy letter,” which left no alternative but a sentenceof expulsion.  But though Bunyan’s flock contained some whosefleeces 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 satisfactionas “his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing.”  Fromsuch he could not be severed lightly.  Inducements which wouldhave 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 incometo keep his station.”  As Dr. Brown says: “He was toodeeply rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings tothink of striking his tent till the command came from the Master tocome up to the higher service for which he had been ripening so long.” At Bedford, therefore, he remained; quietly staying on in his cottagein St. Cuthbert’s, and ministering to his humble flock, lovingand beloved, as Mr. Froude writes, “through changes of ministry,Popish plots, and Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restorationof Popery was bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets,and confident that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforwardcould only bite his nails at the passing pilgrims.”

Bunyan’s peace was not, however, altogether undisturbed. Once it received a shock in a renewal of his imprisonment, though onlyfor a brief period, in 1675, to which we owe the world-famous “Pilgrim’sProgress”; and it was again threatened, though not actually disturbedten years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconformistsinduced him to make over all his property—little enough in goodsooth—to his wife by deed of gift.

The former of these events demands our attention, not so much foritself as for its connection with Bishop Barlow’s interferencein Bunyan’s behalf, and, still more, for its results in the productionof “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”  Until very recentlythe bare fact of this later imprisonment, briefly mentioned by CharlesDoe and another of his early biographers, was all that was known tous.  They even leave the date to be gathered, though both agreein limiting its duration to six months or thereabouts.  The recentdiscovery, among the Chauncey papers, by Mr. W. G. Thorpe, of the originalwarrant under which Bunyan was at this time sent to gaol, supplies themissing information.  It has been already noticed that the Declarationof Indulgence, under which Bunyan was liberated in 1672, was very short-lived. Indeed it barely lasted in force a twelvemonth.  Granted on the15th of March of that year, it was withdrawn on the 9th of March ofthe following year, at the instance of the House of Commons, who hadtaken alarm at a suspension of the laws of the realm by the “inherentpower” 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 promisedto the royal spendthrift as a reward for his complaisance.  Thesame year the Test Act became law.  Bunyan therefore and his fellowNonconformists were in a position of greater peril, as far as the letterof the law was concerned, than they had ever been.  But, as Dr.Stoughton has remarked, “the letter of the law is not to be takenas an accurate index of the Nonconformists’ condition.  Thepressure of a bad law depends very much upon the hands employed in itsadministration.”  Unhappily for Bunyan, the parties in whosehands the execution of the penal statutes against Nonconformists restedin Bedfordshire were his bitter personal enemies, who were not likelyto let them lie inactive.  The prime mover in the matter was doubtlessDr. William Foster, that “right Judas” whom we shall rememberholding the candle in Bunyan’s face in the hall of HarlingtonHouse 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 whichput in his hands extensive powers which he had used with the most relentlessseverity.  He has damned himself to eternal infamy by the bitterzeal he showed in hunting down Dissenters, inflicting exorbitant fines,and breaking into their houses and distraining their goods for a fulldischarge, maltreating their wives and daughters, and haling the offendersto prison.  Having been chiefly instrumental in Bunyan’sfirst committal to gaol, he doubtless viewed his release with indignationas the leader of the Bedfordshire sectaries who was doing more mischiefto the cause of conformity, which it was his province at all hazardsto maintain, than any other twenty men.  The church would neverbe safe till he was clapped in prison again.  The power to do thiswas given by the new proclamation.  By this act the licenses topreach previously granted to Nonconformists were recalled.  Henceforwardno conventicle had “any authority, allowance, or encouragementfrom his Majesty.”  We can easily imagine the delight withwhich Foster would hail the issue of this proclamation.  How hewould read and read again with ever fresh satisfaction its stringentclauses.  That pestilent fellow, Bunyan, was now once more in hisclutches.  This time there was no chance of his escape.  Alllicences were recalled, and he was absolutely defenceless.  Itshould not be Foster’s fault if he failed to end his days in theprison from which he ought never to have been released.  The proclamationis dated the 4th of March, 1674-5, and was published in the Gazetteon the 9th.  It would reach Bedford on the 11th.  It placedBunyan at the mercy of “his enemies, who struck at him forthwith.” A warrant was issued for his apprehension, undoubtedly written by ourold 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 thanthirteen magistrates, ten of them affixing their seals.

That so unusually large a number took part in the execution of thiswarrant, is sufficient indication of the importance attached to Bunyan’simprisonment by the gentry of the county.  The following is thedocument:—

“To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them

Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that (notwithstandingthe Kings Majties late Act of most gracious generall and free pardonto all his subjects for past misdemeanours that by his said clemencieand indulgent grace and favor they might bee mooved and induced forthe time to come more carefully to observe his Highenes lawes and Statutesand to continue in theire loyall and due obedience to his Majtie) Yettone John Bunnyon of youre said Towne Tynker hath divers times withinone month last past in contempt of his Majtie’s good Lawes preachedor teached at a Conventicle Meeting or Assembly under color or ptenceof exercise of Religion in other manner than according to the Liturgieor practiss of the Church of England  These are therefore in hisMajties name to comand you forthwith to apprehend and bring the Bodyof the said John Bunnion before us or any of us or other his MajtiesJustice of Peace within the said County to answer the premisses andfurther to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice shall appertaine andhereof you are not to faile.  Given under our handes and sealesthis ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth yeare of the Raigneof our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second  Aque Dni., juxta &c 1674

J Napier     W Beecher    G Blundell      Hum: Monoux
Will ffranklin     John Ventris
Will Spencer
Will Gery       St Jo Chernocke         Wm Daniels
T Browne          W ffoster
Gaius Squire”

There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant.

John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest,would be immediately committed for trial.  Once more, then, Bunyanbecame a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quartersin the Bedford gaol.  Errors die hard, and those by whom they havebeen once accepted find it difficult to give them up.  The long-standingtradition of Bunyan’s twelve years’ imprisonment in thelittle lock-up-house on the Ouse bridge, having been scattered to thewinds by the logic of fact and common sense, those to whom the storyis 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 compositionof “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” they hold that on thisoccasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol, and that he therewrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring forward any satisfactoryreasons for the change of the place of his confinement.  The circumstances,however, being the same, there can be no reasonable ground for questioningthat, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned in the county gaol.

This last imprisonment of Bunyan’s lasted only half as manymonths as his former imprisonment had lasted years.  At the endof six months he was again a free man.  His release was due tothe good officers of Owen, Cromwell’s celebrated chaplain, withBarlow, Bishop of Lincoln.  The suspicion which hung over thisintervention from its being erroneously attributed to his release in1672, three years before Barlow became a bishop, has been dispelledby the recently discovered warrant.  The dates and circumstancesare now found to tally.  The warrant for Bunyan’s apprehensionbears date March 4, 1675.  On the 14th of the following May thesupple 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 dubiouschurchmanship, who had succeeded in keeping his university appointmentsundisturbed all through the Commonwealth, and who was yet among thefirst with effusive loyalty to welcome the restoration of monarchy,had been Owen’s tutor at Oxford, and continued to maintain friendlyrelations with him.  As bishop of the diocese to which Bedfordshirethen, and long after, belonged, Barlow had the power, by the then existinglaw, of releasing a prisoner for nonconformity on a bond given by twopersons that he would conform within half a year.  A friend ofBunyan’s, probably Ichabod Chauncey, obtained a letter from Owento the bishop requesting him to employ this prerogative in Bunyan’sbehalf.  Barlow with hollow complaisance expressed his particularkindness for Dr. Owen, and his desire to deny him nothing he could legallygrant.  He would even strain a point to serve him.  But hehad only just been made a bishop, and what was asked was a new thingto him.  He desired a little time to consider of it.  If hecould do it, Owen might be assured of his readiness to oblige him. A second application at the end of a fortnight found this readinessmuch cooled.  It was true that on inquiry he found he might doit; but the times were critical, and he had many enemies.  It wouldbe safer for him not to take the initiative.  Let them apply tothe Lord Chancellor, and get him to issue an order for him to releaseBunyan 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 pointto be strained.  He had satisfied himself that he might do thething 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 Bunyanwas to be liberated, his friends must accept Barlow’s terms. “This at last was done, and the poor man was released.  Butlittle thanks to the bishop.”

This short six months’ imprisonment assumes additional importancefrom the probability, first suggested by Dr. Brown, which the recoveryof its date renders almost a certainty, that it was during this periodthat Bunyan began, if he did not complete, the first part of “ThePilgrim’s Progress.”  We know from Bunyan’s ownwords that the book was begun in gaol, and its composition has beenhitherto 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 firstedition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” did not appeartill 1678.  If written during his earlier imprisonment, six yearsmust have elapsed between its writing and its publication.  Butit was not Bunyan’s way to keep his works in manuscript so longafter their completion.  His books were commonly put in the printers’hands as soon as they were finished.  There are no sufficient reasons—thoughsome have been suggested—for his making an exception to this generalhabit 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 itsbeing given to the world.  After having written the book, he tellsus, simply to gratify himself, spending only “vacant seasons”in his “scribble,” to “divert” himself “fromworser thoughts,” he showed it to his friends to get their opinionwhether it should be published or not.  But as they were not allof one mind, but some counselled one thing and some another, after someperplexity, he took the matter into his own hands.

“Now was I in a strait, and did not see
Which was the best thing to be done by me;
At last I thought, Since you are so divided,
I print it will, and so the case decided.”

We must agree with Dr. Brown that “there is a briskness aboutthis which, to say the least, is not suggestive of a six years’interval before publication.”  The break which occurs inthe narrative after the visit of the Pilgrims to the Delectable Mountains,which so unnecessarily interrupts the course of the story—“SoI awoke from my dream; and I slept and dreamed again”—hasbeen not unreasonably thought by Dr. Brown to indicate the point Bunyanhad reached when his six months’ imprisonment ended, and fromwhich he continued the book after his release.

The First Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” issuedfrom the press in 1678.  A second edition followed in the sameyear, and a third with large and important additions in 1679. The Second Part, after an interval of seven years, followed early in1685.  Between the two parts appeared two of his most celebratedworks—the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” publishedin 1680, originally intended to supply a contrast and a foil to “ThePilgrim’s Progress,” by depicting a life which was scandalouslybad; and, in 1682, that which Macaulay, with perhaps exaggerated eulogy,has said, “would have been our greatest allegory if the earlierallegory had never been written,” the “Holy War made byShaddai upon Diabolus.”  Superior to “The Pilgrim’sProgress” as a literary composition, this last work must be pronounceddecidedly inferior to it in attractive power.  For one who readsthe “Holy War,” five hundred read the “Pilgrim.” And those who read it once return to it again and again, with ever freshdelight.  It is a book that never tires.  One or two perusalsof the “Holy War” satisfy: and even these are not withoutweariness.  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-speakingfamily on the globe.”

Leaving the further notice of these and his other chief literaryproductions to another chapter, there is little more to record in Bunyan’slife.  Though never again seriously troubled for his nonconformity,his preaching journeys were not always without risk.  There isa tradition that when he visited Reading to preach, he disguised himselfas a waggoner carrying a long whip in his hand to escape detection. The name of “Bunyan’s Dell,” in a wood not very farfrom Hitchin, tells of the time when he and his hearers had to concealtheir meetings from their enemies’ quest, with scouts plantedon every side to warn them of the approach of the spies and informers,who for reward were actively plying their odious trade.  Referencehas already been made to Bunyan’s “deed of gift” ofall 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—tohis well-beloved wife Elizabeth Bunyan.”  Towards the closeof the first year of James the Second, 1685, the apprehensions underwhich 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 recordshad the condition of the Puritans been so deplorable.  Never hadspies been so actively employed in detecting congregations.  Neverhad magistrates, grand-jurors, rectors, and churchwardens been so muchon the alert.  Many Nonconformists were cited before the ecclesiasticalcourts.  Others found it necessary to purchase the connivance ofthe agents of the Government by bribes.  It was impossible forthe sectaries to pray together without precautions such as are employedby coiners and receivers of stolen goods.  Dissenting ministers,however blameless in life, however eminent in learning, could not ventureto 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 himselfin 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 fledthe kingdom.  Other weaker spirits were terrified into a show ofconformity.  Through many subsequent years the autumn of 1685 wasremembered as a time of misery and terror.  There is, however,no indication of Bunyan having been molested.  The “deedof gift” by which he sought to avoid the confiscation of his goodswas never called into exercise.  Indeed its very existence wasforgotten by his wife in whose behalf it had been executed.  Hiddenaway in a recess in his house in St. Cuthbert’s, this interestingdocument was accidentally discovered at the beginning of the presentcentury, and is preserved among the most valued treasures of the congregationwhich bears his name.

Quieter times for Nonconformists were however at hand.  Activepersecution was soon to cease for them, and happily never to be renewedin England.  The autumn of 1685 showed the first indications ofa great turn of fortune, and before eighteen months had elapsed, theintolerant king and the intolerant Church were eagerly bidding againsteach other for the support of the party which both had so deeply injured. A new form of trial now awaited the Nonconformists.  Peril to theirpersonal liberty was succeeded by a still greater peril to their honestyand consistency of spirit.  James the Second, despairing of employingthe Tories and the Churchmen as his tools, turned, as his brother hadturned before him, to the Dissenters.  The snare was craftily baitedwith a Declaration of Indulgence, by which the king, by his sole authority,annulled a long series of statutes and suspended all penal laws againstNonconformists of every sort.  These lately political Pariahs nowheld the balance of power.  The future fortunes of England dependedmainly on the course they would adopt.  James was resolved to convertthe House of Commons from a free deliberative assembly into a body subservientto his wishes, and ready to give parliamentary sanction to any edicthe 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 serviceperemptorily 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 obtainan obedient parliament, he must secure a roll of electors pledged toreturn 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 thedetails.  Bedford was dealt with in its turn.  Under James’spolicy of courting the Puritans, the leading Dissenters were the firstpersons to be approached.  Two are specially named, a Mr. Margetts,formerly Judge-Advocate-General of the Army under General Monk, andJohn Bunyan.  It is no matter of surprise that Bunyan, who hadbeen so severe a sufferer under the old penal statutes, should desiretheir abrogation, and express his readiness to “steer his friendsand followers” to support candidates who would pledge themselvesto vote for their repeal.  But no further would he go.  TheBedford Corporation was “regulated,” which means that nearlythe whole of its members were removed and others substituted by royalorder.  Of these new members some six or seven were leading personsof Bunyan’s congregation.  But, with all his ardent desirefor religious liberty, Bunyan was too keen-witted not to see throughJames’s policy, and too honest to give it any direct insidioussupport.  “In vain is the net spread in the sight of anybird.”  He clearly saw that it was not for any love of theDissenters that they were so suddenly delivered from their persecutions,and placed on a kind of equality with the Church.  The king’sobject was the establishment of Popery.  To this the Church wasthe chief obstacle.  That must be undermined and subverted first. That done, all other religious denominations would follow.  Allthat the Nonconformists would gain by yielding, was the favour Polyphemuspromised Ulysses, to be devoured last.  Zealous as he was for the“liberty of prophesying,” even that might be purchased attoo high a price.  The boon offered by the king was “goodin itself,” but not “so intended.”  So, as hisbiographer describes, when the regulators came, “he expressedhis zeal with some weariness as perceiving the bad consequences thatwould ensue, and laboured with his congregation” to prevent theirbeing imposed on by the fair promises of those who were at heart thebitterest enemies of the cause they professed to advocate.  Thenewly-modelled corporation of Bedford seems like the other corporationsthrough the country, to have proved as unmanageable as the old. As Macaulay says, “The sectaries who had declared in favour ofthe Indulgence had become generally ashamed of their error, and weredesirous to make atonement.”  Not knowing the man they hadto deal with, the “regulators” are said to have endeavouredto buy Bunyan’s support by the offer of some place under government. The bribe was indignantly rejected.  Bunyan even refused to seethe government agent who offered it,—“he would, by no meanscome to him, but sent his excuse.”  Behind the treacheroussunshine he saw a black cloud, ready to break.  The Ninevites’remedy he felt was now called for.  So he gathered his congregationtogether and appointed a day of fasting and prayer to avert the dangerthat, under a specious pretext, again menaced their civil and religiousliberties.  A true, sturdy Englishman, Bunyan, with Baxter andHowe, “refused an indulgence which could only be purchased bythe violent overthrow of the law.”

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution.  Four months afterhe had witnessed the delirious joy which hailed the acquittal of theseven bishops, the Pilgrim’s earthly Progress ended, and he wasbidden to cross the dark river which has no bridge.  The summonscame to him in the very midst of his religious activity, both as a preacherand as a writer.  His pen had never been more busy than when hewas bidden to lay it down finally.  Early in 1688, after a twoyears’ silence, attributable perhaps to the political troublesof the times, his “Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or a Help to DespairingSouls,” one of the best known and most powerfully characteristicof his works, had issued from the press, and had been followed by fourothers between March and August, the month of his death.  Thesebooks were, “The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate;” apoetical composition entitled “The Building, Nature, and Excellencyof the House of God,” a discourse on the constitution and governmentof the Christian Church; the “Water of Life,” and “Solomon’sTemple Spiritualized.”  At the time of his death he was occupiedin seeing through the press a sixth book, “The Acceptable Sacrifice,”which was published after his funeral.  In addition to these, Bunyanleft behind him no fewer than fourteen works in manuscript, writtenat 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 combmakerof London Bridge (who naively tells us how one day between the stairheadand the middle of the stairs, he resolved that the best work he coulddo 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 HeavenlyFootman,” bought by Doe of Bunyan’s eldest son, and, hesays, “put into the World in Print Word for Word as it came fromhim to Me.”

At the time that death surprised him, Bunyan had gained no smallcelebrity in London as a popular preacher, and approached the nearestto a position of worldly honour.  Though we must probably rejectthe idea that he ever filled the office of Chaplain to the Lord Mayorof London, Sir John Shorter, the fact that he is styled “his Lordship’steacher” proves that there was some relation more than that ofsimple friendship between the chief magistrate and the Bedford minister. But the society of the great was never congenial to him.  If theywere godly as well as great, he would not shrink from intercourse, withthose of a rank above his own, but his heart was with his own humblefolk at Bedford.  Worldly advancement he rejected for his familyas well as for himself.  A London merchant, it is said, offeredto take his son Joseph into his house of business without the customarypremium.  But the offer was declined with what we may consideran overstrained independence.  “God,” he said, “didnot send me to advance my family but to preach the gospel.” “An instance of other-worldliness,” writes Dr. Brown, “perhapsmore consistent with the honour of the father than with the prosperityof the son.”

Bunyan’s end was in keeping with his life.  He had eversought 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 ayoung man in whom he took an interest, had resolved, on some offence,real or supposed, to disinherit his son.  The young man soughtBunyan’s mediation.  Anxious to heal the breach, Bunyan mountedhis horse and took the long journey to the father’s house at Reading—thescene, as we have noticed, of his occasional ministrations—wherehe pleaded the offender’s cause so effectually as to obtain apromise of forgiveness.  Bunyan returned homewards through London,where he was appointed to preach at Mr. Gamman’s meeting-housenear Whitechapel.  His forty miles’ ride to London was throughheavy driving rain.  He was weary and drenched to the skin whenhe reached the house of his “very loving friend,” John Strudwick,grocer and chandler, at the sign of the Star, Holborn Bridge, at thefoot of Snow Hill, and deacon of the Nonconformist meeting in Red CrossStreet.  A few months before Bunyan had suffered from the sweatingsickness.  The exposure caused a return of the malady, and thoughwell enough to fulfil his pulpit engagement on Sunday, the 19th of August,on the following Tuesday dangerous symptoms declared themselves, andin ten days the disease proved fatal.  He died within two monthsof completing his sixtieth year, on the 31st of August, 1688, just amonth before the publication of the Declaration of the Prince of Orangeopened a new era of civil and religious liberty, and between two andthree months before the Prince’s landing in Torbay.  He wasburied in Mr. Strudwick’s newly-purchased vault, in what Southeyhas termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the burial-ground in Finsbury,taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field, from a vast mass of humanremains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul’s Cathedralin 1549.  At a later period it served as a place of interment forthose who died in the Great Plague of 1665.  The day after Bunyan’sfuneral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor, hada fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, and “followed him acrossthe river.”

By his first wife, whose Christian name is nowhere recorded, Bunyanhad four children—two sons and two daughters; and by his secondwife, the heroic Elizabeth, one son and one daughter.  All of thesesurvived him except his eldest daughter Mary, his tenderly-loved blindchild, who died before him.  His wife only survived him for a briefperiod, “following her faithful pilgrim from this world to theother 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 latehusband’s estate, which appears from the Register Book to haveamounted to no more than, £42 19s.  On this, and the proceedsof his books, she supported herself till she rejoined him.

Bunyan’s character and person are thus described by CharlesDoe: “He appeared in countenance to be of a stern and rough temper. But in his conversation he was mild and affable, not given to loquacityor much discourse in company, unless some urgent occasion required it. Observing never to boast of himself or his parts, but rather to seemlow 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 reconciledifferences and make friendship with all.  He had a sharp, quickeye, with an excellent discerning of persons, being of good judgmentand quick wit.  He was tall of stature, strong-boned, though notcorpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes, wearing hishair on his upper lip after the old British fashion.  His hairreddish, but in his later days time had sprinkled it with grey. His nose well set, but not declining or bending.  His mouth moderatelylarge, his forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest. Not puffed up in prosperity, nor shaken in adversity, always holdingthe golden mean.”

We may add the portrait drawn by one who had been his companion andfellow-sufferer for many years, John Nelson: “His countenancewas grave and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frameof his heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and did strikesomething of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God.”

The same friend speaks thus of Bunyan’s preaching: “Asa minister of Christ he was laborious in his work of preaching, diligentin his preparation for it, and faithful in dispensing the Word, notsparing reproof whether in the pulpit or no, yet ready to succour thetempted; a son of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunderto secure and dead sinners.  His memory was tenacious, it beingcustomary with him to commit his sermons to writing after he had preachedthem.  A rich anointing of the Spirit was upon him, yet this greatsaint was always in his own eyes the chiefest of sinners and the leastof saints.”

An anecdote is told which, Southey says, “authenticates itself,”that one day when he had preached “with peculiar warmth and enlargement,”one of his hearers remarked “what a sweet sermon he had delivered.” “Ay,” was Bunyan’s reply, “you have no needto tell me that, for the devil whispered it to me before I was wellout of the pulpit.”  As an evidence of the estimation inwhich Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it is recorded that Charlesthe Second expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen that “a learnedman such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker.” “May it please your Majesty,” Owen replied.  “Iwould gladly give up all my learning if I could preach like that tinker.”

Although much of Bunyan’s literary activity was devoted tocontroversy, 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 intovehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as itsperverters.  But this intensity of speech was coupled with theutmost charity of spirit towards those who differed from him. Few ever had less of the sectarian temper which lays greater stresson the infinitely small points on which all true Christians differ thanon the infinitely great truths on which they are agreed.  Bunyaninherited from his spiritual father, John Gifford, a truly catholicspirit.  External differences he regarded as insignificant wherehe found real Christian faith and love.  “I would be,”he writes, “as I hope I am, a Christian.  But for those factioustitles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I concludethat they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from Hellor from Babylon.”  “He was,” writes one of hisearly biographers, “a true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus,and did often bewail the different and distinguishing appellations thatare among the godly, saying he did believe a time would come when theyshould be all buried.”  The only persons he scrupled to holdcommunion with were those whose lives were openly immoral.  “Divisionsabout non-essentials,” he said, “were to churches what warswere to countries.  Those who talked most about religion caredleast for it; and controversies about doubtful things and things oflittle moment, ate up all zeal for things which were practical and indisputable.” His last sermon breathed the same catholic spirit, free from the trammelsof narrow sectarianism.  “If you are the children of Godlive together lovingly.  If the world quarrel with you it is nomatter; but it is sad if you quarrel together.  If this be amongyou it is a sign of ill-breeding.  Dost thou see a soul that hasthe image of God in him?  Love him, love him.  Say, ‘Thisman and I must go to heaven one day.’  Serve one another. Do good for one another.  If any wrong you pray to God to rightyou, and love the brotherhood.”  The closing words of thishis final testimony are such as deserve to be written in letters ofgold as the sum of all true Christian teaching: “Be ye holy inall 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 maylook your Father in the face with comfort another day.” “There is,” writes Dean Stanley, “no compromise inhis words, no faltering in his convictions; but his love and admirationare reserved on the whole for that which all good men love, and hisdetestation on the whole is reserved for that which all good men detest.” By the catholic spirit which breathes through his writings, especiallythrough “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the tinker of Elstow“has become the teacher not of any particular sect, but of theUniversal Church.”

CHAPTER IX.

We have, in this concluding chapter, to take a review of Bunyan’smerits as a writer, with especial reference to the works on which hisfame mainly rests, and, above all, to that which has given him his chieftitle to be included in a series of Great Writers, “The Pilgrim’sProgress.”  Bunyan, as we have seen, was a very copious author. His works, as collected by the late industrious Mr. Offor, fill threebulky quarto volumes, each of nearly eight hundred double-columned pagesin small type.  And this copiousness of production is combinedwith a general excellence in the matter produced.  While few ofhis books approach the high standard of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”or “Holy War,” none, it may be truly said, sink very farbelow that standard.  It may indeed be affirmed that it was impossiblefor Bunyan to write badly.  His genius was a native genius. As soon as he began to write at all, he wrote well.  Without anytraining, is he says, in the school of Aristotle or Plato, or any studyof the great masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a highlevel of thought and composition.  His earliest book, “SomeGospel Truths Opened,” “thrown off,” writes Dr. Brown,“at a heat,” displays the same ease of style and directnessof speech and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained tothe end.  The great charm which pervades all Bunyan’s writingsis their naturalness.  You never feel that he is writing for effect,still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work.  He writesbecause he had something to say which was worth saying, a message todeliver on which the highest interests of others were at stake, whichdemanded nothing more than a straightforward earnestness and plainnessof speech, such as coming from the heart might best reach the heartsof others.  He wrote as he spoke, because a necessity was laidupon him which he dared not evade.  As he says in a passage quotedin a former chapter, he might have stepped into a much higher style,and have employed more literary ornament.  But to attempt thiswould be, to one of his intense earnestness, to degrade his calling. He dared not do it.  Like the great Apostle, “his speechand preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, butin demonstration of the Spirit and in power.”  God had notplayed with him, and he dared not play with others.  His errandwas much too serious, and their need and danger too urgent to wastetime in tricking out his words with human skill.  And it is justthis which, with all their rudeness, their occasional bad grammar, andhomely colloquialisms, gives to Bunyan’s writings a power of rivetingthe attention and stirring the affections which few writers have attainedto.  The pent-up fire glows in every line, and kindles the heartsof his readers.  “Beautiful images, vivid expressions, forciblearguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings, solemn warnings,make those who read him all eye, all ear, all soul.”  Thisnative vigour is attributable, in no small degree, to the manner inwhich for the most part Bunyan’s works came into being. He did not set himself to compose theological treatises upon statedsubjects, but after he had preached with satisfaction to himself andacceptance with his audience, he usually wrote out the substance ofhis discourse from memory, with the enlargements and additions it mightseem to require.  And thus his religious works have all the glowand fervour of the unwritten utterances of a practised orator, unitedwith the orderliness and precision of a theologian, and are no lessadmirable for the excellence of their arrangement than for their evangelicalspirit and scriptural doctrine.  Originally meant to be heard,they lose somewhat by being read.  But few can read them withoutbeing delighted with the opulence of his imagination and impressed withthe solemn earnestness of his convictions.  Like the subject ofthe portrait described by him in the House of the Interpreter, he stands“like one who pleads with men, the law of truth written upon hislips, the world behind his back, and a crown of gold above his head.”

These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer frommost of his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the worksby which he is chiefly known, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,”the “Holy War,” the “Grace Abounding,” and wemay add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject the book is nowscarcely read at all, the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman.”

One great charm of these works, especially of “The Pilgrim’sProgress,” 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 butnever obscure, always intelligible, always forcible, going straightto the point in the fewest and simplest words; “powerful and picturesque,”writes Hallam, “from concise simplicity.”  Bunyan’sstyle is recommended by Lord Macaulay as an invaluable study to everyperson who wishes to gain a wide command over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people.  “Thereis 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 throughwhole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables.  Noris the source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far toseek.  Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that bookthe very best, not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purityof its style, the English Bible.  “In no book,” writesMr. J. R. Green, “do we see more clearly than in ‘The Pilgrim’sProgress’ the new imaginative force which had been given to thecommon life of Englishmen by their study of the Bible.  Bunyan’sEnglish is the simplest and homeliest English that has ever been usedby any great English writer, but it is the English of the Bible. His images are the images of prophet and evangelist.  So completelyhad the Bible become Bunyan’s life that one feels its phrasesas the natural expression of his thoughts.  He had lived in theBible till its words became his own.”

All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan’s literarygenius 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 realityof its impersonations.  The dramatis personsare not shadowyabstractions, moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figuresticketed with certain names, but solid men and women of our own fleshand blood, living in our own everyday world, and of like passions withourselves.  Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly onewe should be surprised to meet any day.  This lifelike power ofcharacterization belongs in the highest degree to “The Pilgrim’sProgress.”  It is hardly inferior in “The Holy War,”though with some exceptions the people of “Mansoul” havefailed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the charactersof the earlier allegory have done.  The secret of this graphicpower, which gives “The Pilgrim’s Progress” its universalpopularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, suchas he had known and seen them.  They are not fancy pictures, butliteral portraits.  Though the features may be exaggerated, andthe colours laid on with an unsparing brush, the outlines of his boldpersonifications are truthfully drawn from his own experience. He had had to do with every one of them.  He could have given apersonal 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 thetimes, and to get thereby,” who is zealous for Religion “whenhe goes in his silver slippers,” and “loves to walk withhim in the streets when the sun shines and the people applaud him.” All his kindred and surroundings are only too familiar to us—hiswife, that very virtuous woman my Lady Feigning’s daughter, myLord Fair-speech, my Lord Time-server, Mr. Facingbothways, Mr. Anything,and the Parson of the Parish, his mother’s own brother by thefather’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 andstubborn 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,” andhave made acquaintance with Mercy’s would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk,“a man of some breeding and that pretended to religion, but whostuck very close to the world.”  The man Temporary who livedin 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 notcontain Mrs. Timorous and her coterie of gossips, Mrs. Bats-eyes, Mrs.Inconsiderate, Mrs. Lightmind, and Mrs. Knownothing, “all as merryas the maids,” with that pretty fellow Mr. Lechery at the houseof 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, speakingvery smoothly with a smile at the end of each sentence, wearing a greatpurse by her side, with her hand often in it, fingering her money asif that was her chief delight;” of poor Feeblemind of the townof Uncertain, with his “whitely look, the cast in his eye, andhis trembling speech;” of Littlefaith, as “white as a clout,”neither able to fight nor fly when the thieves from Dead Man’sLane 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 dancingwith her in the road?  “True, he could not dance withoutone crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well.  Alsothe girl was to be commanded, for she answered the musick handsomely.” In Bunyan’s pictures there is never a superfluous detail. Every stroke tells, and helps to the completeness of the portraiture.

The same reality characterizes the descriptive part of “ThePilgrim’s Progress.”  As his characters are such ashe must meet with every day in his native town, so also the sceneryand 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 andbred,” writes Kingsley, “in the monotonous Midland, he hadno natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and countryhouses, he saw about him.”  The Slough of Despond, with itstreacherous quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarermight heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire;Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on theother side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, greenall the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrownwith briars and thorns, where one tumbled over a bush, another stuckfast in the dirt, some lost their shoes in the mire, and others werefastened from behind with the brambles; the high wall by the roadsideover which the fruit trees shot their boughs and tempted the boys withtheir unripe plums; the arbour with its settle tempting the footsoretraveller to drowsiness; the refreshing spring at the bottom of HillDifficulty; all are evidently drawn from his own experience.  Bunyan,in his long tramps, had seen them all.  He had known what it wasto be in danger of falling into a pit and being dashed to pieces withVain Confidence, of being drowned in the flooded meadows with Christianand Hopeful; of sinking in deep water when swimming over a river, goingdown and rising up half dead, and needing all his companion’sstrength and skill to keep his head above the stream.  Vanity Fairis evidently drawn from the life.  The great yearly fair of Stourbridge,close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinkerdays, with its streets of booths filled with “wares of all kindsfrom 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 powerof judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture. Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines.  When hehad to describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowyand cold.  Never having been very far from home, he had had noexperience of the higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, andhis pen moves in fetters when he attempts to describe them.  Whenhis pilgrims come to the Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains,the difference is at once seen.  All his nobler imagery is drawnfrom Scripture.  As Hallam has remarked, “There is scarcelya circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not finda place bodily and literally in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’and this has made his imagination appear more creative than it reallyis.”

It would but weary the reader to follow the details of a narrativewhich is so universally known.  Who needs to be told that in thepilgrimage here described is represented in allegorical dress the courseof a human soul convinced of sin, struggling onwards to salvation throughthe trials and temptations that beset its path to its eternal home? The book is so completely wrought into the mind and memory, that mostof us can at once recall the incidents which chequer the pilgrim’sway, and realize their meaning; the Slough of Despond, in which theman convinced of his guilt and fleeing from the wrath to come, in hisagonizing self-consciousness is in danger of being swallowed up in despair;the Wicket Gate, by which he enters on the strait and narrow way ofholiness; the Interpreter’s House, with his visions and actedparables; the Wayside Cross, at the sight of which the burden of guiltfalls from the pilgrim’s back, and he is clothed with change ofraiment; the Hill Difficulty, which stands right in his way, and whichhe must surmount, not circumvent; the lions which he has to pass, notknowing that they are chained; the Palace Beautiful, where he is admittedto the communion of the faithful, and sits down to meat with them; theValley of Humiliation, the scene of his desperate but victorious encounterwith Apollyon; the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with its evil sightsand doleful sounds, where one of the wicked ones whispers into his earthoughts of blasphemy which he cannot distinguish from the suggestionsof his own mind; the cave at the valley’s mouth, in which, GiantPagan having been dead this many a day, his brother, Giant Pope, nowsits alone, grinning at pilgrims as they pass by, and biting his nailsbecause 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 ownself-chosen darkness, and putting it out if it can, where the Pilgrim’sfellow, Faithful, seals his testimony with his death, and the Pilgrimhimself 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; ByepathMeadow, into which the Pilgrim and his newly-found companion stray,and are made prisoners by Giant Despair and shut up in the dungeonsof Doubting Castle, and break out of prison by the help of the Key ofPromise; the Delectable Mountains in Immanuel’s Land, with theirfriendly shepherds and the cheering prospect of the far-off heavenlycity; the Enchanted Land, with its temptations to spiritual drowsinessat the very end of the journey; the Land of Beulah, the ante-chamberof the city to which they were bound; and, last stage of all, the deepdark river, without a bridge, which had to be crossed before the citywas entered; the entrance into its heavenly gates, the pilgrim’sjoyous reception with all the bells in the city ringing again for joy;the Dreamer’s glimpse of its glories through the opened portals—isnot every stage of the journey, every scene of the pilgrimage, indeliblyprinted on our memories, for our warning, our instruction, our encouragementin the race we, as much as they, have each one to run?  Have wenot all, again and again, shared the Dreamer’s feelings—“Afterthat they shut up the Gates; which, when I had seen, I wished myselfamong them,” and prayed, God helping us, that our “dangerousjourney”—ever the most dangerous when we see its dangersthe least—might end in our “safe arrival at the desiredcountry”?

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” exhibits Bunyan in thecharacter by which he would have most desired to be remembered, as oneof the most influential of Christian preachers.  Hallam, however,claims for him another distinction which would have greatly startledand probably shocked him, as the father of our English novelists. As an allegorist Bunyan had many predecessors, not a few of whom, datingfrom early times, had taken the natural allegory of the pilgrimage ofhuman life as the basis of their works.  But as a novelist he hadno one to show him the way.  Bunyan was the first to break groundin a field which has since then been so overabundantly worked that thesoil has almost lost its productiveness; while few novels written purelywith the object of entertainment have ever proved so universally entertaining. Intensely religious as it is in purpose, “The Pilgrim’sProgress” may be safely styled the first English novel. “The claim to be the father of English romance,” writesDr. Allon, “which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, reallypertains to Bunyan.  Defoe may claim the parentage of a species,but Bunyan is the creator of the genus.”  As the parent offictitious biography it is that Bunyan has charmed the world. On its vivid interest as a story, its universal interest and lastingvitality rest.  “Other allegorises,” writes Lord Macaulay,“have shown great ingenuity, but no other allegorist has everbeen able to touch the heart, and to make its abstractions objects ofterror, 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 weare unable without qualification to accept Coleridge’s dictumthat it is “incomparably the best ‘Summa TheologiæEvangelicæ’ 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 andof all orders of intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction. “I have,” says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a longinterval, “always been struck by its piety.  I am now struckequally or even more by its profound wisdom.  It seems to be acomplete reflexion of Scripture.”  And to turn to a criticof very different character, Dean Swift: “I have been better entertainedand more improved,” writes that cynical pessimist, “by afew pages of this book than by a long discourse on the will and intellect.” The favourite of our childhood, as “the most perfect and complexof fairy tales, so human and intelligible,” read, as Hallam says,“at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceivedor little regarded,” the “Pilgrim’s Progress”becomes the chosen companion of our later years, perused with ever freshappreciation of its teaching, and enjoyment of its native genius; “theinterpreter of life to all who are perplexed with its problems, andthe practical guide and solace of all who need counsel and sympathy.”

The secret of this universal acceptableness of “The Pilgrim’sProgress” lies in the breadth of its religious sympathies. Rigid Puritan as Bunyan was, no book is more completely free from sectariannarrowness.  Its reach is as wide as Christianity itself, and ittakes 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 everypersuasion can identify themselves with him; and even those who regardChristianity itself as but a natural outgrowth of the conscience andintellect, and yet desire to live nobly and make the best of themselves,can recognize familiar footprints in every step of Christian’sjourney.  Thus ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is abook which when once read can never be forgotten.  We too, everyone of us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrationscome back to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similartrials, and learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has describedthem.  Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progressmake it cease to be true to experience.”  Dr. Brown’sappreciative words may be added: “With deepest pathos it entersinto the stern battle so real to all of us, into those heart-experienceswhich make up, for all, the discipline of life.  It is this especiallywhich has given to it the mighty hold which it has always had upon thetoiling poor, and made it the one book above all books well-thumbedand torn to tatters among them.  And it is this which makes itone of the first books translated by the missionary who seeks to givetrue thoughts of God and life to heathen men.”

The Second Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” partakesof the character of almost all continuations.  It is, in Mr. Froude’swords, “only a feeble reverberation of the first part, which hasgiven it a popularity it would have hardly attained by its own merits. Christiana and her children are tolerated for the pilgrim’s saketo whom they belong.”  Bunyan seems not to have been insensibleof this himself, when in his metrical preface he thus introduces hisnew work:

“Go now my little book to every place
Where my first Pilgrim has but shown his face.
Call at their door; if any say ‘Who’s there?’
Then answer thus, ‘Christiana is here.’
If they bid thee come in, then enter thou
With all thy boys.  And then, as thou know’st how,
Tell who they are, also from whence they came;
Perhaps they’ll know them by their looks or name.”

But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on thewhole, to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphicpower, such as Bunyan alone could have written.  Everywhere wefind strokes of his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measurethan the first, it has added not a few portraits to Bunyan’s spiritualpicture gallery we should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racysayings which stick to the memory.  The sweet maid Mercy affordsa lovely picture of gentle feminine piety, well contrasted with themore vigorous but still thoroughly womanly character of Christiana. Great-Heart is too much of an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenialdisguise of a knightly champion of distressed females and the slayerof giants.  But the other new characters have generally a vividpersonality.  Who can forget Old Honesty, the dull good man withno mental gifts but of dogged sincerity, who though coming from theTown of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the City of Destruction, was“known for a cock of the right kind,” because he said thetruth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing, that most troublesomeof pilgrims, stumbling at every straw, lying roaring at the Slough ofDespond above a month together, standing shaking and shrinking at theWicket Gate, but making no stick at the Lions, and at last getting overthe river not much above wetshod; or Mr. Valiant for Truth, the nativeof Darkland, standing with his sword drawn and his face all bloody fromhis 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 footwherever he saw the print of his shoe; Mr. Feeblemind, the sickly, melancholypilgrim, at whose door death did usually knock once a day, betakinghimself 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 creepwhen he could not go, an enemy to laughter and to gay attire, bringingup the rear of the company with Mr. Readytohalt hobbling along on hiscrutches; Giant Despair’s prisoners, Mr. Despondency, whom hehad all but starved to death—and Mistress Much-afraid his daughter,who went through the river singing, though none could understand whatshe said?  Each of these characters has a distinct individualitywhich lifts them from shadowy abstractions into living men and women. But with all its excellencies, and they are many, the general inferiorityof the history of Christiana and her children’s pilgrimage tothat of her husband’s must be acknowledged.  The story isless skilfully constructed; the interest is sometimes allowed to flag;the dialogues that interrupt the narrative are in places dry and wearisome—toomuch of sermons in disguise.  There is also a want of keeping betweenthe two parts of the allegory.  The Wicket Gate of the First Parthas become a considerable building with a summer parlour in the Second;the shepherds’ tents on the Delectable Mountains have risen intoa 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 becomea respectable country town, where Christiana and her family, seemingaltogether to forget their pilgrimage, settled down comfortably, enjoythe society of the good people of the place, and the sons marry andhave children.  These same children also cause the reader no littleperplexity, when he finds them in the course of the supposed journeytransformed from sweet babes who are terrified with the Mastiffs barkingat the Wicket Gate, who catch at the boughs for the unripe plums andcry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are stroked by the Interpreter;who are catechised and called “good boys” by Prudence; whosup on bread crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to bed by Mercy—intostrong young men, able to go out and fight with a giant, and lend ahand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and becoming husbands andfathers.  We cannot but feel the want of vraisemblancewhichbrings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark riverat one time, and sends them over in succession, following one anotherrapidly through the Golden Gate of the City.  The four boys withtheir wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but thereis an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory has broughtthem all to what stands for the close of their earthly pilgrimage. Bunyan’s mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and makinghis band of pilgrims so large.  He could get them together andmake them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth,which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for theirdismissal.  The exquisite pathos of the description of the passageof the river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almosttermed the impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggletogether, and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting inthe prosaic picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming downto the water’s edge, and waiting till the postman blows his hornand bids them cross.  Much as the Second Part contains of whatis admirable, and what no one but Bunyan could have written, we feelafter reading it that, in Mr. Froude’s words, the rough simplicityis gone, and has been replaced by a tone of sentiment which is almostmawkish.  “Giants, dragons, and angelic champions carry usinto a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a preacher in disguise. Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously chastened, suit illwith the sternness of the mortal conflict between the soul and sin.” With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of “ThePilgrim’s Progress,” we may be well content that Bunyannever 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 thatdesire it an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantimeI bid my reader—Adieu.”

Bunyan’s second great allegorical work, “The Holy War,”need not detain us long.  Being an attempt, and in the nature ofthings 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 characterswith their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes ofthe drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which attachesto an individual man, like Christian, and those who are linked withor follow his career.  In fact, the tremendous realities of thespiritual history of the human race are entirely unfit for allegoricaltreatment as a whole.  Sin, its origin, its consequences, its remedy,and the apparent failure of that remedy though administered by Almightyhands, must remain a mystery for all time.  The attempts made byBunyan, and by one of much higher intellectual power and greater poeticgifts than Bunyan—John Milton—to bring that mystery withinthe grasp of the finite intellect, only render it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that—

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being “fools”;but when both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up intothe Council Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of theever-blessed Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving,like a sovereign and his ministers when a revolted province has to bebrought back to its allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us downto the infernal regions, and makes us privy to the plots and counterplotsof the rebel leaders and hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feelthat, in spite of the magnificent diction and poetic imagination ofthe one, and the homely picturesque genius of the other, the grand themestreated of are degraded if not vulgarized, without our being in anyway helped to unravel their essential mysteries.  In point of individualpersonal interest, “The Holy War” contrasts badly with “ThePilgrim’s Progress.”  The narrative moves in a moreshadowy region.  We may admire the workmanship; but the same undefinedsense of unreality pursues us through Milton’s noble epic, theoutcome of a divinely-fired genius, and Bunyan’s humble narrative,drawing its scenes and circumstances, and to some extent its dramatispersonæ, from the writer’s own surroundings in the townand corporation of Bedford, and his brief but stirring experience asa soldier in the great Parliamentary War.  The catastrophe alsois eminently unsatisfactory.  When Christian and Hopeful enterthe 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”—“aconclusion in which nothing is concluded.”  After all theendless vicissitudes of the conflict, and the final and glorious victoryof Emmanuel and his forces, and the execution of the ringleaders ofthe mutiny, the issue still remains doubtful.  The town of Mansoulis 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 neverbe laid hold of.  These, therefore, and some few others of themore 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 theirparty have been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close,lurking in dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel’smen.  If Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselvesin the streets, the whole town is up in arms against them; the verychildren raise a hue and cry against them and seek to stone them. But all in vain.  Mansoul, it is true, enjoys some good degreeof peace and quiet.  Her Prince takes up his residence in her borders. Her captains and soldiers do their duties.  She minds her tradewith the heavenly land afar off; also she is busy in her manufacture. But with the remnants of the Diabolonians still within her walls, readyto show their heads on the least relaxation of strict watchfulness,keeping up constant communication with Diabolus and the other lordsof the pit, and prepared to open the gates to them when opportunityoffers, this peace can not be lasting.  The old battle will haveto 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 trueto fact.  Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individualor as the whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so longas it abides in “the country of Universe.”  The fleshwill lust against the spirit, the regenerated man will be in dangerof being brought into captivity to the law of sin and death unless hekeeps up his watchfulness and maintains the struggle to the end.

And it is here, that, for purposes of art, not for purposes of truth,the real failing of “The Holy War” lies.  The dramaof 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 whatthe end will be.  Evil must be put down, and good must triumphat 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 generalthe great Lord Incredulity at their head, reinforced by many fresh regimentsunder novel standards, unknown and unthought of in Bunyan’s days,taking the place of those whose power is past, is ever making new attacksupon 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 lawof 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 victorieswhen won made useless,” it is but seeming,—that the triumphof evil is but temporary, and that these apparent failures and contradictions,are slowly but surely working out and helping forward

“The one unseen divine event
To which the whole creation moves.”

“The mysteries and contradictions which the Christian revelationleaves unsolved are made tolerable by Hope.”  To adopt Bunyan’sfigurative language in the closing paragraph of his allegory, the dayis certainly coming when the famous town of Mansoul shall be taken downand transported “every stick and stone” to Emmanuel’sland, and there set up for the Father’s habitation in such strengthand glory as it never saw before.  No Diabolonian shall be ableto creep into its streets, burrow in its walls, or be seen in its borders. No evil tidings shall trouble its inhabitants, nor sound of Diaboliandrum be heard there.  Sorrow and grief shall be ended, and life,always sweet, always new, shall last longer than they could even desireit, even all the days of eternity.  Meanwhile let those who havesuch a glorious hope set before them keep clean and white the liveriestheir Lord has given them, and wash often in the open fountain. Let them believe in His love, live upon His word; watch, fight, andpray, and hold fast till He come.

One more work of Bunyan’s still remains to be briefly noticed,as bearing the characteristic stamp of his genius, “The Life andDeath of Mr. Badman.”  The original idea of this book wasto furnish a contrast to “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” As in that work he had described the course of a man setting out onhis course heavenwards, struggling onwards through temptation, trials,and difficulties, and entering at last through the golden gates intothe city of God, so in this later work his purpose was to depict thecareer of a man whose face from the first was turned in the oppositedirection, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and more irretrievablyevil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his life full of sinand his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of his sins in hopelesssinfulness.  That this was the original purpose of the work, Bunyantells us in his preface.  It came into his mind, he says, as inthe former book he had written concerning the progress of the Pilgrimfrom this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the lifeand 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 theearlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it.  It is totallyunlike “The Pilgrim’s Progress” both in form and execution. The one is an allegory, the other a tale, describing without imageryor metaphor, in the plainest language, the career of a “vulgar,middle-class, unprincipled scoundrel.”  While “ThePilgrim’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 dialoguebetween a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive.  Mr. Wiseman tellsthe 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, andthe other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and whichbrought him to his miserable end.  The plainness of speech withwhich some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman’sindulgence 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 orhis rival in lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgarEnglish life in the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplacecountry town such as Bedford.  It is not at all a pleasant picture. The life described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean andcommonplace.  But as a description of English middle-class lifeat the epoch of the Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable forthose who wish to put themselves in touch with that period.  Theanecdotes introduced to illustrate Bunyan’s positions of God’sjudgment upon swearers and sinners, convicting him of a credulity anda harshness of feeling one is sorry to think him capable of, are veryinteresting for the side-lights they throw upon the times and the peoplewho lived in them.  It would take too long to give a sketch ofthe story, even if a summary could give any real estimate of its picturesqueand vivid power.  It is certainly a remarkable, if an offensivebook.  As with “Robinson Crusoe” and Defoe’sother tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history beforeus.  We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded shouldnot have happened.  There are no surprises; no unlooked-for catastrophes;no providential interpositions to punish the sinner or rescue the goodman.  Badman’s pious wife is made to pay the penalty of allowingherself to be deceived by a tall, good-looking, hypocritical scoundrel. He himself pursues his evil way to the end, and “dies like a lamb,or as men call it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear,”but the selfsame Mr. Badman still, not only in name, but in condition;sinning onto the last, and dying with a heart that cannot repent.

Mr. Froude’s summing up of this book is so masterly that wemake no apology for presenting it to our readers.  “Bunyanconceals nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing.  Hemakes his bad man sharp and shrewd.  He allows sharpness and shrewdnessto bring him the reward which such qualities in fact command. Badman is successful; is powerful; he enjoys all the pleasures whichmoney can bring; his bad wife helps him to ruin, but otherwise he isnot unhappy, and he dies in peace.  Bunyan has made him a brute,because such men do become brutes.  It is the real punishment ofbrutal and selfish habits.  There the figure stands—a pictureof a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most familiar;travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as theway to Emmanuel’s Land was through the Slough of Despond and theValley of the Shadow of Death.  Pleasures are to be found amongthe primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by. Yet the reader feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would stillprefer to be with Christian.”

FOOTNOTES

{ 1}  A smallenclosure behind a cottage.

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