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Title: The Life of John Bunyan

Author: Edmund Venables

Release date: September 1, 1997 [eBook #1037]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN BUNYAN ***






Transcribed from the 1888 Walter Scott edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





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


CHAPTER I.


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

The year of John Bunyan's birth was a momentous one both for the nation
and for the Church of England.  Charles I., by the extorted assent to the
Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himself of the
irresponsible authority he had claimed, and had taken the first step in
the struggle between King and Parliament which ended in the House of
Commons seating itself in the place of the Sovereign.  Wentworth (better
known as Lord Strafford) had finally left the Commons, baffled in his
nobly-conceived but vain hope of reconciling the monarch and his people,
and having accepted a peerage and the promise of the Presidency of the
Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policy of "Thorough," which
was destined to bring both his own head and that of his weak master to
the block.  The Remonstrance of Parliament against the toleration of
Roman Catholics and the growth of Arminianism, had been presented to the
indignant king, who, wilfully blinded, had replied to it by the promotion
to high and lucrative posts in the Church of the very men against whom it
was chiefly directed.  The most outrageous upholders of the royal
prerogative and the irresponsible power of the sovereign, Montagu and
Mainwaring, had been presented, the one to the see of Chichester, the
other--the impeached and condemned of the Commons--to the rich living
Montagu's consecration had vacated.  Montaigne, the licenser of
Mainwaring's incriminated sermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of
York, while Neile and Laud, who were openly named in the Remonstrance as
the "troublers of the English Israel," were rewarded respectively with
the rich see of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese
of London.  Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap
the whirlwind which was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the
monarchy and the Church in the same overthrow.  Three months before
Bunyan's birth Buckingham, on the eve of his departure for the
beleaguered and famine-stricken city of Rochelle, sanguinely hoping to
conclude a peace with the French king beneath its walls, had been struck
down by the knife of a fanatic, to the undisguised joy of the majority of
the nation, bequeathing a legacy of failure and disgrace in the fall of
the Protestant stronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long
anxiously fixed.

The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the coming
hurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable a name
in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an
obscure Bedfordshire village.  His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling
himself in his will by the more dignified title of "brazier," was more
properly what is known as a "tinker"; "a mender of pots and kettles,"
according to Bunyan's contemporary biographer, Charles Doe.  He was not,
however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually
are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's
Christopher Sly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled
home and an acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow.  The
family was of long standing there, but had for some generations been
going down in the world.  Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we
learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a "petty
chapman," or small retail dealer, in his own freehold cottage, which he
bequeathed, "with its appurtenances," to his second wife, Ann, to
descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her
own son Edward, in equal shares.  This cottage, which was probably John
Bunyan's birthplace, persistent tradition, confirmed by the testimony of
local names, warrants us in placing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile
to the east of the village of Elstow, at a place long called "Bunyan's
End," where two fields are still called by the name of "Bunyans" and
"Further Bunyans."  This small freehold appears to have been all that
remained, at the death of John Bunyan's grandfather, of a property once
considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the whole
locality.

The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan (the
name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of which
the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent) is one
that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times.  The
first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill,
about nine miles from Elstow.  In 1199, the year of King John's
accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish.  One
William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off.  In 1327,
the first year of Edward III., one of the same name, probably his
descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden, close
to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan's birthplace,
and was the owner of property there.  We have no further notices of the
Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century.  We then find them greatly
fallen.  Their ancestral property seems little by little to have passed
into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but "a messuage and
pightell {1} with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land."  This small
residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still further
diminished by sale.  The field already referred to, known as "Bonyon's
End," was sold by "Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer," son of William
Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being the keepers of a small
roadside inn, at which their overcharges for their home-baked bread and
home-brewed beer were continually bringing them into trouble with the
petty local courts of the day.  Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was
born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603,
exactly a month before the great queen passed away.  The mother of the
immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a
native of Elstow and only a few months his junior.  The details of her
mother's will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow,
prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's
latest and most complete biographer, the Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the
very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet
decent and worthy in their ways."  John Bunyan's mother was his father's
second wife.  The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily
consoled themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
successor.  Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
1603, the date of his father's baptism.  But before the year was out his
grandfather had married again.  His father, too, had not completed his
twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
1623.  She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley.  At the end of
seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two
months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a
third wife.  Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when
he married.  We have no particulars of the death of his first wife.  But
he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the time
of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first wife
would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a
widower and his second marriage.

Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy town
of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree.  Its name in its
original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the _stow_ or stockaded
place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in
1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of
the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, in honour of the
mother of the Emperor Constantine.  The parish church, so intimately
connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of
the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to
contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of
the conventual church.  Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, peaked dormers,
and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much
what they were in Bunyan's days.  A village street, with detached
cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew
and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in
the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at
the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building,
with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic
architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-
Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor
when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses--"the scene," writes Dr. Brown
"of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of
village life."  The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little
altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of
the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it
so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which
his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices."  One
may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his "cat" that
memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which
rebuked him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his sport again."
On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a
fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed
at both ends, of Norman and Early English date, which, with its detached
bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so
vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace Abounding."  On entering every
object speaks of Bunyan.  The pulpit--if it has survived the recent
restoration--is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then "Parson"
of Elstow, preached the sermon which first awoke his sleeping conscience.
The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and
mother and remoter progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-
loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth,
on April 14, 1654.  An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of
thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the
tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy
when he "went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost
counting all things holy that were therein contained."  The five bells
which hang in the belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted,
the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring.  The
rough flagged floor, "all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of
generations of ringers," remains undisturbed.  One cannot see the door,
set in its solid masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing
in it, after conscience, "beginning to be tender," told him that "such
practice was but vain," but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of
seeing others ring, hoping that, "if a bell should fall," he could "slip
out" safely "behind the thick walls," and so "be preserved
notwithstanding."  Behind the church, on the south side, stand some
picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the
Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early
part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones,
which may have given Bunyan the first idea of "the very stately Palace,
the name of which was Beautiful."

The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields
at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its
site has passed away.  That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655)
after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still
standing in the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of
all interest.

From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed the
earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the
subject of our biography himself.  The notion that Bunyan was of gipsy
descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which
has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other
side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless.  Even if
Bunyan's inquiry of his father "whether the family was of Israelitish
descent or no," which has been so strangely pressed into the service of
the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the matter, the
decided negative with which his question was met--"he told me, 'No, we
were not'"--would, one would have thought, have settled the point.  But
some fictions die hard.  However low the family had sunk, so that in his
own words, "his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most
despised of all the families in the land," "of a low and inconsiderable
generation," the name, as we have seen, was one of long standing in
Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it.  And
his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute
among their village neighbours.  Bunyan seems to be describing his own
father and his wandering life when he speaks of "an honest poor labouring
man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in,
and was very careful to maintain his family."  He and his wife were also
careful with a higher care that their children should be properly
educated.  "Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my
parents," writes Bunyan, "it pleased God to put it into their hearts to
put me to school, to learn both to read and write."  If we accept the
evidence of the "Scriptural Poems," published for the first time twelve
years after his death, the genuineness of which, though questioned by Dr.
Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he
had was "gained in a grammar school."  This would have been that founded
by Sir William Harpur in Queen Mary's reign in the neighbouring town of
Bedford.  Thither we may picture the little lad trudging day by day along
the mile and a half of footpath and road from his father's cottage by the
brookside, often, no doubt, wet and miry enough, not, as he says, to "go
to school to Aristotle or Plato," but to be taught "according to the rate
of other poor men's children."  The Bedford schoolmaster about this time,
William Barnes by name, was a negligent sot, charged with "night-walking"
and haunting "taverns and alehouses," and other evil practices, as well
as with treating the poor boys "when present" with a cruelty which must
have made them wish that his absences, long as they were, had been more
protracted.  Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that
Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with shame he soon
lost "almost utterly."  He was before long called home to help his father
at the Harrowden forge, where he says he was "brought up in a very mean
condition among a company of poor countrymen."  Here, with but little to
elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted many bad habits, and
grew up what Coleridge somewhat too strongly calls "a bitter blackguard."
According to his own remorseful confession, he was "filled with all
unrighteousness," having "from a child" in his "tender years," "but few
equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming the holy name of
God."  Sins of this kind he declares became "a second nature to him;" he
"delighted in all transgression against the law of God," and as he
advanced in his teens he became a "notorious sinbreeder," the "very
ringleader," he says, of the village lads "in all manner of vice and
ungodliness."  But the unsparing condemnation passed by Bunyan, after his
conversion, on his former self, must not mislead us into supposing him
ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life.  "The
wickedness of the tinker," writes Southey, "has been greatly overrated,
and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to
pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved."  The justice
of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge.  "Bunyan,"
he says, "was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked.'  He was
chaste, sober, and honest."  He hints at youthful escapades, such,
perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the
like, which might have brought him under "the stroke of the laws," and
put him to "open shame before the face of the world."  But he confesses
to no crime or profligate habit.  We have no reason to suppose that he
was ever drunk, and we have his own most solemn declaration that he was
never guilty of an act of unchastity.  "In our days," to quote Mr.
Froude, "a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had
grown to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint.  If in
Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious than
Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth century
must have been higher than believers in progress will be pleased to
allow."  How then, it may be asked, are we to explain the passionate
language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which would hardly
seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and licentious?  We
are confident that Bunyan meant what he said.  So intensely honest a
nature could not allow his words to go beyond his convictions.  When he
speaks of "letting loose the reins to his lusts," and sinning "with the
greatest delight and ease," we know that however exaggerated they may
appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him overstrained.  Dr.
Johnson marvelled that St. Paul could call himself "the chief of
sinners," and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly.  But a highly-
strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called
into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different
estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in
general.  It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others,
as sins against infinite love--a love unto death--and in the light of the
sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while
it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned.  The sinfulness of
sin--more especially their own sin--is the intensest of all possible
realities to them.  No language is too strong to describe it.  We may not
unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may appear
to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether
a mistaken one?

The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan.  While still a
child "but nine or ten years old," he tells us he was racked with
convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears.  He was scared with
"fearful dreams," and "dreadful visions," and haunted in his sleep with
"apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits" coming to carry him away,
which made his bed a place of terrors.  The thought of the Day of
Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over
his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble.  But
though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted,
they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased "as if
they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to the
youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
ringleader.  The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him.  He
could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
prison to me."  The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind."  He said to
God, "depart from me."  According to the later morbid estimate which
stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight and
ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions."  But that the
sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that while
discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by
the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for godliness
dishonoured their profession.  "Once," he says, "when I was at the height
of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a religious man,
it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart to ache."

This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
escapes from accidents which threatened his life--"judgments mixed with
mercy" he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly
forsaken of God.  Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in "Bedford
river"--the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering rounds
having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets of the
Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the
Stour and Orwell to the east.  At another time, in his wild contempt of
danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on with admiration, what
he mistakenly supposed to be an adder's sting.

These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in his brief
career as a soldier which his anonymous biographer tells us "made so deep
an impression upon him that he would never mention it, which he often
did, without thanksgiving to God."  But for this occurrence, indeed, we
should have probably never known that he had ever served in the army at
all.  The story is best told in his own provokingly brief words--"When I
was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to
besiege it.  But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired
to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming
to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket
bullet and died."  Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan's
autobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details.
This is characteristic of the man.  The religious import of the
occurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; their
temporal setting, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of no
account to him.  He gives us not the slightest clue to the name of the
besieged place, or even to the side on which he was engaged.  The date of
the event is left equally vague.  The last point however we are able to
determine with something like accuracy.  November, 1644, was the earliest
period at which Bunyan could have entered the army, for it was not till
then that he reached the regulation age of sixteen.  Domestic
circumstances had then recently occurred which may have tended to
estrange him from his home, and turn his thoughts to a military life.  In
the previous June his mother had died, her death being followed within a
month by that of his sister Margaret.  Before another month was out, his
father, as we have already said, had married again, and whether the new
wife had proved the proverbial _injusta noverca_ or not, his home must
have been sufficiently altered by the double, if we may not say triple,
calamity, to account for his leaving the dull monotony of his native
village for the more stirring career of a soldier.  Which of the two
causes then distracting the nation claimed his adherence, Royalist or
Parliamentarian, can never be determined.  As Mr. Froude writes, "He does
not tell us himself.  His friends in after life did not care to ask him
or he to inform them, or else they thought the matter of too small
importance to be worth mentioning with exactness."  The only evidence is
internal, and the deductions from it vary with the estimate of the
counter-balancing probabilities taken by Bunyan's various biographers.
Lord Macaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly
supported by Dr. Brown, decides in favour of the side of the Parliament.
Mr. Froude, on the other hand, together with the painstaking Mr. Offor,
holds that "probability is on the side of his having been with the
Royalists."  Bedfordshire, however, was one of the "Associated Counties"
from which the Parliamentary army drew its main strength, and it was shut
in by a strong line of defence from any combination with the Royalist
army.  In 1643 the county had received an order requiring it to furnish
"able and armed men" to the garrison at Newport Pagnel, which was then
the base of operations against the King in that part of England.  All
probability therefore points to John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of
Elstow, the leader in all manly sports and adventurous enterprises among
his mates, and probably caring very little on what side he fought, having
been drafted to Newport to serve under Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople, and
other Parliamentary commanders.  The place of the siege he refers to is
equally undeterminable.  A tradition current within a few years of
Bunyan's death, which Lord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the
certainty of fact, names Leicester.  The only direct evidence for this is
the statement of an anonymous biographer, who professes to have been a
personal friend of Bunyan's, that he was present at the siege of
Leicester, in 1645, as a soldier in the Parliamentary army.  This
statement, however, is in direct defiance of Bunyan's own words.  For the
one thing certain in the matter is that wherever the siege may have been,
Bunyan was not at it.  He tells us plainly that he was "drawn to go," and
that when he was just starting, he gave up his place to a comrade who
went in his room, and was shot through the head.  Bunyan's presence at
the siege of Leicester, which has been so often reported that it has
almost been regarded as an historical truth, must therefore take its
place among the baseless creations of a fertile fancy.

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




CHAPTER II.


It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan's return
home from his short experience of a soldier's life, that he took the step
which, more than any other, influences a man's future career for good or
for evil.  The young tinker married.  With his characteristic disregard
of all facts or dates but such as concern his spiritual history, Bunyan
tells us nothing about the orphan girl he made his wife.  Where he found
her, who her parents were, where they were married, even her christian
name, were all deemed so many irrelevant details.  Indeed the fact of his
marriage would probably have been passed over altogether but for the
important bearing it hid on his inner life.  His "mercy," as he calls it,
"was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly," and who,
though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they "came together
as poor as poor might be," as "poor as howlets," to adopt his own simile,
"without so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt" them, yet
brought with her to the Elstow cottage two religious books, which had
belonged to her father, and which he "had left her when he died."  These
books were "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," the work of Arthur Dent,
the puritan incumbent of Shoebury, in Essex--"wearisomely heavy and
theologically narrow," writes Dr. Brown--and "The Practise of Piety," by
Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince
Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as with
churchmen.  Together with these books, the young wife brought the still
more powerful influence of a religious training, and the memory of a holy
example, often telling her young graceless husband "what a godly man her
father was, and how he would reprove and correct vice both in his house
and amongst his neighbours, and what a strict and holy life he lived in
his days both in word and deed."  Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of
the "little he had learnt" at school, he had not lost it "utterly."  He
was still able to read intelligently.  His wife's gentle influence
prevailed on him to begin "sometimes to read" her father's legacy "with
her."  This must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly
at first not much to his taste.  What his favourite reading had been up
to this time, his own nervous words tell us, "Give me a ballad, a news-
book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book
that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables."  But as he and his
young wife read these books together at their fireside, a higher taste
was gradually awakened in Bunyan's mind; "some things" in them he "found
somewhat pleasing" to him, and they "begot" within him "some desires to
religion," producing a degree of outward reformation.  The spiritual
instinct was aroused.  He would be a godly man like his wife's father.  He
began to "go to church twice a day, and that too with the foremost."  Nor
was it a mere formal attendance, for when there he tells us he took his
part with all outward devotion in the service, "both singing and saying
as others did; yet," as he penitently confesses, "retaining his wicked
life," the wickedness of which, however, did not amount to more than a
liking for the sports and games of the lads of the village, bell-ringing,
dancing, and the like.  The prohibition of all liturgical forms issued in
1645, the observance of which varied with the strictness or laxity of the
local authorities, would not seem to have been put in force very rigidly
at Elstow.  The vicar, Christopher Hall, was an Episcopalian, who, like
Bishop Sanderson, retained his benefice unchallenged all through the
Protectorate, and held it some years after the Restoration and the
passing of the Act of Uniformity.  He seems, like Sanderson, to have kept
himself within the letter of the law by making trifling variations in the
Prayer Book formularies, consistent with a general conformity to the old
order of the Church, "without persisting to his own destruction in the
usage of the entire liturgy."  The decent dignity of the ceremonial of
his parish church had a powerful effect on Bunyan's freshly awakened
religious susceptibility--a "spirit of superstition" he called it
afterwards--and helped to its fuller development.  "I adored," he says,
"with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place"--altars then
had not been entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire--"Priest,
Clerk, Vestment, Service, and what else belonging to the church, counting
all things holy that were therein contained, and especially the Priest
and Clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed because they were
the servants of God and were principal in the Holy Temple, to do His work
therein, . . . their name, their garb, and work, did so intoxicate and
bewitch me."  If it is questionable whether the Act forbidding the use of
the Book of Common Prayer was strictly observed at Elstow, it is certain
that the prohibition of Sunday sports was not.  Bunyan's narrative shows
that the aspect of a village green in Bedfordshire during the
Protectorate did not differ much from what Baxter tells us it had been in
Shropshire before the civil troubles began, where, "after the Common
Prayer had been read briefly, the rest of the day even till dark night
almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under a maypole and a
great tree, when all the town did meet together."  These Sunday sports
proved the battle-ground of Bunyan's spiritual experience, the scene of
the fierce inward struggles which he has described so vividly, through
which he ultimately reached the firm ground of solid peace and hope.  As
a high-spirited healthy athletic young fellow, all kinds of manly sports
were Bunyan's delight.  On week days his tinker's business, which he
evidently pursued industriously, left him small leisure for such
amusements.  Sunday therefore was the day on which he "did especially
solace himself" with them.  He had yet to learn the identification of
diversions with "all manner of vice."  The teaching came in this way.  One
Sunday, Vicar Hall preached a sermon on the sin of Sabbath-breaking, and
like many hearers before and since, he imagined that it was aimed
expressly at him.  Sermon ended, he went home "with a great burden upon
his spirit," "sermon-stricken" and "sermon sick" as he expresses it
elsewhere.  But his Sunday's dinner speedily drove away his
self-condemning thoughts.  He "shook the sermon out of his mind," and
went out to his sports with the Elstow lads on the village green, with as
"great delight" as ever.  But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or
"sly," just as he had struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to
give it a second blow--the minuteness of the detail shows the
unforgetable reality of the crisis--he seemed to hear a voice from heaven
asking him whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his
sins and go to hell."  He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking
down on him with threatening countenance.  But like his own Hopeful he
"shut his eyes against the light," and silenced the condemning voice with
the feeling that repentance was hopeless.  "It was too late for him to
look after heaven; he was past pardon."  If his condemnation was already
sealed and he was eternally lost, it would not matter whether he was
condemned for many sins or for few.  Heaven was gone already.  The only
happiness he could look for was what he could get out of his sins--his
morbidly sensitive conscience perversely identifying sports with sin--so
he returned desperately to his games, resolved, he says, to "take my fill
of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might
taste the sweetness of it."

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

The next step onward in this religious progress was the study of the
Bible, to which he was led by the conversation of a poor godly neighbour.
Naturally he first betook himself to the historical books, which, he
tells us, he read "with great pleasure;" but, like Baxter who, beginning
his Bible reading in the same course, writes, "I neither understood nor
relished much the doctrinal part," he frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles
and such like Scriptures I could not away with."  His Bible reading
helped forward the outward reformation he had begun.  He set the keeping
the Ten Commandments before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted
"sometimes" when, as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled
in conscience when "now and then he broke one."  "But then," he says, "I
should repent and say I was sorry for it, and promise God to do better
next time, and then get help again; for then I thought I pleased God as
well as any man in England."  His progress was slow, for each step
involved a battle, but it was steadily onwards.  He had a very hard
struggle in relinquishing his favourite amusements.  But though he had
much yet to learn, his feet were set on the upward way, and he had no
mind to go back, great as the temptation often was.  He had once
delighted in bell-ringing, but "his conscience beginning to be
tender"--morbid we should rather say--"he thought such practise to be
vain, and therefore forced himself to leave it."  But "hankering after it
still," he continued to go while his old companions rang, and look on at
what he "durst not" join in, until the fear that if he thus winked at
what his conscience condemned, a bell, or even the tower itself, might
fall and kill him, put a stop even to that compromise.  Dancing, which
from his boyhood he had practised on the village green, or in the old
Moot Hall, was still harder to give up.  "It was a full year before I
could quite leave that."  But this too was at last renounced, and
finally.  The power of Bunyan's indomitable will was bracing itself for
severe trials yet to come.

Meanwhile Bunyan's neighbours regarded with amazement the changed life of
the profane young tinker.  "And truly," he honestly confesses, "so they
well might for this my conversion was as great as for Tom of Bedlam to
become a sober man."  Bunyan's reformation was soon the town's talk; he
had "become godly," "become a right honest man."  These commendations
flattered is vanity, and he laid himself out for them.  He was then but a
"poor painted hypocrite," he says, "proud of his godliness, and doing all
he did either to be seen of, or well spoken of by man."  This state of
self-satisfaction, he tells us, lasted "for about a twelvemonth or more."
During this deceitful calm he says, "I had great peace of conscience, and
should think with myself, 'God cannot choose but now be pleased with me,'
yea, to relate it in mine own way, I thought no man in England could
please God better than I."  But no outward reformation can bring lasting
inward peace.  When a man is honest with himself, the more earnestly he
struggles after complete obedience, the more faulty does his obedience
appear.  The good opinion of others will not silence his own inward
condemnation.  He needs a higher righteousness than his own; a firmer
standing-ground than the shifting quicksand of his own good deeds.  "All
this while," he writes, "poor wretch as I was, I was ignorant of Jesus
Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had
perished therein had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by
nature."

This revolution was nearer than he imagined.  Bunyan's self-satisfaction
was rudely shaken, and his need of something deeper in the way of
religion than he had yet experienced was shown him by the conversation of
three or four poor women whom, one day, when pursuing his tinker's
calling at Bedford, he came upon "sitting at a door in the sun, and
talking of the things of God."  These women were members of the
congregation of "the holy Mr. John Gifford," who, at that time of
ecclesiastical confusion, subsequently became rector of St. John's
Church, in Bedford, and master of the hospital attached to it.  Gifford's
career had been a strange one.  We hear of him first as a young major in
the king's army at the outset of the Civil War, notorious for his loose
and debauched life, taken by Fairfax at Maidstone in 1648, and condemned
to the gallows.  By his sister's help he eluded his keepers' vigilance,
escaped from prison, and ultimately found his way to Bedford, where for a
time he practised as a physician, though without any change of his loose
habits.  The loss of a large sum of money at gaming awoke a disgust at
his dissolute life.  A few sentences of a pious book deepened the
impression.  He became a converted man, and joined himself to a handful
of earnest Christians in Bedford, who becoming, in the language of the
day, "a church," he was appointed its first minister.  Gifford exercised
a deep and vital though narrow influence, leaving behind him at his
death, in 1655, the character of a "wise, tolerant, and truly Christian
man."  The conversation of the poor women who were destined to exercise
so momentous an influence on Bunyan's spiritual life, evidenced how
thoroughly they had drunk in their pastor's teaching.  Bunyan himself was
at this time a "brisk talker in the matters of religion," such as he drew
from the life in his own Talkative.  But the words of these poor women
were entirely beyond him.  They opened a new and blessed land to which he
was a complete stranger.  "They spoke of their own wretchedness of heart,
of their unbelief, of their miserable state by nature, of the new birth,
and the work of God in their souls, and how the Lord refreshed them, and
supported them against the temptations of the Devil by His words and
promises."  But what seems to have struck Bunyan the most forcibly was
the happiness which their religion shed in the hearts of these poor
women.  Religion up to this time had been to him a system of rules and
restrictions.  Heaven was to be won by doing certain things and not doing
certain other things.  Of religion as a Divine life kindled in the soul,
and flooding it with a joy which creates a heaven on earth, he had no
conception.  Joy in believing was a new thing to him.  "They spake as if
joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture
language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they
were to me as if they had found a new world," a veritable "El Dorado,"
stored with the true riches.  Bunyan, as he says, after he had listened
awhile and wondered at their words, left them and went about his work
again.  But their words went with him.  He could not get rid of them.  He
saw that though he thought himself a godly man, and his neighbours
thought so too, he wanted the true tokens of godliness.  He was convinced
that godliness was the only true happiness, and he could not rest till he
had attained it.  So he made it his business to be going again and again
into the company of these good women.  He could not stay away, and the
more he talked with them the more uneasy he became--"the more I
questioned my own condition."  The salvation of his soul became all in
all to him.  His mind "lay fixed on eternity like a horse-leech at the
vein."  The Bible became precious to him.  He read it with new eyes, "as
I never did before."  "I was indeed then never out of the Bible, either
by reading or meditation."  The Epistles of St. Paul, which before he
"could not away with," were now "sweet and pleasant" to him.  He was
still "crying out to God that he might know the truth and the way to
Heaven and glory."  Having no one to guide him in his study of the most
difficult of all books, it is no wonder that he misinterpreted and
misapplied its words in a manner which went far to unsettle his brain.  He
read that without faith he could not be saved, and though he did not
clearly know what faith was, it became a question of supreme anxiety to
him to determine whether he had it or not.  If not, he was a castaway
indeed, doomed to perish for ever.  So he determined to put it to the
test.  The Bible told him that faith, "even as a grain of mustard seed,"
would enable its possessor to work miracles.  So, as Mr. Froude says,
"not understanding Oriental metaphors," he thought he had here a simple
test which would at once solve the question.  One day as he was walking
along the miry road between Elstow and Bedford, which he had so often
paced as a schoolboy, "the temptation came hot upon him" to put the
matter to the proof, by saying to the puddles that were in the horse-pads
"be dry," and to the dry places, "be ye puddles."  He was just about to
utter the words when a sudden thought stopped him.  Would it not be
better just to go under the hedge and pray that God would enable him?
This pause saved him from a rash venture, which might have landed him in
despair.  For he concluded that if he tried after praying and nothing
came of it, it would prove that he had no faith, but was a castaway.
"Nay, thought I, if it be so, I will never try yet, but will stay a
little longer."  "Then," he continues, "I was so tossed betwixt the Devil
and my own ignorance, and so perplexed, especially at sometimes, that I
could not tell what to do."  At another time his mind, as the minds of
thousands have been and will be to the end, was greatly harassed by the
insoluble problems of predestination and election.  The question was not
now whether he had faith, but "whether he was one of the elect or not,
and if not, what then?"  "He might as well leave off and strive no
further."  And then the strange fancy occurred to him, that the good
people at Bedford whose acquaintance he had recently made, were all that
God meant to save in that part of the country, and that the day of grace
was past and gone for him; that he had overstood the time of mercy.  "Oh
that he had turned sooner!" was then his cry.  "Oh that he had turned
seven years before!  What a fool he had been to trifle away his time till
his soul and heaven were lost!"  The text, "compel them to come in, and
yet there is room," came to his rescue when he was so harassed and faint
that he was "scarce able to take one step more."  He found them "sweet
words," for they showed him that there was "place enough in heaven for
him," and he verily believed that when Christ spoke them He was thinking
of him, and had them recorded to help him to overcome the vile fear that
there was no place left for him in His bosom.  But soon another fear
succeeded the former.  Was he truly called of Christ?  "He called to them
when He would, and they came to Him."  But they could not come unless He
called them.  Had He called him?  Would He call him?  If He did how
gladly would he run after Him.  But oh, he feared that He had no liking
to him; that He would not call him.  True conversion was what he longed
for.  "Could it have been gotten for gold," he said, "what could I have
given for it!  Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times
over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state."  All
those whom he thought to be truly converted were now lovely in his eyes.
"They shone, they walked like people that carried the broad seal of
heaven about them.  Oh that he were like them, and shared in their goodly
heritage!"

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

But this sunshine shone but in illusion, and soon gave place to the old
sad questioning, which filled his soul with darkness.  Was he already
called, or should he be called some day?  He would give worlds to know.
Who could assure him?  At last some words of the prophet Joel (chap. iii,
21) encouraged him to hope that if not converted already, the time might
come when he should be converted to Christ.  Despair began to give way to
hopefulness.

At this crisis Bunyan took the step which he would have been wise if he
had taken long before.  He sought the sympathy and counsel of others.  He
began to speak his mind to the poor people in Bedford whose words of
religious experiences had first revealed to him his true condition.  By
them he was introduced to their pastor, "the godly Mr. Gifford," who
invited him to his house and gave him spiritual counsel.  He began to
attend the meetings of his disciples.

The teaching he received here was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan's
morbid sensitiveness.  For it was based upon a constant introspection and
a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion
of its motive, which made a man's ever-varying spiritual feelings the
standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to
the Saviour.  It is not, therefore, at all surprising that a considerable
period intervened before, in the language of his school, "he found
peace."  This period, which seems to have embraced two or three years,
was marked by that tremendous inward struggle which he has described, "as
with a pen of fire," in that marvellous piece of religious autobiography,
without a counterpart except in "The Confessions of St. Augustine," his
"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners."  Bunyan's first experiences
after his introduction to Mr. Gifford and the inner circle of his
disciples were most discouraging.  What he heard of God's dealings with
their souls showed him something of "the vanity and inward wretchedness
of his wicked heart," and at the same time roused all its hostility to
God's will.  "It did work at that rate for wickedness as it never did
before."  "The Canaanites _would_ dwell in the land."  "His heart
hankered after every foolish vanity, and hung back both to and in every
duty, as a clog on the leg of a bird to hinder her from flying."  He
thought that he was growing "worse and worse," and was "further from
conversion than ever before."  Though he longed to let Christ into his
heart, "his unbelief would, as it were, set its shoulder to the door to
keep Him out."

Yet all the while he was tormented with the most perverse scrupulosity of
conscience.  "As to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now;
I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my
conscience now was sore, and would smart at every twist.  I could not now
tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them.  Oh! how
gingerly did I then go in all I did or said: I found myself in a miry
bog, that shook if I did but stir, and was as those left both of God, and
Christ, and the Spirit, and all good things."  All the misdoings of his
earlier years rose up against him.  There they were, and he could not rid
himself of them.  He thought that no one could be so bad as he was; "not
even the Devil could be his equal: he was more loathsome in his own eyes
than a toad."  What then must God think of him?  Despair seized fast hold
of him.  He thought he was "forsaken of God and given up to the Devil,
and to a reprobate mind."  Nor was this a transient fit of despondency.
"Thus," he writes, "I continued a long while, even for some years
together."

This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan's religious history
through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fierce
temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated
scraps of Bible language--texts torn from their context--the harassing
doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the
elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic
power.  It is a picture of fearful fascination that he draws.  "A great
storm" at one time comes down upon him, "piece by piece," which "handled
him twenty times worse than all he had met with before," while "floods of
blasphemies were poured upon his spirit," and would "bolt out of his
heart."  He felt himself driven to commit the unpardonable sin and
blaspheme the Holy Ghost, "whether he would or no."  "No sin would serve
but that."  He was ready to "clap his hand under his chin," to keep his
mouth shut, or to leap head-foremost "into some muckhill-hole," to
prevent his uttering the fatal words.  At last he persuaded himself that
he had committed the sin, and a good but not overwise man, "an ancient
Christian," whom he consulted on his sad case, told him he thought so
too, "which was but cold comfort."  He thought himself possessed by the
devil, and compared himself to a child "carried off under her apron by a
gipsy."  "Kick sometimes I did, and also shriek and cry, but yet I was as
bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away."
He wished himself "a dog or a toad," for they "had no soul to be lost as
his was like to be;" and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle
upon him.  "If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could
not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one."  And yet he
was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought
himself singular.  "This much sunk me.  I thought my condition was alone;
but how to get out of, or get rid of, these things I could not."  Again
the very ground of his faith was shaken.  "Was the Bible true, or was it
not rather a fable and cunning story?"  All thought "their own religion
true.  Might not the Turks have as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet
Saviour as Christians had for Christ?  What if all we believed in should
be but 'a think-so' too?"  So powerful and so real were his illusions
that he had hard work to keep himself from praying to things about him,
to "a bush, a bull, a besom, or the like," or even to Satan himself.  He
heard voices behind him crying out that Satan desired to have him, and
that "so loud and plain that he would turn his head to see who was
calling him;" when on his knees in prayer he fancied he felt the foul
fiend pull his clothes from behind, bidding him "break off, make haste;
you have prayed enough."

This "horror of great darkness" was not always upon him.  Bunyan had his
intervals of "sunshine-weather" when Giant Despair's fits came on him,
and the giant "lost the use of his hand."  Texts of Scripture would give
him a "sweet glance," and flood his soul with comfort.  But these
intervals of happiness were but short-lived.  They were but "hints,
touches, and short visits," sweet when present, but "like Peter's sheet,
suddenly caught up again into heaven."  But, though transient, they
helped the burdened Pilgrim onward.  So vivid was the impression
sometimes made, that years after he could specify the place where these
beams of sunlight fell on him--"sitting in a neighbour's
house,"--"travelling into the country,"--as he was "going home from
sermon."  And the joy was real while it lasted.  The words of the
preacher's text, "Behold, thou art fair, my love," kindling his spirit,
he felt his "heart filled with comfort and hope."  "Now I could believe
that my sins would be forgiven."  He was almost beside himself with
ecstasy.  "I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God that I
thought I could have spoken of it even to the very crows that sat upon
the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood
me."  "Surely," he cried with gladness, "I will not forget this forty
years hence."  "But, alas! within less than forty days I began to
question all again."  It was the Valley of the Shadow of Death which
Bunyan, like his own Pilgrim, was travelling through.  But, as in his
allegory, "by and by the day broke," and "the Lord did more fully and
graciously discover Himself unto him."  "One day," he writes, "as I was
musing on the wickedness and blasphemy of my heart, that scripture came
into my mind, 'He hath made peace by the Blood of His Cross.'  By which I
was made to see, both again and again and again that day, that God and my
soul were friends by this blood: Yea, I saw the justice of God and my
sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other.  This was a good day to
me.  I hope I shall not forget it."  At another time the "glory and joy"
of a passage in the Hebrews (ii. 14-15) were "so weighty" that "I was
once or twice ready to swoon as I sat, not with grief and trouble, but
with solid joy and peace."  "But, oh! now how was my soul led on from
truth to truth by God; now had I evidence of my salvation from heaven,
with many golden seals thereon all banging in my sight, and I would long
that the last day were come, or that I were fourscore years old, that I
might die quickly that my soul might be at rest."

At this time he fell in with an old tattered copy of Luther's "Commentary
on the Galatians," "so old that it was ready to fall piece from piece if
I did but turn it over."  As he read, to his amazement and thankfulness,
he found his own spiritual experience described.  "It was as if his book
had been written out of my heart."  It greatly comforted him to find that
his condition was not, as he had thought, solitary, but that others had
known the same inward struggles.  "Of all the books that ever he had
seen," he deemed it "most fit for a wounded conscience."  This book was
also the means of awakening an intense love for the Saviour.  "Now I
found, as I thought, that I loved Christ dearly.  Oh, methought my soul
cleaved unto Him, my affections cleaved unto Him; I felt love to Him as
hot as fire."

And very quickly, as he tells us, his "love was tried to some purpose."
He became the victim of an extraordinary temptation--"a freak of fancy,"
Mr. Froude terms it--"fancy resenting the minuteness with which he
watched his own emotions."  He had "found Christ" and felt Him "most
precious to his soul."  He was now tempted to give Him up, "to sell and
part with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for the things of
this life; for anything."  Nor was this a mere passing, intermittent
delusion.  "It lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so
continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month, no, not
sometimes one hour in many days together, except when I was asleep."
Wherever he was, whatever he was doing day and night, in bed, at table,
at work, a voice kept sounding in his ears, bidding him "sell Christ" for
this or that.  He could neither "eat his food, stoop for a pin, chop a
stick, or cast his eyes on anything" but the hateful words were heard,
"not once only, but a hundred times over, as fast as a man could speak,
'sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,'" and, like his own Christian in the dark
valley, he could not determine whether they were suggestions of the
Wicked One, or came from his own heart.  The agony was so intense, while,
for hours together, he struggled with the temptation, that his whole body
was convulsed by it.  It was no metaphorical, but an actual, wrestling
with a tangible enemy.  He "pushed and thrust with his hands and elbows,"
and kept still answering, as fast as the destroyer said "sell Him," "No,
I will not, I will not, I will not! not for thousands, thousands,
thousands of worlds!" at least twenty times together.  But the fatal
moment at last came, and the weakened will yielded, against itself.  One
morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came again with redoubled force,
and would not be silenced.  He fought against it as long as he could,
"even until I was almost out of breath," when "without any conscious
action of his will" the suicidal words shaped themselves in his heart,
"Let Him go if He will."

Now all was over.  He had spoken the words and they could not be
recalled.  Satan had "won the battle," and "as a bird that is shot from
the top of a tree, down fell he into great guilt and fearful despair."  He
left his bed, dressed, and went "moping into the field," where for the
next two hours he was "like a man bereft of life, and as one past all
recovery and bound to eternal punishment."  The most terrible examples in
the Bible came trooping before him.  He had sold his birthright like
Esau.  He a betrayed his Master like Judas--"I was ashamed that I should
be like such an ugly man as Judas."  There was no longer any place for
repentance.  He was past all recovery; shut up unto the judgment to come.
He dared hardly pray.  When he tried to do so, he was "as with a tempest
driven away from God," while something within said, "'Tis too late; I am
lost; God hath let me fall."  The texts which once had comforted him gave
him no comfort now; or, if they did, it was but for a brief space.  "About
ten or eleven o'clock one day, as I was walking under a hedge and
bemoaning myself for this hard hap that such a thought should arise
within me, suddenly this sentence bolted upon me, 'The blood of Christ
cleanseth from all sin,'" and gave me "good encouragement."  But in two
or three hours all was gone.  The terrible words concerning Esau's
selling his birthright took possession of his mind, and "held him down."
This "stuck with him."  Though he "sought it carefully with tears," there
was no restoration for him.  His agony received a terrible aggravation
from a highly coloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira,
an Italian lawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having
embraced the Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to
return to the Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and
despair, from which Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of "the man
in the Iron Cage" at "the Interpreter's house."  The reading of this book
was to his "troubled spirit" as "salt when rubbed into a fresh wound,"
"as knives and daggers in his soul."  We cannot wonder that his health
began to give way under so protracted a struggle.  His naturally sturdy
frame was "shaken by a continual trembling."  He would "wind and twine
and shrink under his burden," the weight of which so crushed him that he
"could neither stand, nor go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet."  His
digestion became disordered, and a pain, "as if his breastbone would have
split asunder," made him fear that as he had been guilty of Judas' sin,
so he was to perish by Judas' end, and "burst asunder in the midst."  In
the trembling of his limbs he saw Cain's mark set upon him; God had
marked him out for his curse.  No one was ever so bad as he.  No one had
ever sinned so flagrantly.  When he compared his sins with those of David
and Solomon and Manasseh and others which had been pardoned, he found his
sin so much exceeded theirs that he could have no hope of pardon.  Theirs,
"it was true, were great sins; sins of a bloody colour.  But none of them
were of the nature of his.  He had sold his Saviour.  His sin was point
blank against Christ."  "Oh, methought this sin was bigger than the sins
of a country, of a kingdom, or of the whole world; not all of them
together was able to equal mine; mine outwent them every one."

It would be wearisome to follow Bunyan through all the mazes of his self-
torturing illusions.  Fierce as the storm was, and long in its
duration--for it was more than two years before the storm became a
calm--the waves, though he knew it not, in their fierce tossings which
threatened to drive his soul like a broken vessel headlong on the rocks
of despair, were bearing him nearer and nearer to the "haven where he
would be."  His vivid imagination, as we have seen, surrounded him with
audible voices.  He had heard, as he thought, the tempter bidding him
"Sell Christ;" now he thought he heard God "with a great voice, as it
were, over his shoulder behind him," saying, "Return unto Me, for I have
redeemed thee;" and though he felt that the voice mocked him, for he
could not return, there was "no place of repentance" for him, and fled
from it, it still pursued him, "holloaing after him, 'Return, return!'"
And return he did, but not all at once, or without many a fresh struggle.
With his usual graphic power he describes the zigzag path by which he
made his way.  His hot and cold fits alternated with fearful suddenness.
"As Esau beat him down, Christ raised him up."  "His life hung in doubt,
not knowing which way he should tip."  More sensible evidence came.  "One
day," he tells us, "as I walked to and fro in a good man's shop"--we can
hardly be wrong in placing it in Bedford--"bemoaning myself for this hard
hap of mine, for that I should commit so great a sin, greatly fearing
that I should not be pardoned, and ready to sink with fear, suddenly
there was as if there had rushed in at the window the noise of wind upon
me, but very pleasant, and I heard a voice speaking, 'Did'st ever refuse
to be justified by the Blood of Christ?'"  Whether the voice were
supernatural or not, he was not, "in twenty years' time," able to
determine.  At the time he thought it was.  It was "as if an angel had
come upon me."  "It commanded a great calm upon me.  It persuaded me
there might be hope."  But this persuasion soon vanished.  "In three or
four days I began to despair again."  He found it harder than ever to
pray.  The devil urged that God was weary of him; had been weary for
years past; that he wanted to get rid of him and his "bawlings in his
ears," and therefore He had let him commit this particular sin that he
might be cut off altogether.  For such an one to pray was but to add sin
to sin.  There was no hope for him.  Christ might indeed pity him and
wish to help him; but He could not, for this sin was unpardonable.  He
had said "let Him go if He will," and He had taken him at his word.
"Then," he says, "I was always sinking whatever I did think or do."  Years
afterwards he remembered how, in this time of hopelessness, having walked
one day, to a neighbouring town, wearied out with his misery, he sat down
on a settle in the street to ponder over his fearful state.  As he looked
up, everything he saw seemed banded together for the destruction of so
vile a sinner.  The "sun grudged him its light, the very stones in the
streets and the tiles on the house-roofs seemed to bend themselves
against him."  He burst forth with a grievous sigh, "How can God comfort
such a wretch as I?"  Comfort was nearer than he imagined.  "No sooner
had I said it, but this returned to me, as an echo doth answer a voice,
'This sin is not unto death.'"  This breathed fresh life into his soul.
He was "as if he had been raised out of a grave."  "It was a release to
me from my former bonds, a shelter from my former storm."  But though the
storm was allayed it was by no means over.  He had to struggle hard to
maintain his ground.  "Oh, how did Satan now lay about him for to bring
me down again.  But he could by no means do it, for this sentence stood
like a millpost at my back."  But after two days the old despairing
thoughts returned, "nor could his faith retain the word."  A few hours,
however, saw the return of his hopes.  As he was on his knees before
going to bed, "seeking the Lord with strong cries," a voice echoed his
prayer, "I have loved Thee with an everlasting love."  "Now I went to bed
at quiet, and when I awaked the next morning it was fresh upon my soul
and I believed it."

These voices from heaven--whether real or not he could not tell, nor did
he much care, for they were real to him--were continually sounding in his
ears to help him out of the fresh crises of his spiritual disorder.  At
one time "O man, great is thy faith," "fastened on his heart as if one
had clapped him on the back."  At another, "He is able," spoke suddenly
and loudly within his heart; at another, that "piece of a sentence," "My
grace is sufficient," darted in upon him "three times together," and he
was "as though he had seen the Lord Jesus look down through the tiles
upon him," and was sent mourning but rejoicing home.  But it was still
with him like an April sky.  At one time bright sunshine, at another
lowering clouds.  The terrible words about Esau "returned on him as
before," and plunged him in darkness, and then again some good words, "as
it seemed writ in great letters," brought back the light of day.  But the
sunshine began to last longer than before, and the clouds were less
heavy.  The "visage" of the threatening texts was changed; "they looked
not on him so grimly as before;" "that about Esau's birthright began to
wax weak and withdraw and vanish."  "Now remained only the hinder part of
the tempest.  The thunder was gone; only a few drops fell on him now and
then."

The long-expected deliverance was at hand.  As he was walking in the
fields, still with some fears in his heart, the sentence fell upon his
soul, "Thy righteousness is in heaven."  He looked up and "saw with the
eyes of his soul our Saviour at God's right hand."  "There, I say, was my
righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was a-doing, God
could not say of me, 'He wants my righteousness,' for that was just
before Him.  Now did the chains fall off from my legs.  I was loosed from
my affliction and irons.  My temptations also fled away, so that from
that time those dreadful Scriptures left off to trouble me.  Oh methought
Christ, Christ, there was nothing but Christ that was before mine eyes.  I
could look from myself to Him, and should reckon that all those graces of
God that now were green upon me, were yet but like those crack-groats,
and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, while
their gold is in their trunks at home.  Oh, I saw my gold was in my trunk
at home.  In Christ my Lord and Saviour.  Further the Lord did lead me
into the mystery of union with the Son of God.  His righteousness was
mine, His merits mine, His victory also mine.  Now I could see myself in
heaven and earth at once; in heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my
Righteousness and Life, though on earth by my body or person.  These
blessed considerations were made to spangle in mine eyes.  Christ was my
all; all my Wisdom, all my Righteousness, all my Sanctification, and all
my Redemption."




CHAPTER III.


The Pilgrim, having now floundered through the Slough of Despond, passed
through the Wicket Gate, climbed the Hill Difficulty, and got safe by the
Lions, entered the Palace Beautiful, and was "had in to the family."  In
plain words, Bunyan united himself to the little Christian brotherhood at
Bedford, of which the former loose-living royalist major, Mr. Gifford,
was the pastor, and was formally admitted into their society.  In Gifford
we recognize the prototype of the Evangelist of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
while the Prudence, Piety, and Charity of Bunyan's immortal narrative had
their human representatives in devout female members of the congregation,
known in their little Bedford world as Sister Bosworth, Sister Munnes,
and Sister Fenne, three of the poor women whose pleasant words on the
things of God, as they sat at a doorway in the sun, "as if joy did make
them speak," had first opened Bunyan's eyes to his spiritual ignorance.
He was received into the church by baptism, which, according to his
earliest biographer, Charles Doe "the Struggler," was performed publicly
by Mr. Gifford, in the river Ouse, the "Bedford river" into which Bunyan
tells us he once fell out of a boat, and barely escaped drowning.  This
was about the year 1653.  The exact date is uncertain.  Bunyan never
mentions his baptism himself, and the church books of Gifford's
congregation do not commence till May, 1656, the year after Gifford's
death.  He was also admitted to the Holy Communion, which for want, as he
deemed, of due reverence in his first approach to it, became the occasion
of a temporary revival of his old temptations.  While actually at the
Lord's Table he was "forced to bend himself to pray" to be kept from
uttering blasphemies against the ordinance itself, and cursing his fellow
communicants.  For three-quarters of a year he could "never have rest or
ease" from this shocking perversity.  The constant strain of beating off
this persistent temptation seriously affected his health.  "Captain
Consumption," who carried off his own "Mr. Badman," threatened his life.
But his naturally robust constitution "routed his forces," and brought
him through what at one time he anticipated would prove a fatal illness.
Again and again, during his period of indisposition, the Tempter took
advantage of his bodily weakness to ply him with his former despairing
questionings as to his spiritual state.  That seemed as bad as bad could
be.  "Live he must not; die he dare not."  He was repeatedly near giving
up all for lost.  But a few words of Scripture brought to his mind would
revive his drooping spirits, with a natural reaction on his physical
health, and he became "well both in body and mind at once."  "My sickness
did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in my work for God again."
At another time, after three or four days of deep dejection, some words
from the Epistle to the Hebrews "came bolting in upon him," and sealed
his sense of acceptance with an assurance he never afterwards entirely
lost.  "Then with joy I told my wife, 'Now I know, I know.'  That night
was a good night to me; I never had but few better.  I could scarce lie
in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ."

During this time Bunyan, though a member of the Bedford congregation,
continued to reside at Elstow, in the little thatched wayside tenement,
with its lean-to forge at one end, already mentioned, which is still
pointed out as "Bunyan's Cottage."  There his two children, Mary, his
passionately loved blind daughter, and Elizabeth were born; the one in
1650, and the other in 1654.  It was probably in the next year, 1655,
that he finally quitted his native village and took up his residence in
Bedford, and became a deacon of the congregation.  About this time also
he must have lost the wife to whom he owed so much.  Bunyan does not
mention the event, and our only knowledge of it is from the conversation
of his second wife, Elizabeth, with Sir Matthew Hale.  He sustained also
an even greater loss in the death of his friend and comrade, Mr. Gifford,
who died in September, 1655.  The latter was succeeded by a young man
named John Burton, of very delicate health, who was taken by death from
his congregation, by whom he was much beloved, in September, 1660, four
months after the restoration of the Monarchy and the Church.  Burton
thoroughly appreciated Bunyan's gifts, and stood sponsor for him on the
publication of his first printed work.  This was a momentous year for
Bunyan, for in it Dr. Brown has shown, by a "comparison of dates," that
we may probably place the beginning of Bunyan's ministerial life.  Bunyan
was now in his twenty-seventh year, in the prime of his manly vigour,
with a vivid imagination, ready speech, minute textual knowledge of the
Bible, and an experience of temptation and the wiles of the evil one,
such as few Christians of double his years have ever reached.  "His gifts
could not long be hid."  The beginnings of that which was to prove the
great work of his life were slender enough.  As Mr. Froude says, "he was
modest, humble, shrinking."  The members of his congregation, recognizing
that he had "the gift of utterance" asked him to speak "a word of
exhortation" to them.  The request scared him.  The most truly gifted are
usually the least conscious of their gifts.  At first it did much "dash
and abash his spirit."  But after earnest entreaty he gave way, and made
one or two trials of his gift in private meetings, "though with much
weakness and infirmity."  The result proved the correctness of his
brethren's estimate.  The young tinker showed himself no common preacher.
His words came home with power to the souls of his hearers, who
"protested solemnly, as in the sight of God, that they were both affected
and comforted by them, and gave thanks to the Father of mercies for the
grace bestowed on him."  After this, as the brethren went out on their
itinerating rounds to the villages about, they began to ask Bunyan to
accompany them, and though he "durst not make use of his gift in an open
way," he would sometimes, "yet more privately still, speak a word of
admonition, with which his hearers professed their souls edified."  That
he had a real Divine call to the ministry became increasingly evident,
both to himself and to others.  His engagements of this kind multiplied.
An entry in the Church book records "that Brother Bunyan being taken off
by the preaching of the gospel" from his duties as deacon, another member
was appointed in his room.  His appointment to the ministry was not long
delayed.  After "some solemn prayer with fasting," he was "called forth
and appointed a preacher of the word," not, however, so much for the
Bedford congregation as for the neighbouring villages.  He did not
however, like some, neglect his business, or forget to "show piety at
home."  He still continued his craft as a tinker, and that with industry
and success.  "God," writes an early biographer, "had increased his
stores so that he lived in great credit among his neighbours."  He
speedily became famous as a preacher.  People "came in by hundreds to
hear the word, and that from all parts, though upon sundry and divers
accounts,"--"some," as Southey writes, "to marvel, and some perhaps to
mock."  Curiosity to hear the once profane tinker preach was not one of
the least prevalent motives.  But his word proved a word of power to
many.  Those "who came to scoff remained to pray."  "I had not preached
long," he says, "before some began to be touched and to be greatly
afflicted in their minds."  His success humbled and amazed him, as it
must every true man who compares the work with the worker.  "At first,"
he says, "I could not believe that God should speak by me to the heart of
any man, still counting myself unworthy; and though I did put it from me
that they should be awakened by me, still they would confess it and
affirm it before the saints of God.  They would also bless God for
me--unworthy wretch that I am--and count me God's instrument that showed
to them the way of salvation."  He preached wherever he found
opportunity, in woods, in barns, on village greens, or even in churches.
But he liked best to preach "in the darkest places of the country, where
people were the furthest off from profession," where he could give the
fullest scope to "the awakening and converting power" he possessed.  His
success as a preacher might have tempted him to vanity.  But the
conviction that he was but an instrument in the hand of a higher power
kept it down.  He saw that if he had gifts and wanted grace he was but as
a "tinkling cymbal."  "What, thought I, shall I be proud because I am a
sounding brass?  Is it so much to be a fiddle?"  This thought was, "as it
were, a maul on the head of the pride and vainglory" which he found
"easily blown up at the applause and commendation of every unadvised
christian."  His experiences, like those of every public speaker,
especially the most eloquent, were very varied, even in the course of the
same sermon.  Sometimes, he tells us, he would begin "with much
clearness, evidence, and liberty of speech," but, before he had done, he
found himself "so straitened in his speech before the people," that he
"scarce knew or remembered what he had been about," and felt "as if his
head had been in a bag all the time of the exercise."  He feared that he
would not be able to "speak sense to the hearers," or he would be "seized
with such faintness and strengthlessness that his legs were hardly able
to carry him to his place of preaching."  Old temptations too came back.
Blasphemous thoughts formed themselves into words, which he had hard work
to keep himself from uttering from the pulpit.  Or the tempter tried to
silence him by telling him that what he was going to say would condemn
himself, and he would go "full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit
door."  "'What,' the devil would say, 'will you preach this?  Of this
your own soul is guilty.  Preach not of it at all, or if you do, yet so
mince it as to make way for your own escape.'"  All, however, was in
vain.  Necessity was laid upon him.  "Woe," he cried, "is me, if I preach
not the gospel."  His heart was "so wrapped up in the glory of this
excellent work, that he counted himself more blessed and honoured of God
than if he had made him emperor of the Christian world."  Bunyan was no
preacher of vague generalities.  He knew that sermons miss their mark if
they hit no one.  Self-application is their object.  "Wherefore," he
says, "I laboured so to speak the word, as that the sin and person guilty
might be particularized by it."  And what he preached he knew and felt to
be true.  It was not what he read in books, but what he had himself
experienced.  Like Dante he had been in hell himself, and could speak as
one who knew its terrors, and could tell also of the blessedness of
deliverance by the person and work of Christ.  And this consciousness
gave him confidence and courage in declaring his message.  It was "as if
an angel of God had stood at my back."  "Oh it hath been with such power
and heavenly evidence upon my own soul while I have been labouring to
fasten it upon the conscience of others, that I could not be contented
with saying, 'I believe and am sure.'  Methought I was more than sure, if
it be lawful so to express myself, that the things I asserted were true."

Bunyan, like all earnest workers for God, had his disappointments which
wrung his heart.  He could be satisfied with nothing less than the
conversion and sanctification of his hearers.  "If I were fruitless, it
mattered not who commanded me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who
did condemn."  And the result of a sermon was often very different from
what he anticipated: "When I thought I had done no good, then I did the
most; and when I thought I should catch them, I fished for nothing."  "A
word cast in by-the-bye sometimes did more execution than all the Sermon
besides."  The tie between him and his spiritual children was very close.
The backsliding of any of his converts caused him the most extreme grief;
"it was more to me than if one of my own children were going to the
grave.  Nothing hath gone so near me as that, unless it was the fear of
the loss of the salvation of my own soul."

A story, often repeated, but too characteristic to be omitted,
illustrates the power of his preaching even in the early days of his
ministry.  "Being to preach in a church in a country village in
Cambridgeshire"--it was before the Restoration--"and the public being
gathered together in the churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the
soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people
was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was
to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was
resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear
him.  But God met him there by His ministry, so that he came out much
changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long
time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that country
afterwards."  "This story," continues the anonymous biographer, "I know
to be true, having many times discoursed with the man."  To the same ante-
Restoration period, Dr. Brown also assigns the anecdote of Bunyan's
encounter, on the road near Cambridge, with the university man who asked
him how he dared to preach not having the original Scriptures.  With
ready wit, Bunyan turned the tables on the scholar by asking whether he
had the actual originals, the copies written by the apostles and
prophets.  The scholar replied, "No," but they had what they believed to
be a true copy of the original.  "And I," said Bunyan, "believe the
English Bible to be a true copy, too."  "Then away rid the scholar."

The fame of such a preacher, naturally, soon spread far and wide; all the
countryside flocked eagerly to hear him.  In some places, as at Meldreth
in Cambridgeshire, and Yelden in his own county of Bedfordshire, the
pulpits of the parish churches were opened to him.  At Yelden, the
Rector, Dr. William Dell, the Puritan Master of Caius College, Cambridge,
formerly Chaplain to the army under Fairfax, roused the indignation of
his orthodox parishioners by allowing him--"one Bunyon of Bedford, a
tinker," as he is ignominiously styled in the petition sent up to the
House of Lords in 1660--to preach in his parish church on Christmas Day.
But, generally, the parochial clergy were his bitterest enemies.  "When I
first went to preach the word abroad," he writes, "the Doctors and
priests of the country did open wide against me."  Many were envious of
his success where they had so signally failed.  In the words of Mr. Henry
Deane, when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith,
Professor of Arabic and Keeper of the University Library at Cambridge,
who had come upon Bunyan preaching in a barn at Toft, they were "angry
with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and
pans," and proved himself more skilful in his craft than those who had
graduated at a university.  Envy is ever the mother of detraction.
Slanders of the blackest dye against his moral character were freely
circulated, and as readily believed.  It was the common talk that he was
a thorough reprobate.  Nothing was too bad for him.  He was "a witch, a
Jesuit, a highwayman, and the like."  It was reported that he had "his
misses and his bastards; that he had two wives at once," &c.  Such
charges roused all the man in Bunyan.  Few passages in his writings show
more passion than that in "Grace Abounding," in which he defends himself
from the "fools or knaves" who were their authors.  He "begs belief of no
man, and if they believe him or disbelieve him it is all one to him.  But
he would have them know how utterly baseless their accusations are."  "My
foes," he writes, "have missed their mark in their open shooting at me.  I
am not the man.  If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were
hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would be still alive.  I
know not whether there is such a thing as a woman breathing under the
copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by
common fame, except my wife."  He calls not only men, but angels, nay,
even God Himself, to bear testimony to his innocence in this respect.  But
though they were so absolutely baseless, nay, the rather because they
were so baseless, the grossness of these charges evidently stung Bunyan
very deeply.

So bitter was the feeling aroused against him by the marvellous success
of his irregular ministry, that his enemies, even before the restoration
of the Church and Crown, endeavoured to put the arm of the law in motion
to restrain him.  We learn from the church books that in March, 1658, the
little Bedford church was in trouble for "Brother Bunyan," against whom
an indictment had been laid at the Assizes for "preaching at Eaton
Socon."  Of this indictment we hear no more; so it was probably dropped.
But it is an instructive fact that, even during the boasted religious
liberty of the Protectorate, irregular preaching, especially that of the
much dreaded Anabaptists, was an indictable offence.  But, as Dr. Brown
observes, "religious liberty had not yet come to mean liberty all round,
but only liberty for a certain recognized section of Christians."  That
there was no lack of persecution during the Commonwealth is clear from
the cruel treatment to which Quakers were subjected, to say nothing of
the intolerance shown to Episcopalians and Roman Catholics.  In Bunyan's
own county of Bedford, Quakeresses were sentenced to be whipped and sent
to Bridewell for reproving a parish priest, perhaps well deserving of it,
and exhorting the folks on a market day to repentance and amendment of
life.  "The simple truth is," writes Robert Southey, "all parties were
agreed on the one catholic opinion that certain doctrines were not to be
tolerated:" the only points of difference between them were "what those
doctrines were," and how far intolerance might be carried.  The withering
lines are familiar to us, in which Milton denounces the "New Forcers of
Conscience," who by their intolerance and "super-metropolitan and
hyperarchiepiscopal tyranny," proved that in his proverbial words, "New
Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"--

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

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

It was in these closing years of the Protectorate that Bunyan made his
first essay at authorship.  He was led to it by a long and tiresome
controversy with the Quakers, who had recently found their way to
Bedford.  The foundations of the faith, he thought, were being
undermined.  The Quakers' teaching as to the inward light seemed to him a
serious disparagement of the Holy Scriptures, while their mystical view
of the spiritual Christ revealed to the soul and dwelling in the heart,
came perilously near to a denial of the historic reality of the personal
Christ.  He had had public disputations with male and female Quakers from
time to time, at the Market Cross at Bedford, at "Paul's Steeple-house in
Bedford town," and other places.  One of them, Anne Blackley by name,
openly bade him throw away the Scriptures, to which Bunyan replied, "No;
for then the devil would be too hard for me."  The same enthusiast
charged him with "preaching up an idol, and using conjuration and
witchcraft," because of his assertion of the bodily presence of Christ in
heaven.

The first work of one who was to prove himself so voluminous an author,
cannot but be viewed with much interest.  It was a little volume in
duodecimo, of about two hundred pages, entitled "Some Gospel Truths
Opened, by that unworthy servant of Christ, John Bunyan, of Bedford, by
the Grace of God, preacher of the Gospel of His dear Son," published in
1656.  The little book, which, as Dr. Brown says, was "evidently thrown
off at a heat," was printed in London and published at Newport Pagnel.
Bunyan being entirely unknown to the world, his first literary venture
was introduced by a commendatory "Epistle" written by Gifford's
successor, John Burton.  In this Burton speaks of the young author--Bunyan
was only in his twenty-ninth year--as one who had "neither the greatness
nor the wisdom of the world to commend him," "not being chosen out of an
earthly but out of a heavenly university, the Church of Christ," where
"through grace he had taken three heavenly degrees, to wit, union with
Christ, the anointing of the Spirit, and experience of the temptations of
Satan," and as one of whose "soundness in the faith, godly conversation,
and his ability to preach the Gospel, not by human aid, but by the Spirit
of the Lord," he "with many other saints had had experience."  This book
must be pronounced a very remarkable production for a young travelling
tinker, under thirty, and without any literary or theological training
but such as he had gained for himself after attaining to manhood.  Its
arrangement is excellent, the arguments are ably marshalled, the style is
clear, the language pure and well chosen.  It is, in the main, a well-
reasoned defence of the historical truth of the Articles of the Creed
relating to the Second Person of the Trinity, against the mystical
teaching of the followers of George Fox, who, by a false spiritualism,
sublimated the whole Gospel narrative into a vehicle for the
representation of truths relating to the inner life of the believer.  No
one ever had a firmer grasp than Bunyan of the spiritual bearing of the
facts of the recorded life of Christ on the souls of men.  But he would
not suffer their "subjectivity"--to adopt modern terms--to destroy their
"objectivity."  If the Son of God was not actually born of the Virgin
Mary, if He did not live in a real human body, and in that body die, lie
in the grave, rise again, and ascend up into heaven, whence He would
return--and that Bunyan believed shortly--in the same Body He took of His
mortal mother, His preaching was vain; their faith was vain; they were
yet in their sins.  Those who "cried up a Christ within, _in opposition_
to a Christ without," who asserted that Christ had no other Body but the
Church, that the only Crucifixion, rising again, and ascension of Christ
was that _within_ the believer, and that every man had, as an inner
light, a measure of Christ's Spirit within him sufficient to guide him to
salvation, he asserted were "possessed with a spirit of delusion;"
deceived themselves, they were deceiving others to their eternal ruin.  To
the refutation of such fundamental errors, substituting a mystical for an
historical faith, Bunyan's little treatise is addressed; and it may be
truly said the work is done effectually.  To adopt Coleridge's expression
concerning Bunyan's greater and world-famous work, it is an admirable
"_Summa Theologiae Evangelicae_," which, notwithstanding its obsolete
style and old-fashioned arrangement, may be read even now with advantage.

Bunyan's denunciation of the tenets of the Quakers speedily elicited a
reply.  This was written by a certain Edward Burrough, a young man of
three and twenty, fearless, devoted, and ardent in the propagation of the
tenets of his sect.  Being subsequently thrown into Newgate with hundreds
of his co-religionists, at the same time that his former antagonist was
imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, Burrough met the fate Bunyan's stronger
constitution enabled him to escape; and in the language of the times,
"rotted in prison," a victim to the loathsome foulness of his place of
incarceration, in the year of the "Bartholomew Act," 1662.

Burrough entitled his reply, "The Gospel of Peace, contended for in the
Spirit of Meekness and Love against the secret opposition of John Bunyan,
a professed minister in Bedfordshire."  His opening words, too
characteristic of the entire treatise, display but little of the meekness
professed.  "How long, ye crafty fowlers, will ye prey upon the innocent?
How long shall the righteous be a prey to your teeth, ye subtle foxes!
Your dens are in darkness, and your mischief is hatched upon your beds of
secret whoredoms?"  Of John Burton and the others who recommended
Bunyan's treatise, he says, "They have joined themselves with the broken
army of Magog, and have showed themselves in the defence of the dragon
against the Lamb in the day of war betwixt them."  We may well echo Dr.
Brown's wish that "these two good men could have had a little free and
friendly talk face to face.  There would probably have been better
understanding, and fewer hard words, for they were really not so far
apart as they thought.  Bunyan believed in the inward light, and Burrough
surely accepted an objective Christ.  But failing to see each other's
exact point of view, Burrough thunders at Bunyan, and Bunyan swiftly
returns the shot."

The rapidity of Bunyan's literary work is amazing, especially when we
take his antecedents into account.  Within a few weeks he published his
rejoinder to Friend Burrough, under the title of "A Vindication of Gospel
Truths Opened."  In this work, which appeared in 1667, Bunyan repays
Burrough in his own coin, styling him "a proved enemy to the truth," a
"grossly railing Rabshakeh, who breaks out with a taunt and a jeer," is
very "censorious and utters many words without knowledge."  In vigorous,
nervous language, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself
from Burrough's charges, and proves that the Quakers are "deceivers."  "As
for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbands is not walking
after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do make a religion out
of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walking after their own
lusts, and not after the Spirit of God."  Burrough had most unwarrantably
stigmatized Bunyan as one of "the false prophets, who love the wages of
unrighteousness, and through covetousness make merchandise of souls."
Bunyan calmly replies, "Friend, dost thou speak this as from thy own
knowledge, or did any other tell thee so?  However that spirit that led
thee out this way is a lying spirit.  For though I be poor and of no
repute in the world as to outward things, yet through grace I have
learned by the example of the Apostle to preach the truth, and also to
work with my hands both for mine own living, and for those that are with
me, when I have opportunity.  And I trust that the Lord Jesus who hath
helped me to reject the wages of unrighteousness hitherto, will also help
me still so that I shall distribute that which God hath given me freely,
and not for filthy lucre's sake."  The fruitfulness of his ministry which
Burrough had called in question, charging him with having "run before he
was sent," he refuses to discuss.  Bunyan says, "I shall leave it to be
taken notice of by the people of God and the country where I dwell, who
will testify the contrary for me, setting aside the carnal ministry with
their retinue who are so mad against me as thyself."

In his third book, published in 1658, at "the King's Head, in the Old
Bailey," a few days before Oliver Cromwell's death, Bunyan left the
thorny domain of polemics, for that of Christian exhortation, in which
his chief work was to be done.  This work was an exposition of the
parable of "the Rich Man and Lazarus," bearing the horror-striking title,
"A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul."  In this work,
as its title would suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the
parable as a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave,
gives full scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of
the lost.  It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in the
similes, and is written in the nervous homespun English of which he was
master.  Its popularity is shown by its having gone through nine editions
in the author's lifetime.  To take an example or two of its style:
dealing with the excuses people make for not hearing the Gospel, "O,
saith one, I dare not for my master, my brother, my landlord; I shall
lose his favour, his house of work, and so decay my calling.  O, saith
another, I would willingly go in this way but for my father; he chides me
and tells me he will not stand my friend when I come to want; I shall
never enjoy a pennyworth of his goods; he will disinherit me--And I dare
not, saith another, for my husband, for he will be a-railing, and tells
me he will turn me out of doors, he will beat me and cut off my legs;"
and then turning from the hindered to the hinderers: "Oh, what red lines
will there be against all those rich ungodly landlords that so keep under
their poor tenants that they dare not go out to hear the word for fear
that their rent should be raised or they turned out of their houses.
Think on this, you drunken proud rich, and scornful landlords; think on
this, you madbrained blasphemous husbands, that are against the godly and
chaste conversation of your wives; also you that hold your servants so
hard to it that you will not spare them time to hear the Word, unless it
will be where and when your lusts will let you."  He bids the ungodly
consider that "the profits, pleasures, and vanities of the world" will
one day "give thee the slip, and leave thee in the sands and the brambles
of all that thou hast done."  The careless man lies "like the smith's dog
at the foot of the anvil, though the fire sparks flee in his face."  The
rich man remembers how he once despised Lazarus, "scrubbed beggarly
Lazarus.  What, shall I dishonour my fair sumptuous and gay house with
such a scabbed creephedge as he?  The Lazaruses are not allowed to warn
them of the wrath to come, because they are not gentlemen, because they
cannot with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.  Nay, they
must not, shall not, speak to them, and all because of this."

The fourth production of Bunyan's pen, his last book before his twelve
years of prison life began, is entitled, "The Doctrine of Law and Grace
Unfolded."  With a somewhat overstrained humility which is hardly worthy
of him, he describes himself in the title-page as "that poor contemptible
creature John Bunyan, of Bedford."  It was given to the world in May,
1659, and issued from the same press in the Old Bailey as his last work.
It cannot be said that this is one of Bunyan's most attractive writings.
It is as he describes it, "a parcel of plain yet sound, true, and home
sayings," in which with that clearness of thought and accuracy of
arrangement which belongs to him, and that marvellous acquaintance with
Scripture language which he had gained by his constant study of the
Bible, he sets forth the two covenants--the covenant of works, and the
covenant of Grace--"in their natures, ends, bounds, together with the
state and condition of them that are under the one, and of them that are
under the other."  Dr. Brown describes the book as "marked by a firm
grasp of faith and a strong view of the reality of Christ's person and
work as the one Priest and Mediator for a sinful world."  To quote a
passage, "Is there righteousness in Christ? that is mine.  Is there
perfection in that righteousness? that is mine.  Did He bleed for sin?  It
was for mine.  Hath He overcome the law, the devil, and hell?  The
victory is mine, and I am come forth conqueror, nay, more than a
conqueror through Him that hath loved me. . . Lord, show me continually
in the light of Thy Spirit, through Thy word, that Jesus that was born in
the days of Caesar Augustus, when Mary, a daughter of Judah, went with
Joseph to be taxed in Bethlehem, that He is the very Christ.  Let me not
rest contented without such a faith that is so wrought even by the
discovery of His Birth, Crucifying Death, Blood, Resurrection, Ascension,
and Second--which is His Personal--Coming again, that the very faith of
it may fill my soul with comfort and holiness."  Up and down its pages we
meet with vivid reminiscences of his own career, of which he can only
speak with wonder and thankfulness.  In the "Epistle to the Reader,"
which introduces it, occurs the passage already referred to describing
his education.  "I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato, but was
brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company
of poor countrymen."  Of his own religious state before his conversion he
thus speaks: "When it pleased the Lord to begin to instruct my soul, He
found me one of the black sinners of the world.  He found me making a
sport of oaths, and also of lies; and many a soul-poisoning meal did I
make out of divers lusts, such as drinking, dancing, playing, pleasure
with the wicked ones of the world; and so wedded was I to my sins, that
thought I to myself, 'I will have them though I lose my soul.'"  And
then, after narrating the struggles he had had with his conscience, the
alternations of hope and fear which he passed through, which are more
fully described in his "Grace Abounding," he thus vividly depicts the
full assurance of faith he had attained to: "I saw through grace that it
was the Blood shed on Mount Calvary that did save and redeem sinners, as
clearly and as really with the eyes of my soul as ever, methought, I had
seen a penny loaf bought with a penny. . . O let the saints know that
unless the devil can pluck Christ out of heaven he cannot pull a true
believer out of Christ."  In a striking passage he shows how, by turning
Satan's temptations against himself, Christians may "Get the art as to
outrun him in his own shoes, and make his own darts pierce himself."
"What! didst thou never learn to outshoot the devil in his own bow, and
cut off his head with his own sword as David served Goliath?"  The whole
treatise is somewhat wearisome, but the pious reader will find much in it
for spiritual edification.




CHAPTER IV.


We cannot doubt that one in whom loyalty was so deep and fixed a
principle as Bunyan, would welcome with sincere thankfulness the
termination of the miserable interval of anarchy which followed the death
of the Protector and the abdication of his indolent and feeble son, by
the restoration of monarchy in the person of Charles the Second.  Even if
some forebodings might have arisen that with the restoration of the old
monarchy the old persecuting laws might be revived, which made it
criminal for a man to think for himself in the matters which most nearly
concerned his eternal interests, and to worship in the way which he found
most helpful to his spiritual life, they would have been silenced by the
promise, contained in Charles's "Declaration from Breda," of liberty to
tender consciences, and the assurance that no one should be disquieted
for differences of opinion in religion, so long as such differences did
not endanger the peace and well-being of the realm.  If this declaration
meant anything, it meant a breadth of toleration larger and more liberal
than had been ever granted by Cromwell.  Any fears of the renewal of
persecution must be groundless.

But if such dreams of religious liberty were entertained they were
speedily and rudely dispelled, and Bunyan was one of the first to feel
the shock of the awakening.  The promise was coupled with a reference to
the "mature deliberation of Parliament."  With such a promise Charles's
easy conscience was relieved of all responsibility.  Whatever he might
promise, the nation, and Parliament which was its mouthpiece, might set
his promise aside.  And if he knew anything of the temper of the people
he was returning to govern, he must have felt assured that any scheme of
comprehension was certain to be rejected by them.  As Mr. Froude has
said, "before toleration is possible, men must have learnt to tolerate
toleration," and this was a lesson the English nation was very far from
having learnt; at no time, perhaps, were they further from it.  Puritanism
had had its day, and had made itself generally detested.  Deeply
enshrined as it was in many earnest and devout hearts, such as Bunyan's,
it was necessarily the religion not of the many, but of the few; it was
the religion not of the common herd, but of a spiritual aristocracy.  Its
stern condemnation of all mirth and pastime, as things in their nature
sinful, of which we have so many evidences in Bunyan's own writings; its
repression of all that makes life brighter and more joyous, and the sour
sanctimoniousness which frowned upon innocent relaxation, had rendered
its yoke unbearable to ordinary human nature, and men took the earliest
opportunity of throwing the yoke off and trampling it under foot.  They
hailed with rude and boisterous rejoicings the restoration of the
Monarchy which they felt, with a true instinct, involved the restoration
of the old Church of England, the church of their fathers and of the
older among themselves, with its larger indulgence for the instincts of
humanity, its wider comprehensiveness, and its more dignified and
decorous ritual.

The reaction from Puritanism pervaded all ranks.  In no class, however,
was its influence more powerful than among the country gentry.  Most of
them had been severe sufferers both in purse and person during the
Protectorate.  Fines and sequestrations had fallen heavily upon them, and
they were eager to retaliate on their oppressors.  Their turn had come;
can we wonder that they were eager to use it?  As Mr. J. R. Green has
said: "The Puritan, the Presbyterian, the Commonwealthsman, all were at
their feet. . . Their whole policy appeared to be dictated by a
passionate spirit of reaction. . . The oppressors of the parson had been
the oppressors of the squire.  The sequestrator who had driven the one
from his parsonage had driven the other from his manor-house.  Both had
been branded with the same charge of malignity.  Both had suffered
together, and the new Parliament was resolved that both should triumph
together."

The feeling thus eloquently expressed goes far to explain the harshness
which Bunyan experienced at the hands of the administrators of justice at
the crisis of his life at which we have now arrived.  Those before whom
he was successively arraigned belonged to this very class, which, having
suffered most severely during the Puritan usurpation, was least likely to
show consideration to a leading teacher of the Puritan body.  Nor were
reasons wanting to justify their severity.  The circumstances of the
times were critical.  The public mind was still in an excitable state,
agitated by the wild schemes of political and religious enthusiasts
plotting to destroy the whole existing framework both of Church and
State, and set up their own chimerical fabric.  We cannot be surprised
that, as Southey has said, after all the nation had suffered from
fanatical zeal, "The government, rendered suspicious by the constant
sense of danger, was led as much by fear as by resentment to seventies
which are explained by the necessities of self-defence," and which the
nervous apprehensions of the nation not only condoned, but incited.
Already Churchmen in Wales had been taking the law into their own hands,
and manifesting their orthodoxy by harrying Quakers and Nonconformists.
In the May and June of this year, we hear of sectaries being taken from
their beds and haled to prison, and brought manacled to the Quarter
Sessions and committed to loathsome dungeons.  Matters had advanced since
then.  The Church had returned in its full power and privileges together
with the monarchy, and everything went back into its old groove.  Every
Act passed for the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church was
declared a dead letter.  Those of the ejected incumbents who remained
alive entered again into their parsonages, and occupied their pulpits as
of old; the surviving bishops returned to their sees; and the whole
existing statute law regarding the Church revived from its suspended
animation.  No new enactment was required to punish Nonconformists and to
silence their ministers; though, to the disgrace of the nation and its
parliament, many new ones were subsequently passed, with ever-increasing
disabilities.  The various Acts of Elizabeth supplied all that was
needed.  Under these Acts all who refused to attend public worship in
their parish churches were subject to fines; while those who resorted to
conventicles were to be imprisoned till they made their submissions; if
at the end of three months they refused to submit they were to be
banished the realm, and if they returned from banishment, without
permission of the Crown, they were liable to execution as felons.  This
long-disused sword was now drawn from its rusty sheath to strike terror
into the hearts of Nonconformists.  It did not prove very effectual.  All
the true-hearted men preferred to suffer rather than yield in so sacred a
cause.  Bunyan was one of the earliest of these, as he proved one of the
staunchest.

Early in October, 1660, the country magistrates meeting in Bedford issued
an order for the public reading of the Liturgy of the Church of England.
Such an order Bunyan would not regard as concerning him.  Anyhow he would
not give obeying it a thought.  One of the things we least like in Bunyan
is the feeling he exhibits towards the Book of Common Prayer.  To him it
was an accursed thing, the badge and token of a persecuting party, a
relic of popery which he exhorted his adherents to "take heed that they
touched not" if they would be "steadfast in the faith of Jesus Christ."
Nothing could be further from his thoughts than to give any heed to the
magistrates' order to go to church and pray "after the form of men's
inventions."

The time for testing Bunyan's resolution was now near at hand.  Within
six months of the king's landing, within little more than a month of the
issue of the magistrate's order for the use of the Common Prayer Book,
his sturdy determination to yield obedience to no authority in spiritual
matters but that of his own conscience was put to the proof.  Bunyan may
safely be regarded as at that time the most conspicuous of the
Nonconformists of the neighbourhood.  He had now preached for five or six
years with ever-growing popularity.  No name was so rife in men's mouths
as his.  At him, therefore, as the representative of his brother
sectaries, the first blow was levelled.  It is no cause of surprise that
in the measures taken against him he recognized the direct agency of
Satan to stop the course of the truth: "That old enemy of man's
salvation," he says, "took his opportunity to inflame the hearts of his
vassals against me, insomuch that at the last I was laid out for the
warrant of a justice."  The circumstances were these, on November 12,
1660, Bunyan had engaged to go to the little hamlet of Lower Samsell near
Harlington, to hold a religious service.  His purpose becoming known, a
neighbouring magistrate, Mr. Francis Wingate, of Harlington House, was
instructed to issue a warrant for his apprehension under the Act of
Elizabeth.  The meeting being represented to him as one of seditious
persons bringing arms, with a view to the disturbance of the public
peace, he ordered that a strong watch should be kept about the house, "as
if," Bunyan says, "we did intend to do some fearful business to the
destruction of the country."  The intention to arrest him oozed out, and
on Bunyan's arrival the whisperings of his friends warned him of his
danger.  He might have easily escaped if he "had been minded to play the
coward."  Some advised it, especially the brother at whose house the
meeting was to take place.  He, "living by them," knew "what spirit" the
magistrates "were of," before whom Bunyan would be taken if arrested, and
the small hope there would be of his avoiding being committed to gaol.
The man himself, as a "harbourer of a conventicle," would also run no
small danger of the same fate, but Bunyan generously acquits him of any
selfish object in his warning: "he was, I think, more afraid of (for) me,
than of (for) himself."  The matter was clear enough to Bunyan.  At the
same time it was not to be decided in a hurry.  The time fixed for the
service not being yet come, Bunyan went into the meadow by the house, and
pacing up and down thought the question well out.  "If he who had up to
this time showed himself hearty and courageous in his preaching, and had
made it his business to encourage others, were now to run and make an
escape, it would be of an ill savour in the country.  If he were now to
flee because there was a warrant out for him, would not the weak and
newly-converted brethren be afraid to stand when great words only were
spoken to them.  God had, in His mercy, chosen him to go on the forlorn
hope; to be the first to be opposed for the gospel; what a discouragement
it must be to the whole body if he were to fly.  No, he would never by
any cowardliness of his give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme the
gospel."  So back to the house he came with his mind made up.  He had
come to hold the meeting, and hold the meeting he would.  He was not
conscious of saying or doing any evil.  If he had to suffer it was the
Lord's will, and he was prepared for it.  He had a full hour before him
to escape if he had been so minded, but he was resolved "not to go away."
He calmly waited for the time fixed for the brethren to assemble, and
then, without hurry or any show of alarm, he opened the meeting in the
usual manner, with prayer for God's blessing.  He had given out his text,
the brethren had just opened their Bibles and Bunyan was beginning to
preach, when the arrival of the constable with the warrant put an end to
the exercise.  Bunyan requested to be allowed to say a few parting words
of encouragement to the terrified flock.  This was granted, and he
comforted the little company with the reflection that it was a mercy to
suffer in so good a cause; and that it was better to be the persecuted
than the persecutors; better to suffer as Christians than as thieves or
murderers.  The constable and the justice's servant soon growing weary of
listening to Bunyan's exhortations, interrupted him and "would not be
quiet till they had him away" from the house.

The justice who had issued the warrant, Mr. Wingate, not being at home
that day, a friend of Bunyan's residing on the spot offered to house him
for the night, undertaking that he should be forthcoming the next day.
The following morning this friend took him to the constable's house, and
they then proceeded together to Mr. Wingate's.  A few inquiries showed
the magistrate that he had entirely mistaken the character of the Samsell
meeting and its object.  Instead of a gathering of "Fifth Monarchy men,"
or other turbulent fanatics as he had supposed, for the disturbance of
the public peace, he learnt from the constable that they were only a few
peaceable, harmless people, met together "to preach and hear the word,"
without any political meaning.  Wingate was now at a nonplus, and "could
not well tell what to say."  For the credit of his magisterial character,
however, he must do something to show that he had not made a mistake in
issuing the warrant.  So he asked Bunyan what business he had there, and
why it was not enough for him to follow his own calling instead of
breaking the law by preaching.  Bunyan replied that his only object in
coming there was to exhort his hearers for their souls' sake to forsake
their sinful courses and close in with Christ, and this he could do and
follow his calling as well.  Wingate, now feeling himself in the wrong,
lost his temper, and declared angrily that he would "break the neck of
these unlawful meetings," and that Bunyan must find securities for his
good behaviour or go to gaol.  There was no difficulty in obtaining the
security.  Bail was at once forthcoming.  The real difficulty lay with
Bunyan himself.  No bond was strong enough to keep him from preaching.  If
his friends gave them, their bonds would be forfeited, for he "would not
leave speaking the word of God."  Wingate told him that this being so, he
must be sent to gaol to be tried at the next Quarter Sessions, and left
the room to make out his mittimus.  While the committal was preparing,
one whom Bunyan bitterly styles "an old enemy to the truth," Dr. Lindall,
Vicar of Harlington, Wingate's father-in-law, came in and began "taunting
at him with many reviling terms," demanding what right he had to preach
and meddle with that for which he had no warrant, charging him with
making long prayers to devour widows houses, and likening him to "one
Alexander the Coppersmith he had read of," "aiming, 'tis like," says
Bunyan, "at me because I was a tinker."  The mittimus was now made out,
and Bunyan in the constable's charge was on his way to Bedford, when he
was met by two of his friends, who begged the constable to wait a little
while that they might use their interest with the magistrate to get
Bunyan released.  After a somewhat lengthened interview with Wingate,
they returned with the message that if Bunyan would wait on the
magistrate and "say certain words" to him, he might go free.  To satisfy
his friends, Bunyan returned with them, though not with any expectation
that the engagement proposed to him would be such as he could lawfully
take.  "If the words were such as he could say with a good conscience he
would say them, or else he would not."

After all this coming and going, by the time Bunyan and his friends got
back to Harlington House, night had come on.  As he entered the hall,
one, he tells us, came out of an inner room with a lighted candle in his
hand, whom Bunyan recognized as one William Foster, a lawyer of Bedford,
Wingate's brother-in-law, afterwards a fierce persecutor of the
Nonconformists of the district.  With a simulated affection, "as if he
would have leapt on my neck and kissed me," which put Bunyan on his
guard, as he had ever known him for "a close opposer of the ways of God,"
he adopted the tone of one who had Bunyan's interest at heart, and begged
him as a friend to yield a little from his stubbornness.  His brother-in-
law, he said, was very loath to send him to gaol.  All he had to do was
only to promise that he would not call people together, and he should be
set at liberty and might go back to his home.  Such meetings were plainly
unlawful and must be stopped.  Bunyan had better follow his calling and
leave off preaching, especially on week-days, which made other people
neglect their calling too.  God commanded men to work six days and serve
Him on the seventh.  It was vain for Bunyan to reply that he never
summoned people to hear him, but that if they came he could not but use
the best of his skill and wisdom to counsel them for their soul's
salvation; that he could preach and the people could come to hear without
neglecting their callings, and that men were bound to look out for their
souls' welfare on week-days as well as Sundays.  Neither could convince
the other.  Bunyan's stubbornness was not a little provoking to Foster,
and was equally disappointing to Wingate.  They both evidently wished to
dismiss the case, and intentionally provided a loophole for Bunyan's
escape.  The promise put into his mouth--"that he would not call the
people together"--was purposely devised to meet his scrupulous
conscience.  But even if he could keep the promise in the letter, Bunyan
knew that he was fully purposed to violate its spirit.  He was the last
man to forfeit self-respect by playing fast and loose with his
conscience.  All evasion was foreign to his nature.  The long interview
came to an end at last.  Once again Wingate and Foster endeavoured to
break down Bunyan's resolution; but when they saw he was "at a point, and
would not be moved or persuaded," the mittimus was again put into the
constable's hands, and he and his prisoner were started on the walk to
Bedford gaol.  It was dark, as we have seen, when this protracted
interview began.  It must have now been deep in the night.  Bunyan gives
no hint whether the walk was taken in the dark or in the daylight.  There
was however no need for haste.  Bedford was thirteen miles away, and the
constable would probably wait till the morning to set out for the prison
which was to be Bunyan's home for twelve long years, to which he went
carrying, he says, the "peace of God along with me, and His comfort in my
poor soul."




CHAPTER V.


A long-standing tradition has identified Bunyan's place of imprisonment
with a little corporation lock-up-house, some fourteen feet square,
picturesquely perched on one of the mid-piers of the many-arched mediaeval
bridge which, previously to 1765, spanned the Ouse at Bedford, and as Mr.
Froude has said, has "furnished a subject for pictures," both of pen and
pencil, "which if correct would be extremely affecting."  Unfortunately,
however, for the lovers of the sensational, these pictures are not
"correct," but are based on a false assumption which grew up out of a
desire to heap contumely on Bunyan's enemies by exaggerating the severity
of his protracted, but by no means harsh imprisonment.  Being arrested by
the warrant of a county magistrate for a county offence, Bunyan's place
of incarceration was naturally the county gaol.  There he undoubtedly
passed the twelve years of his captivity, and there the royal warrant for
his release found him "a prisoner in the common gaol for our county of
Bedford."  But though far different from the pictures which writers,
desirous of exhibiting the sufferings of the Puritan confessor in the
most telling form, have drawn--if not "a damp and dreary cell" into which
"a narrow chink admits a few scanty rays of light to render visible the
prisoner, pale and emaciated, seated on the humid earth, pursuing his
daily task to earn the morsel which prolongs his existence and his
confinement together,"--"the common gaol" of Bedford must have been a
sufficiently strait and unwholesome abode, especially for one, like the
travelling tinker, accustomed to spend the greater part of his days in
the open-air in unrestricted freedom.  Prisons in those days, and indeed
long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places.  A
century later Howard found Bedford gaol, though better than some, in what
would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition.  One who visited
Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it as "an uncomfortable and close
prison."  Bunyan however himself, in the narrative of his imprisonment,
makes no complaint of it, nor do we hear of his health having in any way
suffered from the conditions of his confinement, as was the case with not
a few of his fellow-sufferers for the sake of religion in other English
gaols, some of them even unto death.  Bad as it must have been to be a
prisoner, as far as his own testimony goes, there is no evidence that his
imprisonment, though varying in its strictness with his various gaolers,
was aggravated by any special severity; and, as Mr. Froude has said, "it
is unlikely that at any time he was made to suffer any greater hardships
than were absolutely inevitable."

The arrest of one whose work as a preacher had been a blessing to so
many, was not at once tamely acquiesced in by the religious body to which
he belonged.  A few days after Bunyan's committal to gaol, some of "the
brethren" applied to Mr. Crompton, a young magistrate at Elstow, to bail
him out, offering the required security for his appearance at the Quarter
Sessions.  The magistrate was at first disposed to accept the bail; but
being a young man, new in his office, and thinking it possible that there
might be more against Bunyan than the "mittimus" expressed, he was afraid
of compromising himself by letting him go at large.  His refusal, though
it sent him back to prison, was received by Bunyan with his usual calm
trust in God's overruling providence.  "I was not at all daunted, but
rather glad, and saw evidently that the Lord had heard me."  Before he
set out for the justice's house, he tells us he had committed the whole
event to God's ordering, with the prayer that "if he might do more good
by being at liberty than in prison," the bail might be accepted, "but if
not, that His will might be done."  In the failure of his friends' good
offices he saw an answer to his prayer, encouraging the hope that the
untoward event, which deprived them of his personal ministrations, "might
be an awaking to the saints in the country," and while "the slender
answer of the justice," which sent him back to his prison, stirred
something akin to contempt, his soul was full of gladness.  "Verily I did
meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me, and satisfying of me, that
it was His will and mind that I should be there."  The sense that he was
being conformed to the image of his great Master was a stay to his soul.
"This word," he continues, "did drop in upon my heart with some life, for
he knew that 'for envy they had delivered him.'"

Seven weeds after his committal, early in January, 1661, the Quarter
Sessions came on, and "John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer,"
was indicted in the customary form for having "devilishly and
perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear Divine Service," and
as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventions, to
the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of the
kingdom."  The chairman of the bench was the brutal and blustering Sir
John Keeling, the prototype of Bunyan's Lord Hategood in Faithful's trial
at Vanity Fair, who afterwards, by his base subserviency to an infamous
government, climbed to the Lord Chief Justice's seat, over the head of
Sir Matthew Hale.  Keeling had suffered much from the Puritans during the
great Rebellion, when, according to Clarendon, he was "always in gaol,"
and was by no means disposed to deal leniently with an offender of that
persuasion.  His brethren of the bench were country gentlemen hating
Puritanism from their heart, and eager for retaliation for the wrongs it
had wrought them.  From such a bench, even if Bunyan had been less
uncompromising, no leniency was to be anticipated.  But Bunyan's attitude
forbade any leniency.  As the law stood he had indisputably broken it,
and he expressed his determination, respectfully but firmly, to take the
first opportunity of breaking it again.  "I told them that if I was let
out of prison today I would preach the gospel again to-morrow by the help
of God."  We may dislike the tone adopted by the magistrates towards the
prisoner; we may condemn it as overbearing and contemptuous; we may smile
at Keeling's expositions of Scripture and his stock arguments against
unauthorized prayer and preaching, though we may charitably believe that
Bunyan misunderstood him when he makes him say that "the Book of Common
Prayer had been ever since the apostles' time"; we may think that the
prisoner, in his "canting pedlar's French," as Keeling called it, had the
better of his judges in knowledge of the Bible, in Christian charity, as
well as in dignity and in common sense, and that they showed their wisdom
in silencing him in court--"Let him speak no further," said one of them,
"he will do harm,"--since they could not answer him more convincingly:
but his legal offence was clear.  He confessed to the indictment, if not
in express terms, yet virtually.  He and his friends had held "many
meetings together, both to pray to God and to exhort one another.  I
confessed myself guilty no otherwise."  Such meetings were forbidden by
the law, which it was the duty of the justices to administer, and they
had no choice whether they would convict or no.  Perhaps they were not
sorry they had no such choice.  Bunyan was a most "impracticable"
prisoner, and as Mr. Froude says, the "magistrates being but unregenerate
mortals may be pardoned if they found him provoking."  The sentence
necessarily followed.  It was pronounced, not, we are sure reluctantly,
by Keeling, in the terms of the Act.  "He was to go back to prison for
three months.  If at three months' end he still refused to go to church
to hear Divine service and leave his preaching, he was to be banished the
realm,"--in modern language "transported," and if "he came back again
without special royal license," he must "stretch by the neck for it."

"This," said Keeling, "I tell you plainly."  Bunyan's reply that "as to
that matter he was at a point with the judge," for "that he would repeat
the offence the first time he could," provoked a rejoinder from one of
the bench, and the unseemly wrangling might have been still further
prolonged, had it not been stopped by the gaoler, who "pulling him away
to be gone," had him back to prison, where he says, and "blesses the Lord
Jesus Christ for it," his heart was as "sweetly refreshed" in returning
to it as it had "been during his examination.  So that I find Christ's
words more than bare trifles, where He saith, He will give a mouth and
wisdom, even such as all the adversaries shall not gainsay or resist.  And
that His peace no man can take from us."

The magistrates, however, though not unnaturally irritated by what seemed
to them Bunyan's unreasonable obstinacy, were not desirous to push
matters to extremity.  The three months named in his sentence, at the
expiration of which he was either to conform or be banished the realm,
were fast drawing to an end, without any sign of submission on his part.
As a last resort Mr. Cobb, the Clerk of the Peace, was sent to try what
calm and friendly reasoning might effect.  Cobb, who evidently knew
Bunyan personally, did his best, as a kind-hearted, sensible man, to
bring him to reason.  Cobb did not profess to be "a man that could
dispute," and Bunyan had the better of him in argument.  His position,
however, was unassailable.  The recent insurrection of Venner and his
Fifth Monarchy men, he said, had shown the danger to the public peace
there was in allowing fanatical gatherings to assemble unchecked.  Bunyan,
whose loyalty was unquestioned, must acknowledge the prudence of
suppressing meetings which, however good their ostensible aim, might
issue in nothing less than the ruin of the kingdom and commonwealth.
Bunyan had confessed his readiness to obey the apostolic precept by
submitting himself to the king as supreme.  The king forbade the holding
of private meetings, which, under colour of religion, might be
prejudicial to the State.  Why then did he not submit?  This need not
hinder him from doing good in a neighbourly way.  He might continue to
use his gifts and exhort his neighbours in private discourse, provided he
did not bring people together in public assemblies.  The law did not
abridge him of this liberty.  Why should he stand so strictly on public
meetings?  Or why should he not come to church and hear?  Was his gift so
far above that of others that he could learn of no one?  If he could not
be persuaded, the judges were resolved to prosecute the law against him.
He would be sent away beyond the seas to Spain or Constantinople--either
Cobb's or Bunyan's colonial geography was rather at fault here--or some
other remote part of the world, and what good could he do to his friends
then?  "Neighbour Bunyan" had better consider these things seriously
before the Quarter Session, and be ruled by good advice.  The gaoler here
put in his word in support of Cobb's arguments: "Indeed, sir, I hope he
will be ruled."  But all Cobb's friendly reasonings and expostulations
were ineffectual to bend Bunyan's sturdy will.  He would yield to no-one
in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law.  But,
he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly
condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, "one to obey
actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to
lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him."  The Clerk of the
Peace saw that it was no use to prolong the argument any further.  "At
this," writes Bunyan, "he sat down, and said no more; which, when he had
done, I did thank him for his civil and meek discoursing with me; and so
we parted: O that we might meet in heaven!"

The Coronation which took place very soon after this interview, April 13,
1661, afforded a prospect of release without unworthy submission.  The
customary proclamation, which allowed prisoners under sentence for any
offence short of felony to sue out a pardon for twelve months from that
date, suspended the execution of the sentence of banishment and gave a
hope that the prison doors might be opened for him.  The local
authorities taking no steps to enable him to profit by the royal
clemency, by inserting his name in the list of pardonable offenders, his
second wife, Elizabeth, travelled up to London,--no slight venture for a
young woman not so long raised from the sick bed on which the first news
of her husband's arrest had laid her,--and with dauntless courage made
her way to the House of Lords, where she presented her petition to one of
the peers, whom she calls Lord Barkwood, but whom unfortunately we cannot
now identify.  He treated her kindly, and showed her petition to other
peers, who appear to have been acquainted with the circumstances of
Bunyan's case.  They replied that the matter was beyond their province,
and that the question of her husband's release was committed to the
judges at the next assizes.  These assizes were held at Bedford in the
following August.  The judges of the circuit were Twisden and Sir Matthew
Hale.  From the latter--the friend of Richard Baxter, who, as Burnet
records, took great care to "cover the Nonconformists, whom he thought
too hardly used, all he could from the seventies some designed; and
discouraged those who were inclined to stretch the laws too much against
them"--Bunyan's case would be certain to meet with sympathetic
consideration.  But being set to administer the law, not according to his
private wishes, but according to its letter and its spirit, he was
powerless to relieve him.  Three several times did Bunyan's noble-hearted
wife present her husband's petition that he might be heard, and his case
taken impartially into consideration.  But the law forbad what Burnet
calls Sir Matthew Hale's "tender and compassionate nature" to have free
exercise.  He "received the petition very mildly at her hand, telling her
that he would do her and her husband the best good he could; but he
feared he could do none."  His brother judge's reception of her petition
was very different.  Having thrown it into the coach, Twisden "snapt her
up," telling her, what after all was no more than the truth, that her
husband was a convicted person, and could not be released unless he would
promise to obey the law and abstain from preaching.  On this the High
Sheriff, Edmund Wylde, of Houghton Conquest, spoke kindly to the poor
woman, and encouraged her to make a fresh application to the judges
before they left the town.  So she made her way, "with abashed face and
trembling heart," to the large chamber at the Old Swan Inn at the Bridge
Foot, where the two judges were receiving a large number of the justices
of the peace and other gentry of the county.  Addressing Sir Matthew Hale
she said, "My lord, I make bold to come again to your lordship to know
what may be done with my husband."  Hale received her with the same
gentleness as before, repeated what he had said previously, that as her
husband had been legally convicted, and his conviction was recorded,
unless there was something to undo that he could do her no good.  Twisden,
on the other hand, got violently angry, charged her brutally with making
poverty her cloak, told her that her husband was a breaker of the peace,
whose doctrine was the doctrine of the devil, and that he ran up and down
and did harm, while he was better maintained by his preaching than by
following his tinker's craft.  At last he waxed so violent that "withal
she thought he would have struck her."  In the midst of all his coarse
abuse, however, Twisden hit the mark when he asked: "What! you think we
can do what we list?"  And when we find Hale, confessedly the soundest
lawyer of the time, whose sympathies were all with the prisoner, after
calling for the Statute Book, thus summing up the matter: "I am sorry,
woman, that I can do thee no good.  Thou must do one of these three
things, viz., either apply thyself to the king, or sue out his pardon, or
get a writ of error," which last, he told her, would be the cheapest
course--we may feel sure that Bunyan's Petition was not granted because
it could not be granted legally.  The blame of his continued imprisonment
lay, if anywhere, with the law, not with its administrators.  This is not
always borne in mind as it ought to be.  As Mr. Froude remarks, "Persons
often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administer the law which
they find, and rail at them as if the sentences which they are obliged by
their oath to pass were their own personal acts."  It is not surprising
that Elizabeth Bunyan was unable to draw this distinction, and that she
left the Swan chamber in tears, not, however, so much at what she thought
the judges' "hardheartedness to her and her husband," as at the thought
of "the sad account such poor creatures would have to give" hereafter,
for what she deemed their "opposition to Christ and His gospel."

No steps seem to have been taken by Bunyan's wife, or any of his
influential friends, to carry out either of the expedients named by Hale.
It may have been that the money needed was not forthcoming, or, what
Southey remarks is "quite probable,"--"because it is certain that Bunyan,
thinking himself in conscience bound to preach in defiance of the law,
would soon have made his case worse than it then was."

At the next assizes, which were held in January, 1662, Bunyan again made
strenuous efforts to get his name put on the calendar of felons, that he
might have a regular trial before the king's judges and be able to plead
his cause in person.  This, however, was effectually thwarted by the
unfriendly influence of the county magistrates by whom he had been
committed, and the Clerk of the Peace, Mr. Cobb, who having failed in his
kindly meant attempt to induce "Neighbour Bunyan" to conform, had turned
bitterly against him and become one of his chief enemies.  "Thus," writes
Bunyan, "was I hindered and prevented at that time also from appearing
before the judge, and left in prison."  Of this prison, the county gaol
of Bedford, he remained an inmate, with one, short interval in 1666, for
the next twelve years, till his release by order of the Privy Council,
May 17, 1672.




CHAPTER VI.


The exaggeration of the severity of Bunyan's imprisonment long current,
now that the facts are better known, has led, by a very intelligible
reaction, to an undue depreciation of it.  Mr. Froude thinks that his
incarceration was "intended to be little more than nominal," and was
really meant in kindness by the authorities who "respected his
character," as the best means of preventing him from getting himself into
greater trouble by "repeating an offence that would compel them to adopt
harsh measures which they were earnestly trying to avoid."  If convicted
again he must be transported, and "they were unwilling to drive him out
of the country."  It is, however, to be feared that it was no such kind
consideration for the tinker-preacher which kept the prison doors closed
on Bunyan.  To the justices he was simply an obstinate law-breaker, who
must be kept in prison as long as he refused compliance with the Act.  If
he rotted in gaol, as so many of his fellow sufferers for conscience'
sake did in those unhappy times, it was no concern of theirs.  He and his
stubbornness would be alone to blame.

It is certainly true that during a portion of his captivity, Bunyan, in
Dr. Brown's words, "had an amount of liberty which in the case of a
prisoner nowadays would be simply impossible."  But the mistake has been
made of extending to the whole period an indulgence which belonged only
to a part, and that a very limited part of it.  When we are told that
Bunyan was treated as a prisoner at large, and like one "on parole," free
to come and go as he pleased, even as far as London, we must remember
that Bunyan's own words expressly restrict this indulgence to the six
months between the Autumn Assizes of 1661 and the Spring Assizes of 1662.
"Between these two assizes," he says, "I had by my jailer some liberty
granted me more than at the first."  This liberty was certainly of the
largest kind consistent with his character of a prisoner.  The church
books show that he was occasionally present at their meetings, and was
employed on the business of the congregation.  Nay, even his preaching,
which was the cause of his imprisonment, was not forbidden.  "I
followed," he says, writing of this period, "my wonted course of
preaching, taking all occasions that were put into my hand to visit the
people of God."  But this indulgence was very brief and was brought
sharply to an end.  It was plainly irregular, and depended on the
connivance of his jailer.  We cannot be surprised that when it came to
the magistrates' ears--"my enemies," Bunyan rather unworthily calls
them--they were seriously displeased.  Confounding Bunyan with the Fifth
Monarchy men and other turbulent sectaries, they imagined that his visits
to London had a political object, "to plot, and raise division, and make
insurrections," which, he honestly adds, "God knows was a slander."  The
jailer was all but "cast out of his place," and threatened with an
indictment for breach of trust, while his own liberty was so seriously
"straitened" that he was prohibited even "to look out at the door."  The
last time Bunyan's name appears as present at a church meeting is October
28, 1661, nor do we see it again till October 9, 1668, only four years
before his twelve years term of imprisonment expired.

But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quite so
narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, during the
greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painful one,
especially when spent, as it sometimes was, "under cruel and oppressive
jailers."  The enforced separation from his wife and children, especially
his tenderly loved blind daughter, Mary, was a continually renewed
anguish to his loving heart.  "The parting with them," he writes, "hath
often been to me as pulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only
because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I
should often have brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and
wants my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them;
especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all
beside.  Poor child, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou
must suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I
cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee.  O, the thoughts of the
hardships my blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces."  He
seemed to himself like a man pulling down his house on his wife and
children's head, and yet he felt, "I must do it; O, I must do it."  He
was also, he tells us, at one time, being but "a young prisoner," greatly
troubled by the thoughts that "for aught he could tell," his
"imprisonment might end at the gallows," not so much that he dreaded
death as that he was apprehensive that when it came to the point, even if
he made "a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder," he might play the
coward and so do discredit to the cause of religion.  "I was ashamed to
die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this."  The
belief that his imprisonment might be terminated by death on the
scaffold, however groundless, evidently weighed long on his mind.  The
closing sentences of his third prison book, "Christian Behaviour,"
published in 1663, the second year of his durance, clearly point to such
an expectation.  "Thus have I in few words written to you before I die,
.  . . not knowing the shortness of my life, nor the hindrances that
hereafter I may have of serving my God and you."  The ladder of his
apprehensions was, as Mr. Froude has said, "an imaginary ladder," but it
was very real to Bunyan.  "Oft I was as if I was on the ladder with a
rope about my neck."  The thought of it, as his autobiography shows,
caused him some of his deepest searchings of heart, and noblest ventures
of faith.  He was content to suffer by the hangman's hand if thus he
might have an opportunity of addressing the crowd that he thought would
come to see him die.  "And if it must be so, if God will but convert one
soul by my very last words, I shall not count my life thrown away or
lost."  And even when hours of darkness came over his soul, and he was
tempted to question the reality of his Christian profession, and to doubt
whether God would give him comfort at the hour of death, he stayed
himself up with such bold words as these.  "I was bound, but He was free.
Yea, 'twas my duty to stand to His word whether He would ever look on me
or no, or save me at the last.  If God doth not come in, thought I, I
will leap off the ladder even blindfold into Eternity, sink or swim, come
heaven, come hell.  Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do.  If not, I
will venture for Thy name."

Bunyan being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his brazier's
craft for the support of his wife and family, and his active spirit
craving occupation, he got himself taught how to make "long tagged
laces," "many hundred gross" of which, we are told by one who first
formed his acquaintance in prison, he made during his captivity, for "his
own and his family's necessities."  "While his hands were thus busied,"
writes Lord Macaulay, "he had often employment for his mind and for his
lips."  "Though a prisoner he was a preacher still."  As with St. Paul in
his Roman chains, "the word of God was not bound."  The prisoners for
conscience' sake, who like him, from time to time, were cooped up in
Bedford gaol, including several of his brother ministers and some of his
old friends among the leading members of his own little church, furnished
a numerous and sympathetic congregation.  At one time a body of some
sixty, who had met for worship at night in a neighbouring wood, were
marched off to gaol, with their minister at their head.  But while all
about him was in confusion, his spirit maintained its even calm, and he
could at once speak the words of strength and comfort that were needed.
In the midst of the hurry which so many "newcomers occasioned," writes
the friend to whom we are indebted for the details of his prison life, "I
have heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of
faith and plerophory of Divine assistance that has made me stand and
wonder."  These sermons addressed to his fellow prisoners supplied, in
many cases, the first outlines of the books which, in rapid succession,
flowed from his pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment,
relieving the otherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement.
Bunyan himself tells us that this was the case with regard to his "Holy
City," the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind when addressing
"his brethren in the prison chamber," nor can we doubt that the case was
the same with other works of his.  To these we shall hereafter return.
Nor was it his fellow prisoners only who profited by his counsels.  In
his "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," he gives us a story of a woman who
came to him when he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her
master, and to ask his help.  Hers was probably a representative case.
The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious
counsel and exhortation, was given to study and composition.  For this
his confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would have
looked for in vain.  The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably.
His library was, at least at one period, a very limited one,--"the least
and the best library," writes a friend who visited him in prison, "that I
ever saw, consisting only of two books--the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of
Martyrs.'"  "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no
cause to complain of intellectual destitution."  Bunyan's mode of
composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,--thoughts succeeding one
another with a quickness akin to inspiration,--was anything but careless.
The "limae labor" with him was unsparing.  It was, he tells us, "first
with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that
his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of
Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow
dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine; books
which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of
language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and
earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.

Bunyan's prison life when the first bitterness of it was past, and habit
had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it would seem, not an
unhappy one.  A manly self-respect bore him up and forbade his dwelling
on the darker features of his position, or thinking or speaking harshly
of the authors of his durance.  "He was," writes one who saw him at this
time, "mild and affable in conversation; not given to loquacity or to
much discourse unless some urgent occasion required.  It was observed he
never spoke of himself or his parents, but seemed low in his own eyes.  He
was never heard to reproach or revile, whatever injury he received, but
rather rebuked those who did so.  He managed all things with such
exactness as if he had made it his study not to give offence."

According to his earliest biographer, Charles Doe, in 1666, the year of
the Fire of London, after Bunyan had lain six years in Bedford gaol, "by
the intercession of some interest or power that took pity on his
sufferings," he enjoyed a short interval of liberty.  Who these friends
and sympathisers were is not mentioned, and it would be vain to
conjecture.  This period of freedom, however, was very short.  He at once
resumed his old work of preaching, against which the laws had become even
more stringent during his imprisonment, and was apprehended at a meeting
just as he was about to preach a sermon.  He had given out his text,
"Dost thou believe on the Son of God?" (John ix. 35), and was standing
with his open Bible in his hand, when the constable came in to take him.
Bunyan fixed his eyes on the man, who turned pale, let go his hold, and
drew back, while Bunyan exclaimed, "See how this man trembles at the word
of God!"  This is all we know of his second arrest, and even this little
is somewhat doubtful.  The time, the place, the circumstances, are as
provokingly vague as much else of Bunyan's life.  The fact, however, is
certain.  Bunyan returned to Bedford gaol, where he spent another six
years, until the issuing of the "Declaration of Indulgence" early in 1672
opened the long-closed doors, and he walked out a free man, and with what
he valued far more than personal liberty, freedom to deliver Christ's
message as he understood it himself, none making him afraid, and to
declare to his brother sinners what their Saviour had done for them, and
what he expected them to do that they might obtain the salvation He died
to win.

From some unknown cause, perhaps the depressing effect of protracted
confinement, during this second six years Bunyan's pen was far less
prolific than during the former period.  Only two of his books are dated
in these years.  The last of these, "A Defence of the Doctrine of
Justification by Faith," a reply to a work of Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, the rector of Northill, was written in hot haste
immediately before his release, and issued from the press
contemporaneously with it, the prospect of liberty apparently breathing
new life into his wearied soul.  When once Bunyan became a free man
again, his pen recovered its former copiousness of production, and the
works by which he has been immortalized, "The Pilgrim's Progress"--which
has been erroneously ascribed to Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment--and
its sequel, "The Holy War," and the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," and a
host of more strictly theological works, followed one another in rapid
succession.

Bunyan's second term of imprisonment was certainly less severe than that
which preceded it.  At its commencement we learn that, like Joseph in
Egypt, he found favour in his jailer's eyes, who "took such pity of his
rigorous suffering, that he put all care and trust into his hands."
Towards the close of his imprisonment its rigour was still further
relaxed.  The Bedford church book begins its record again in 1688, after
an interval of ominous silence of five years, when the persecution was at
the hottest.  In its earliest entries we find Bunyan's name, which occurs
repeatedly up to the date of his final release in 1672.  Not one of these
notices gives the slightest allusion of his being a prisoner.  He is
deputed with others to visit and remonstrate with backsliding brethren,
and fulfil other commissions on behalf of the congregation, as if he were
in the full enjoyment of his liberty.  This was in the two years'
interval between the expiration of the Conventicle Act, March 2, 1667-8,
and the passing of the new Act, styled by Marvell, "the quintessence of
arbitrary malice," April 11, 1670.  After a few months of hot
persecution, when a disgraceful system of espionage was set on foot and
the vilest wretches drove a lucrative trade as spies on "meetingers," the
severity greatly lessened.  Charles II. was already meditating the
issuing of a Declaration of Indulgence, and signified his disapprobation
of the "forceable courses" in which, "the sad experience of twelve years"
showed, there was "very little fruit."  One of the first and most notable
consequences of this change of policy was Bunyan's release.

Mr. Offor's patient researches in the State Paper Office have proved that
the Quakers, than whom no class of sectaries had suffered more severely
from the persecuting edicts of the Crown, were mainly instrumental in
throwing open the prison doors to those who, like Bunyan, were in bonds
for the sake of their religion.  Gratitude to John Groves, the Quaker
mate of Tattersall's fishing boat, in which Charles had escaped to France
after the battle of Worcester, had something, and the untiring advocacy
of George Whitehead, the Quaker, had still more, to do with this act of
royal clemency.  We can readily believe that the good-natured Charles was
not sorry to have an opportunity of evidencing his sense of former
services rendered at a time of his greatest extremity.  But the main
cause lay much deeper, and is connected with what Lord Macaulay justly
styles "one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that
England has ever seen"--that of the Cabal.  Our national honour was at
its lowest ebb.  Charles had just concluded the profligate Treaty of
Dover, by which, in return for the "protection" he sought from the French
king, he declared himself a Roman Catholic at heart, and bound himself to
take the first opportunity of "changing the present state of religion in
England for a better," and restoring the authority of the Pope.  The
announcement of his conversion Charles found it convenient to postpone.
Nor could the other part of his engagement be safely carried into effect
at once.  It called for secret and cautious preparation.  But to pave the
way for it, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative he issued
a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended all penal laws against
"whatever sort of Nonconformists or Recusants."  The latter were
evidently the real object of the indulgence; the former class were only
introduced the better to cloke his infamous design.  Toleration, however,
was thus at last secured, and the long-oppressed Nonconformists hastened
to profit by it.  "Ministers returned," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "after
years of banishment, to their homes and their flocks.  Chapels were re-
opened.  The gaols were emptied.  Men were set free to worship God after
their own fashion.  John Bunyan left the prison which had for twelve
years been his home."  More than three thousand licenses to preach were
at once issued.  One of the earliest of these, dated May 9, 1672, four
months before his formal pardon under the Great Seal, was granted to
Bunyan, who in the preceding January had been chosen their minister by
the little congregation at Bedford, and "giving himself up to serve
Christ and His Church in that charge, had received of the elders the
right hand of fellowship."  The place licensed for the exercise of
Bunyan's ministry was a barn standing in an orchard, once forming part of
the Castle Moat, which one of the congregation, Josias Roughead, acting
for the members of his church, had purchased.  The license bears date May
9, 1672.  This primitive place of worship, in which Bunyan preached
regularly till his death, was pulled down in 1707, when a "three-ridged
meeting-house" was erected in its place.  This in its turn gave way, in
1849, to the existing more seemly chapel, to which the present Duke of
Bedford, in 1876, presented a pair of noble bronze doors bearing scenes,
in high relief, from "The Pilgrim's Progress," the work of Mr. Frederick
Thrupp.  In the vestry are preserved Bunyan's chair, and other relics of
the man who has made the name of Bedford famous to the whole civilized
world.




CHAPTER VII.


Mr. Green has observed that Bunyan "found compensation for the narrow
bounds of his prison in the wonderful activity of his pen.  Tracts,
controversial treatises, poems, meditations, his 'Grace Abounding,' and
his 'Holy War,' followed each other in quick succession."  Bunyan's
literary fertility in the earlier half of his imprisonment was indeed
amazing.  Even if, as seems almost certain, we have been hitherto in
error in assigning the First Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to this
period, while the "Holy War" certainly belongs to a later, the works
which had their birth in Bedford Gaol during the first six years of his
confinement, are of themselves sufficient to make the reputation of any
ordinary writer.  As has been already remarked, for some unexplained
cause, Bunyan's gifts as an author were much more sparingly called into
exercise during the second half of his captivity.  Only two works appear
to have been written between 1666 and his release in 1672.

Mr. Green has spoken of "poems" as among the products of Bunyan's pen
during this period.  The compositions in verse belonging to this epoch,
of which there are several, hardly deserve to be dignified with so high a
title.  At no part of his life had Bunyan much title to be called a poet.
He did not aspire beyond the rank of a versifier, who clothed his
thoughts in rhyme or metre instead of the more congenial prose, partly
for the pleasure of the exercise, partly because he knew by experience
that the lessons he wished to inculcate were more likely to be remembered
in that form.  Mr. Froude, who takes a higher estimate of Bunyan's verse
than is commonly held, remarks that though it is the fashion to apply the
epithet of "doggerel" to it, the "sincere and rational meaning" which
pervades his compositions renders such an epithet improper.  "His ear for
rhythm," he continues, "though less true than in his prose, is seldom
wholly at fault, and whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative
merit that he could never write nonsense."  Bunyan's earliest prison
work, entitled "Profitable Meditations," was in verse, and neither this
nor his later metrical ventures before his release--his "Four Last
Things," his "Ebal and Gerizim," and his "Prison Meditations"--can be
said to show much poetical power.  At best he is a mere rhymester, to
whom rhyme and metre, even when self-chosen, were as uncongenial
accoutrements "as Saul's armour was to David."  The first-named book,
which is entitled a "Conference between Christ and a Sinner," in the form
of a poetical dialogue, according to Dr. Brown has "small literary merit
of any sort."  The others do not deserve much higher commendation.  There
is an individuality about the "Prison Meditations" which imparts to it a
personal interest, which is entirely wanting in the other two works,
which may be characterized as metrical sermons, couched in verse of the
Sternhold and Hopkins type.  A specimen or two will suffice.  The "Four
Last Things" thus opens:--

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

The following lines are from "Ebal and Gerizim":--

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

The poetical effusion entitled "Prison Meditations" does not in any way
rise above the prosaic level of its predecessors.  But it can be read
with less weariness from the picture it presents of Bunyan's prison life,
and of the courageous faith which sustained him.  Some unnamed friend, it
would appear, fearing he might flinch, had written him a letter
counselling him to keep "his head above the flood."  Bunyan replied in
seventy stanzas in ballad measure, thanking his correspondent for his
good advice, of which he confesses he stood in need, and which he takes
it kindly of him to send, even though his feet stand upon Mount Zion, and
the gaol is to him like a hill from which he could see beyond this world,
and take his fill of the blessedness of that which remains for the
Christian.  Though in bonds his mind is free, and can wander where it
will.

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

Meanwhile his captivity is sweetened by the thought of what it was that
brought him there:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will be seen that though Bunyan's verses are certainly not high-class
poetry, they are very far removed from doggerel.  Nothing indeed that
Bunyan ever wrote, however rugged the rhymes and limping the metre, can
be so stigmatized.  The rude scribblings on the margins of the copy of
the "Book of Martyrs," which bears Bunyan's signature on the title-pages,
though regarded by Southey as "undoubtedly" his, certainly came from a
later and must less instructed pen.  And as he advanced in his literary
career, his claim to the title of a poet, though never of the highest,
was much strengthened.  The verses which diversify the narrative in the
Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" are decidedly superior to those
in the First Part, and some are of high excellence.  Who is ignorant of
the charming little song of the Shepherd Boy in the Valley of
Humiliation, "in very mean clothes, but with a very fresh and
well-favoured countenance, and wearing more of the herb called Heartsease
in his bosom than he that is clad in silk and velvet?"--

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

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

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

Bunyan reaches a still higher flight in Valiant-for-Truth's song, later
on, the Shakesperian ring of which recalls Amiens' in "As You Like It,"

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

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

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

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

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

All readers of "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Holy War" are familiar
with the long metrical compositions giving the history of these works by
which they are prefaced and the latter work is closed.  No more
characteristic examples of Bunyan's muse can be found.  They show his
excellent command of his native tongue in racy vernacular, homely but
never vulgar, and his power of expressing his meaning "with sharp defined
outlines and without the waste of a word."

Take this account of his perplexity, when the First Part of his
"Pilgrim's Progress" was finished, whether it should be given to the
world or no, and the characteristic decision with which he settled the
question for himself:--

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

or the lines in which he introduces the Second Part of the Pilgrim to the
readers of the former part:--

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

How racy, even if the lines are a little halting, is the defence of the
genuineness of his Pilgrim in "The Advertisement to the Reader" at the
end of "The Holy War."

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

How full of life and vigour his sketch of the beleaguerment and
deliverance of "Mansoul," as a picture of his own spiritual experience,
in the introductory verses to "The Holy War"!--

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

Bunyan's other essays in the domain of poetry need not detain us long.
The most considerable of these--at least in bulk--if it be really his, is
a version of some portions of the Old and New Testaments: the life of
Joseph, the Book of Ruth, the history of Samson, the Book of Jonah, the
Sermon on the Mount, and the General Epistle of St. James.  The attempt
to do the English Bible into verse has been often made and never
successfully: in the nature of things success in such a task is
impossible, nor can this attempt be regarded as happier than that of
others.  Mr. Froude indeed, who undoubtingly accepts their genuineness,
is of a different opinion.  He styles the "Book of Ruth" and the "History
of Joseph" "beautiful idylls," of such high excellence that, "if we found
them in the collected works of a poet laureate, we should consider that a
difficult task had been accomplished successfully."  It would seem almost
doubtful whether Mr. Froude can have read the compositions that he
commends so largely, and so much beyond their merit.  The following
specimen, taken haphazard, will show how thoroughly Bunyan or the
rhymester, whoever he may be, has overcome what Mr. Froude regards as an
almost insuperable difficulty, and has managed to "spoil completely the
faultless prose of the English translation":--

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

The more we read of these poems, not given to the world till twelve years
after Bunyan's death, and that by a publisher who was "a repeated
offender against the laws of honest dealing," the more we are inclined to
agree with Dr. Brown, that the internal evidence of their style renders
their genuineness at the least questionable.  In the dull prosaic level
of these compositions there is certainly no trace of the "force and
power" always present in Bunyan's rudest rhymes, still less of the "dash
of genius" and the "sparkle of soul" which occasionally discover the hand
of a master.

Of the authenticity of Bunyan's "Divine Emblems," originally published
three years after his death under the title of "Country Rhymes for
Children," there is no question.  The internal evidence confirms the
external.  The book is thoroughly in Bunyan's vein, and in its homely
naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the "Interpreter's
House," especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys.  As in
that "house of imagery" things of the most common sort, the sweeping of a
room, the burning of a fire, the drinking of a chicken, a robin with a
spider in his mouth, are made the vehicle of religious teaching; so in
this "Book for Boys and Girls," a mole burrowing in the ground, a swallow
soaring in the air, the cuckoo which can do nothing but utter two notes,
a flaming and a blinking candle, or a pound of candles falling to the
ground, a boy chasing a butterfly, the cackling of a hen when she has
laid her egg, all, to his imaginative mind, set forth some spiritual
truth or enforce some wholesome moral lesson.  How racy, though homely,
are these lines on a Frog!--

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

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

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

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

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

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

A perusal of this little volume with its roughness and quaintness,
sometimes grating on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque
images, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet.  His muse,
it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a homely one.  She is "clad
in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks
along the level Bedfordshire roads."  But if the lines are unpolished,
"they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant," with the
"strong thought and the knack of the skilled workman who can drive by a
single blow the nail home to the head."

During his imprisonment Bunyan's pen was much more fertile in prose than
in poetry.  Besides his world-famous "Grace Abounding," he produced
during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer,
entitled "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian Behaviour,"
setting forth with uncompromising plainness the relative duties of
husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, by which
those who profess a true faith are bound to show forth its reality and
power; the "Holy City," an exposition of the vision in the closing
chapters of the Book of Revelation, brilliant with picturesque
description and rich in suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its
origin in a sermon preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their
prison chamber; and a work on the "Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal
Judgment."  On these works we may not linger.  There is not one of them
which is not marked by vigour of thought, clearness of language, accuracy
of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience.  Nor is there one which
does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan's picturesque
imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy language.  Each
will reward perusal.  His work on "Prayer" is couched in the most exalted
strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing
experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the
soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not
denied, is granted.  It is, however, unhappily deformed by much ignorant
reviling of the Book of Common Prayer.  He denounces it as "taken out of
the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragments of some popes, some
friars, and I know not what;" and ridicules the order of service it
propounds to the worshippers.  "They have the matter and the manner of
their prayer at their fingers' ends; they set such a prayer for such a
day, and that twenty years before it comes: one for Christmas, another
for Easter, and six days after that.  They have also bounded how many
syllables must be said in every one of them at their public exercises.
For each saint's day also they have them ready for the generations yet
unborn to say.  They can tell you also when you shall kneel, when you
shall stand, when you should abide in your seats, when you should go up
into the chancel, and what you should do when you come there.  All which
the apostles came short of, as not being able to compose so profound a
manner."  This bitter satirical vein in treating of sacred things is
unworthy of its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence.  It has
its excuse in the hard measure he had received from those who were so
unwisely endeavouring to force the Prayer Book on a generation which had
largely forgotten it.  In his mind, the men and the book were identified,
and the unchristian behaviour of its advocates blinded his eyes to its
merits as a guide to devotion.  Bunyan, when denouncing forms in worship,
forgot that the same apostle who directs that in our public assemblies
everything should be done "to edification," directs also that everything
should be done "decently and in order."

By far the most important of these prison works--"The Pilgrim's
Progress," belonging, as will be seen, to a later period--is the "Grace
Abounding," in which with inimitable earnestness and simplicity Bunyan
gives the story of his early life and his religious history.  This book,
if he had written no other, would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest
masters of the English language of his own or any other age.  In graphic
delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a
hardly won freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of
hope and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid self-torturing
questionings of motive and action, this work of the travelling tinker, as
a spiritual history, has never been surpassed.  Its equal can hardly be
found, save perhaps in the "Confessions of St. Augustine."  These,
however, though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a
more cultured style, and rise to a higher metaphysical region than Bunyan
was capable of attaining to.  His level is a lower one, but on that level
Bunyan is without a rival.  Never has the history of a soul convinced of
the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most
certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger of
hopeless, irreversible doom--seeing itself, to employ his own image,
hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might
snap any moment--been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring
language.  And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth.
Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, but
simply telling in plain unadorned language what he had felt.  The
experience was a very tremendous reality to him.  Like Dante, if he had
not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he
had in very deed traversed "the Valley of the Shadow of Death," had heard
its "hideous noises," and seen "the Hobgoblins of the Pit."  He "spake
what he knew and testified what he had seen."  Every sentence breathes
the most tremendous earnestness.  His words are the plainest, drawn from
his own homely vernacular.  He says in his preface, which will amply
repay reading, as one of the most characteristic specimens of his style,
that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adorned his narrative
more plentifully.  But he dared not.  "God did not play in convincing
him.  The devil did not play in tempting him.  He himself did not play
when he sunk as into a bottomless pit, and the pangs of hell caught hold
on him.  Nor could he play in relating them.  He must be plain and simple
and lay down the thing as it was.  He that liked it might receive it.  He
that did not might produce a better."  The remembrance of "his great
sins, his great temptations, his great fears of perishing for ever,
recalled the remembrance of his great help, his great support from
heaven, the great grace God extended to such a wretch as he was."  Having
thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children,
for whose use the work was originally composed and to whom it is
dedicated,--"those whom God had counted him worthy to beget to Faith by
his ministry in the Word"--to survey their own religious history, to
"work diligently and leave no corner unsearched."  He would have them
"remember their tears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every
hedge for mercy.  Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember?
Had they forgotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where
God visited their souls?  Let them remember the Word on which the Lord
had caused them to hope.  If they had sinned against light, if they were
tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let them remember
that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and that out of
them all the Lord had delivered him."  This dedication ends thus: "My
dear children, the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness.  God be
merciful to you, and grant you be not slothful to go in to possess the
land."

This remarkable book, as we learn from the title-page, was "written by
his own hand in prison."  It was first published by George Larkin in
London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the year of the Fire
of London, about the time that he experienced his first brief release.  As
with "The Pilgrim's Progress," the work grew in picturesque detail and
graphic power in the author's hand after its first appearance.  The later
editions supply some of the most interesting personal facts contained in
the narrative, which were wanting when it first issued from the press.
His two escapes from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder;
his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance from
death; the graphic account of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at
Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green--these and other
minor touches which give a life and colour to the story, which we should
be very sorry to lose, are later additions.  It is impossible to over-
estimate the value of the "Grace Abounding," both for the facts of
Bunyan's earlier life and for the spiritual experience of which these
facts were, in his eyes only the outward framework.  Beginning with his
parentage and boyhood, it carries us down to his marriage and life in the
wayside-cottage at Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford's congregation
at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and his subsequent call to
the work of the ministry among them, and winds up with an account of his
apprehension, examinations, and imprisonment in Bedford gaol.  The work
concludes with a report of the conversation between his noble-hearted
wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes,
narrated in a former chapter, "taken down," he says, "from her own
mouth."  The whole story is of such sustained interest that our chief
regret on finishing it is that it stops where it does, and does not go on
much further.  Its importance for our knowledge of Bunyan as a man, as
distinguished from an author, and of the circumstances of his life, is
seen by a comparison of our acquaintance with his earlier and with his
later years.  When he laid down his pen no one took it up, and beyond two
or three facts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little or nothing of all
that happened between his final release and his death.

The value of the "Grace Abounding," however, as a work of experimental
religion may be easily over-estimated.  It is not many who can study
Bunyan's minute history of the various stages of his spiritual life with
real profit.  To some temperaments, especially among the young, the book
is more likely to prove injurious than beneficial; it is calculated
rather to nourish morbid imaginations, and a dangerous habit of
introspection, than to foster the quiet growth of the inner life.
Bunyan's unhappy mode of dealing with the Bible as a collection of texts,
each of Divine authority and declaring a definite meaning entirely
irrespective of its context, by which the words hide the Word, is also
utterly destructive of the true purpose of the Holy Scriptures as a
revelation of God's loving and holy mind and will.  Few things are more
touching than the eagerness with which, in his intense self-torture,
Bunyan tried to evade the force of those "fearful and terrible
Scriptures" which appeared to seal his condemnation, and to lay hold of
the promises to the penitent sinner.  His tempest-tossed spirit could
only find rest by doing violence to the dogma, then universally accepted
and not quite extinct even in our own days, that the authority of the
Bible--that "Divine Library"--collectively taken, belongs to each and
every sentence of the Bible taken for and by itself, and that, in
Coleridge's words, "detached sentences from books composed at the
distance of centuries, nay, sometimes at a millenium from each other,
under different dispensations and for different objects," are to be
brought together "into logical dependency."  But "where the Spirit of the
Lord is there is liberty."  The divinely given life in the soul of man
snaps the bonds of humanly-constructed logical systems.  Only those,
however, who have known by experience the force of Bunyan's spiritual
combat, can fully appreciate and profit by Bunyan's narrative.  He tells
us on the title-page that it was written "for the support of the weak and
tempted people of God."  For such the "Grace Abounding to the chief of
sinners" will ever prove most valuable.  Those for whom it was intended
will find in it a message--of comfort and strength.

As has been said, Bunyan's pen was almost idle during the last six years
of his imprisonment.  Only two of his works were produced in this period:
his "Confession of Faith," and his "Defence of the Doctrine of
Justification by Faith."  Both were written very near the end of his
prison life, and published in the same year, 1672, only a week or two
before his release.  The object of the former work was, as Dr. Brown
tells us, "to vindicate his teaching, and if possible, to secure his
liberty."  Writing as one "in bonds for the Gospel," his professed
principles, he asserts, are "faith, and holiness springing therefrom,
with an endeavour so far as in him lies to be at peace with all men."  He
is ready to hold communion with all whose principles are the same; with
all whom he can reckon as children of God.  With these he will not
quarrel about "things that are circumstantial," such as water baptism,
which he regards as something quite indifferent, men being "neither the
better for having it, nor the worse for having it not."  "He will receive
them in the Lord as becometh saints.  If they will not have communion
with him, the neglect is theirs not his.  But with the openly profane and
ungodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the
communion, he will have no communion.  It would be a strange community,
he says, that consisted of men and beasts.  Men do not receive their
horse or their dog to their table; they put them in a room by
themselves."  As regards forms and ceremonies, he "cannot allow his soul
to be governed in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of
this world.  He is content to stay in prison even till the moss grows on
his eyelids rather than thus make of his conscience a continual butchery
and slaughter-shop by putting out his eyes and committing himself to the
blind to lead him.  Eleven years' imprisonment was a weighty argument to
pause and pause again over the foundation of the principles for which he
had thus suffered.  Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in
the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them
by the Word of God and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from
or deny them on pain of eternal damnation."

The second-named work, the "Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by
Faith," is entirely controversial.  The Rev. Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had published in the early
part of 1671, a book entitled "The Design of Christianity."  A copy
having found its way into Bunyan's hands, he was so deeply stirred by
what he deemed its subversion of the true foundation of Evangelical
religion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks composed a
long and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, and a
confutation of its teaching.  Fowler's doctrines as Bunyan understood
them--or rather misunderstood them--awoke the worst side of his impetuous
nature.  His vituperation of the author and his book is coarse and
unmeasured.  He roundly charges Fowler with having "closely, privily, and
devilishly turned the grace of God into a licentious doctrine,
bespattering it with giving liberty to lasciviousness;" and he calls him
"a pretended minister of the Word," who, in "his cursed blasphemous book
vilely exposes to public view the rottenness of his heart, in principle
diametrically opposite to the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, a
glorious latitudinarian that can, as to religion, turn and twist like an
eel on the angle, or rather like the weathercock that stands on the
steeple;" and describes him as "contradicting the wholesome doctrine of
the Church of England."  He "knows him not by face much less his personal
practise."  He may have "kept himself clear of the ignorant Sir Johns who
had for a long time, as a judgment of God, been made the mouth to the
people--men of debauched lives who for the love of filthy lucre and the
pampering of their idle carcases had made shipwreck of their former
faith;" but he does know that having been ejected as a Nonconformist in
1662, he had afterwards gone over to the winning side, and he fears that
"such an unstable weathercock spirit as he had manifested would stumble
the work and give advantage to the adversary to speak vilifyingly of
religion."  No excuse can be offered for the coarse violence of Bunyan's
language in this book; but it was too much the habit of the time to load
a theological opponent with vituperation, to push his assertions to the
furthest extreme, and make the most unwarrantable deductions from them.
It must be acknowledged that Bunyan does not treat Fowler and his
doctrines with fairness, and that, if the latter may be thought to
depreciate unduly the sacrifice of the Death of Christ as an expiation
for man's guilt, and to lay too great a stress on the moral faculties
remaining in the soul after the Fall, Bunyan errs still more widely on
the other side in asserting the absolute, irredeemable corruption of
human nature, leaving nothing for grace to work upon, but demanding an
absolutely fresh creation, not a revivification of the Divine nature
grievously marred but not annihilated by Adam's sin.

A reply to Bunyan's severe strictures was not slow to appear.  The book
bears the title, characteristic of the tone and language of its contents,
of "_Dirt wip't off_; or, a manifest discovery of the Gross Ignorance,
Erroneousness, and most Unchristian and Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan,
Lay-preacher in Bedford."  It professes to be written by a friend of
Fowler's, but Fowler was generally accredited with it.  Its violent
tirades against one who, he says, had been "near these twenty years or
longer very infamous in the Town and County of Bedford as a very
Pestilent Schismatick," and whom he suggests the authorities have done
wrong in letting out of prison, and had better clap in gaol again as "an
impudent and malicious Firebrand," have long since been consigned to a
merciful oblivion, where we may safely leave them.




CHAPTER VIII.


Bunyan's protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672.  The exact date
of his actual liberation is uncertain.  His pardon under the Great Seal
bears date September 13th.  But we find from the church books that he had
been appointed pastor of the congregation to which he belonged as early
as the 21st of January of that year, and on the 9th of May his
ministerial position was duly recognized by the Government, and a license
was granted to him to act "as preacher in the house of Josias Roughead,"
for those "of the Persuasion commonly called Congregational."  His
release would therefore seem to have anticipated the formal issue of his
pardon by four months.  Bunyan was now half way through his forty-fourth
year.  Sixteen years still remained to him before his career of
indefatigable service in the Master's work was brought to a close.  Of
these sixteen years, as has already been remarked, we have only a very
general knowledge.  Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known
source from which they can be recovered.  If he kept any diary it has not
been preserved.  If he wrote letters--and one who was looked up to by so
large a circle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose
pen was so ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written many--not one
has come down to us.  The pages of the church books during his pastorate
are also provokingly barren of record, and little that they contain is in
Bunyan's handwriting.  As Dr. Brown has said, "he seems to have been too
busy to keep any records of his busy life."  Nor can we fill up the blank
from external authorities.  The references to Bunyan in contemporary
biographies are far fewer than we might have expected; certainly far
fewer than we could have desired.  But the little that is recorded is
eminently characteristic.  We see him constantly engaged in the great
work to which he felt God had called him, and for which, "with much
content through grace," he had suffered twelve years' incarceration.  In
addition to the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own
congregation, he took a general oversight of the villages far and near
which had been the scene of his earlier ministry, preaching whenever
opportunity offered, and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour,
making long journeys into distant parts of the country for the
furtherance of the gospel.  We find him preaching at Leicester in the
year of his release.  Reading also is mentioned as receiving occasional
visits from him, and that not without peril after the revival of
persecution; while the congregations in London had the benefit of his
exhortations at stated intervals.  Almost the first thing Bunyan did,
after his liberation from gaol, was to make others sharers in his hardly
won "liberty of prophesying," by applying to the Government for licenses
for preachers and preaching places in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring
counties, under the Declaration of Indulgence.  The still existing list
sent in to the authorities by him, in his own handwriting, contains the
names of twenty-five preachers and thirty buildings, besides "Josias
Roughead's House in his orchard at Bedford."  Nineteen of these were in
his own native county, three in Northamptonshire, three in
Buckinghamshire, two in Cambridgeshire, two in Huntingdonshire, and one
in Hertfordshire.  The places sought to be licensed were very various,
barns, malthouses, halls belonging to public companies, &c., but more
usually private houses.  Over these religious communities, bound together
by a common faith and common suffering, Bunyan exercised a
quasi-episcopal superintendence, which gained for him the playful title
of "Bishop Bunyan."  In his regular circuits,--"visitations" we may not
improperly term them,--we are told that he exerted himself to relieve the
temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,--so soon and so
cruelly revived,--ministered diligently to the sick and afflicted, and
used his influence in reconciling differences between "professors of the
gospel," and thus prevented the scandal of litigation among Christians.
The closing period of Bunyan's life was laborious but happy, spent
"honourably and innocently" in writing, preaching, visiting his
congregations, and planting daughter churches.  "Happy," writes Mr.
Froude, "in his work; happy in the sense that his influence was daily
extending--spreading over his own country and to the far-off settlements
of America,--he spent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting
Castle out of sight, and the towers and minarets of Immanuel's Land
growing nearer and clearer as the days went on."

With his time so largely occupied in his spiritual functions, he could
have had but small leisure to devote to his worldly calling.  This,
however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure not to have
neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extent he should
work for his living.  He had a family to maintain.  His congregation were
mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contribute much to their pastor's
support.  Had it been otherwise, Bunyan was the last man in the world to
make a trade of the gospel, and though never hesitating to avail himself
of the apostolic privilege to "live of the gospel," he, like the apostle
of the Gentiles, would never be ashamed to "work with his own hands,"
that he might "minister to his own necessities," and those of his family.
But from the time of his release he regarded his ministerial work as the
chief work of his life.  "When he came abroad," says one who knew him,
"he found his temporal affairs were gone to wreck, and he had as to them
to begin again as if he had newly come into the world.  But yet he was
not destitute of friends, who had all along supported him with
necessaries and had been very good to his family, so that by their
assistance getting things a little about him again, he resolved as much
as possible to decline worldly business, and give himself wholly up to
the service of God."  The anonymous writer to whom we are indebted for
information concerning his imprisonment and his subsequent life, says
that Bunyan, "contenting himself with that little God had bestowed upon
him, sequestered himself from all secular employments to follow that of
his call to the ministry."  The fact, however, that in the "deed of gift"
of all his property to his wife in 1685, he still describes himself as a
"brazier," puts it beyond all doubt that though his ministerial duties
were his chief concern, he prudently kept fast hold of his handicraft as
a certain means of support for himself and those dependent on him.  On
the whole, Bunyan's outward circumstances were probably easy.  His wants
were few and easily supplied.  "Having food and raiment" for himself, his
wife, and his children, he was "therewith content."  The house in the
parish of St. Cuthbert's which was his home from his release to his death
(unhappily demolished fifty years back), shows the humble character of
his daily life.  It was a small cottage, such as labourers now occupy,
with three small rooms on the ground floor, and a garret with a
diminutive dormer window under the high-pitched tiled roof.  Behind stood
an outbuilding which served as his workshop.  We have a passing glimpse
of this cottage home in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary.
One Mr. Bagford, otherwise unknown to us, had once "walked into the
country" on purpose to see "the study of John Bunyan," and the student
who made it famous.  On his arrival the interviewer--as we should now
call him--met with a civil and courteous reception from Bunyan; but he
found the contents of his study hardly larger than those of his prison
cell.  They were limited to a Bible, and copies of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," and a few other books, chiefly his own works, "all lying on a
shelf or shelves."  Slight as this sketch is, it puts us more in touch
with the immortal dreamer than many longer and more elaborate paragraphs.

Bunyan's celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shut up in gaol,
was naturally enhanced by the circumstance of his imprisonment.  The barn
in Josias Roughead's orchard, where he was licensed as a preacher, was
"so thronged the first time he appeared there to edify, that many were
constrained to stay without; every one that was of his persuasion
striving to partake of his instructions."  Wherever he ministered,
sometimes, when troublous days returned, in woods, and in dells, and
other hiding-places, the announcement that John Bunyan was to preach
gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking
from them the word of life.  His fame grew the more he was known and
reached its climax when his work was nearest its end.  His biographer
Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, "when Mr. Bunyan
preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would
be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold.  I have
seen, by my computation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by
seven o'clock on a working day, in the dark winter time.  I also computed
about three thousand that came to hear him one Lord's Day in London, at a
town's-end meeting-house, so that half were fain to go back again for
want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled
almost over people to get upstairs to his pulpit."  This "town's-end
meeting house" has been identified by some with a quaint straggling long
building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is
an engraving in Wilkinson's "Londina Illustrata."  Doe's account,
however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street meeting-
house was not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan's
death, and then for Presbyterian service.  Other places in London
connected with his preaching are Pinners' Hall in Old Broad Street,
where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon
on "The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss
thereof," first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen's meeting-house in
White's Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place for titled folk,
city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position and degree.  At
earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformists were in
vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealth in private
houses and other places where he might hope to escape the lynx-eyed
informer.  It was at one of these furtive meetings that his earliest
biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of London Bridge, Charles
Doe, first heard him preach.  His choice of an Old Testament text at
first offended Doe, who had lately come into New Testament light and had
had enough of the "historical and doing-for-favour of the Old Testament."
But as he went on he preached "so New Testament like" that his hearer's
prejudices vanished, and he could only "admire, weep for joy, and give
the preacher his affections."

Bunyan was more than once urged to leave Bedford and settle in the
metropolis.  But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear.  Bedford
was the home of his deepest affections.  It was there the holy words of
the poor women "sitting in the sun," speaking "as if joy did make them
speak," had first "made his heart shake," and shown him that he was still
a stranger to vital godliness.  It was there he had been brought out of
darkness into light himself, and there too he had been the means of
imparting the same blessing to others.  The very fact of his long
imprisonment had identified him with the town and its inhabitants.  There
he had a large and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the ties
of a common faith and common sufferings.  Many of these recognized in
Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few "of the baser sort,"
reverenced him as their teacher and guide.  No prospect of a wider field
of usefulness, still less of a larger income, could tempt him to desert
his "few sheep in the wilderness."  Some of them, it is true, were
wayward sheep, who wounded the heart of their pastor by breaking from the
fold, and displaying very un-lamb-like behaviour.  He had sometimes to
realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep
in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion,
however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy members.  Brother John
Stanton had to be admonished "for abusing his wife and beating her often
for very light matters" (if the matters had been less light, would the
beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary
Foskett, for "privately whispering of a horrid scandal, 'without culler
of truth,' against Brother Honeylove."  Evil-speaking and backbiting set
brother against brother.  Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan's
spirit.  He himself was not always spared.  A letter had to be written to
Sister Hawthorn "by way of reproof for her unseemly language against
Brother Scot and the whole Church."  John Wildman was had up before the
Church and convicted of being "an abominable liar and slanderer,"
"extraordinary guilty" against "our beloved Brother Bunyan himself."  And
though Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by "humble acknowledgment of
her miscariag," the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by "a frothy
letter," which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion.  But
though Bunyan's flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as
he desired, these were the exception.  The congregation meeting in Josias
Roughead's barn must have been, take them as a whole, a quiet,
God-fearing, spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think
with thankfulness and satisfaction as "his hope and joy and crown of
rejoicing."  From such he could not be severed lightly.  Inducements
which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his
independent spirit.  He was not "a man that preached by way of bargain
for money," and, writes Doe, "more than once he refused a more plentiful
income to keep his station."  As Dr. Brown says: "He was too deeply
rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings to think of
striking his tent till the command came from the Master to come up to the
higher service for which he had been ripening so long."  At Bedford,
therefore, he remained; quietly staying on in his cottage in St.
Cuthbert's, and ministering to his humble flock, loving and beloved, as
Mr. Froude writes, "through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and
Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of Popery was
bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets, and confident
that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforward could only
bite his nails at the passing pilgrims."

Bunyan's peace was not, however, altogether undisturbed.  Once it
received a shock in a renewal of his imprisonment, though only for a
brief period, in 1675, to which we owe the world-famous "Pilgrim's
Progress"; and it was again threatened, though not actually disturbed ten
years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconformists
induced him to make over all his property--little enough in good sooth--to
his wife by deed of gift.

The former of these events demands our attention, not so much for itself
as for its connection with Bishop Barlow's interference in Bunyan's
behalf, and, still more, for its results in the production of "The
Pilgrim's Progress."  Until very recently the bare fact of this later
imprisonment, briefly mentioned by Charles Doe and another of his early
biographers, was all that was known to us.  They even leave the date to
be gathered, though both agree in limiting its duration to six months or
thereabouts.  The recent discovery, among the Chauncey papers, by Mr. W.
G. Thorpe, of the original warrant under which Bunyan was at this time
sent to gaol, supplies the missing information.  It has been already
noticed that the Declaration of Indulgence, under which Bunyan was
liberated in 1672, was very short-lived.  Indeed it barely lasted in
force a twelvemonth.  Granted on the 15th of March of that year, it was
withdrawn on the 9th of March of the following year, at the instance of
the House of Commons, who had taken alarm at a suspension of the laws of
the realm by the "inherent power" of the sovereign, without the advice or
sanction of Parliament.  The Declaration was cancelled by Charles II.,
the monarch, it is said, tearing off the Great Seal with his own hands, a
subsidy being promised to the royal spendthrift as a reward for his
complaisance.  The same year the Test Act became law.  Bunyan therefore
and his fellow Nonconformists were in a position of greater peril, as far
as the letter of the law was concerned, than they had ever been.  But, as
Dr. Stoughton has remarked, "the letter of the law is not to be taken as
an accurate index of the Nonconformists' condition.  The pressure of a
bad law depends very much upon the hands employed in its administration."
Unhappily for Bunyan, the parties in whose hands the execution of the
penal statutes against Nonconformists rested in Bedfordshire were his
bitter personal enemies, who were not likely to let them lie inactive.
The prime mover in the matter was doubtless Dr. William Foster, that
"right Judas" whom we shall remember holding the candle in Bunyan's face
in the hall of Harlington House at his first apprehension, and showing
such feigned affection "as if he would have leaped on his neck and kissed
him."  He had some time before this become Chancellor of the Bishop of
Lincoln, and Commissary of the Court of the Archdeacon of Bedford,
offices which put in his hands extensive powers which he had used with
the most relentless severity.  He has damned himself to eternal infamy by
the bitter zeal he showed in hunting down Dissenters, inflicting
exorbitant fines, and breaking into their houses and distraining their
goods for a full discharge, maltreating their wives and daughters, and
haling the offenders to prison.  Having been chiefly instrumental in
Bunyan's first committal to gaol, he doubtless viewed his release with
indignation as the leader of the Bedfordshire sectaries who was doing
more mischief to the cause of conformity, which it was his province at
all hazards to maintain, than any other twenty men.  The church would
never be safe till he was clapped in prison again.  The power to do this
was given by the new proclamation.  By this act the licenses to preach
previously granted to Nonconformists were recalled.  Henceforward no
conventicle had "any authority, allowance, or encouragement from his
Majesty."  We can easily imagine the delight with which Foster would hail
the issue of this proclamation.  How he would read and read again with
ever fresh satisfaction its stringent clauses.  That pestilent fellow,
Bunyan, was now once more in his clutches.  This time there was no chance
of his escape.  All licences were recalled, and he was absolutely
defenceless.  It should not be Foster's fault if he failed to end his
days in the prison from which he ought never to have been released.  The
proclamation is dated the 4th of March, 1674-5, and was published in the
_Gazette_ on the 9th.  It would reach Bedford on the 11th.  It placed
Bunyan at the mercy of "his enemies, who struck at him forthwith."  A
warrant was issued for his apprehension, undoubtedly written by our old
friend, Paul Cobb, the clerk of the peace, who, it will be remembered,
had acted in the same capacity on Bunyan's first committal.  It is dated
the 4th of March, and bears the signature of no fewer than thirteen
magistrates, ten of them affixing their seals.

That so unusually large a number took part in the execution of this
warrant, is sufficient indication of the importance attached to Bunyan's
imprisonment by the gentry of the county.  The following is the
document:--

   "To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them

   Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that
   (notwithstanding the Kings Majties late Act of most gracious generall
   and free pardon to all his subjects for past misdemeanours that by his
   said clemencie and indulgent grace and favor they might bee mooved and
   induced for the time to come more carefully to observe his Highenes
   lawes and Statutes and to continue in theire loyall and due obedience
   to his Majtie) Yett one John Bunnyon of youre said Towne Tynker hath
   divers times within one month last past in contempt of his Majtie's
   good Lawes preached or teached at a Conventicle Meeting or Assembly
   under color or ptence of exercise of Religion in other manner than
   according to the Liturgie or practiss of the Church of England  These
   are therefore in his Majties name to comand you forthwith to apprehend
   and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion before us or any of us or
   other his Majties Justice of Peace within the said County to answer
   the premisses and further to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice
   shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile.  Given under our
   handes and seales this ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth
   yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles
   the Second  A que Dni., juxta &c 1674

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

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

John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest,
would be immediately committed for trial.  Once more, then, Bunyan became
a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quarters in
the Bedford gaol.  Errors die hard, and those by whom they have been once
accepted find it difficult to give them up.  The long-standing tradition
of Bunyan's twelve years' imprisonment in the little lock-up-house on the
Ouse bridge, having been scattered to the winds by the logic of fact and
common sense, those to whom the story is dear, including the latest and
ablest of his biographers, Dr. Brown, see in this second brief
imprisonment a way to rehabilitate it.  Probability pointing to this
imprisonment as the time of the composition of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
they hold that on this occasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol,
and that he there wrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring
forward any satisfactory reasons for the change of the place of his
confinement.  The circumstances, however, being the same, there can be no
reasonable ground for questioning that, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned
in the county gaol.

This last imprisonment of Bunyan's lasted only half as many months as his
former imprisonment had lasted years.  At the end of six months he was
again a free man.  His release was due to the good officers of Owen,
Cromwell's celebrated chaplain, with Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln.  The
suspicion which hung over this intervention from its being erroneously
attributed to his release in 1672, three years before Barlow became a
bishop, has been dispelled by the recently discovered warrant.  The dates
and circumstances are now found to tally.  The warrant for Bunyan's
apprehension bears date March 4, 1675.  On the 14th of the following May
the supple and time-serving Barlow, after long and eager waiting for a
mitre, was elected to the see of Lincoln vacated by the death of Bishop
Fuller, and consecrated on the 27th of June.  Barlow, a man of very
dubious churchmanship, who had succeeded in keeping his university
appointments undisturbed all through the Commonwealth, and who was yet
among the first with effusive loyalty to welcome the restoration of
monarchy, had been Owen's tutor at Oxford, and continued to maintain
friendly relations with him.  As bishop of the diocese to which
Bedfordshire then, and long after, belonged, Barlow had the power, by the
then existing law, of releasing a prisoner for nonconformity on a bond
given by two persons that he would conform within half a year.  A friend
of Bunyan's, probably Ichabod Chauncey, obtained a letter from Owen to
the bishop requesting him to employ this prerogative in Bunyan's behalf.
Barlow with hollow complaisance expressed his particular kindness for Dr.
Owen, and his desire to deny him nothing he could legally grant.  He
would even strain a point to serve him.  But he had only just been made a
bishop, and what was asked was a new thing to him.  He desired a little
time to consider of it.  If he could do it, Owen might be assured of his
readiness to oblige him.  A second application at the end of a fortnight
found this readiness much cooled.  It was true that on inquiry he found
he might do it; but the times were critical, and he had many enemies.  It
would be safer for him not to take the initiative.  Let them apply to the
Lord Chancellor, and get him to issue an order for him to release Bunyan
on the customary bond.  Then he would do what Owen asked.  It was vain to
tell Barlow that the way he suggested was chargeable, and Bunyan poor.
Vain also to remind him that there was no point to be strained.  He had
satisfied himself that he might do the thing legally.  It was hoped he
would remember his promise.  But the bishop would not budge from the
position he had taken up.  They had his ultimatum; with that they must be
content.  If Bunyan was to be liberated, his friends must accept Barlow's
terms.  "This at last was done, and the poor man was released.  But
little thanks to the bishop."

This short six months' imprisonment assumes additional importance from
the probability, first suggested by Dr. Brown, which the recovery of its
date renders almost a certainty, that it was during this period that
Bunyan began, if he did not complete, the first part of "The Pilgrim's
Progress."  We know from Bunyan's own words that the book was begun in
gaol, and its composition has been hitherto unhesitatingly assigned to
his twelve years' confinement.  Dr. Brown was, we believe, the first to
call this in question.  Bunyan's imprisonment, we know, ended in 1672.
The first edition of "The Pilgrim's Progress" did not appear till 1678.
If written during his earlier imprisonment, six years must have elapsed
between its writing and its publication.  But it was not Bunyan's way to
keep his works in manuscript so long after their completion.  His books
were commonly put in the printers' hands as soon as they were finished.
There are no sufficient reasons--though some have been suggested--for his
making an exception to this general habit in the case of "The Pilgrim's
Progress."  Besides we should certainly conclude, from the poetical
introduction, that there was little delay between the finishing of the
book and its being given to the world.  After having written the book, he
tells us, simply to gratify himself, spending only "vacant seasons" in
his "scribble," to "divert" himself "from worser thoughts," he showed it
to his friends to get their opinion whether it should be published or
not.  But as they were not all of one mind, but some counselled one thing
and some another, after some perplexity, he took the matter into his own
hands.

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

We must agree with Dr. Brown that "there is a briskness about this which,
to say the least, is not suggestive of a six years' interval before
publication."  The break which occurs in the narrative after the visit of
the Pilgrims to the Delectable Mountains, which so unnecessarily
interrupts the course of the story--"So I awoke from my dream; and I
slept and dreamed again"--has been not unreasonably thought by Dr. Brown
to indicate the point Bunyan had reached when his six months'
imprisonment ended, and from which he continued the book after his
release.

The First Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" issued from the press in 1678.
A second edition followed in the same year, and a third with large and
important additions in 1679.  The Second Part, after an interval of seven
years, followed early in 1685.  Between the two parts appeared two of his
most celebrated works--the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," published in
1680, originally intended to supply a contrast and a foil to "The
Pilgrim's Progress," by depicting a life which was scandalously bad; and,
in 1682, that which Macaulay, with perhaps exaggerated eulogy, has said,
"would have been our greatest allegory if the earlier allegory had never
been written," the "Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus."  Superior to
"The Pilgrim's Progress" as a literary composition, this last work must
be pronounced decidedly inferior to it in attractive power.  For one who
reads the "Holy War," five hundred read the "Pilgrim."  And those who
read it once return to it again and again, with ever fresh delight.  It
is a book that never tires.  One or two perusals of the "Holy War"
satisfy: and even these are not without weariness.  As Mr. Froude has
said, "The 'Holy War' would have entitled Bunyan to a place among the
masters of English literature.  It would never have made his name a
household word in every English-speaking family on the globe."

Leaving the further notice of these and his other chief literary
productions to another chapter, there is little more to record in
Bunyan's life.  Though never again seriously troubled for his
nonconformity, his preaching journeys were not always without risk.  There
is a tradition that when he visited Reading to preach, he disguised
himself as a waggoner carrying a long whip in his hand to escape
detection.  The name of "Bunyan's Dell," in a wood not very far from
Hitchin, tells of the time when he and his hearers had to conceal their
meetings from their enemies' quest, with scouts planted on every side to
warn them of the approach of the spies and informers, who for reward were
actively plying their odious trade.  Reference has already been made to
Bunyan's "deed of gift" of all that he possessed in the world--his
"goods, chattels, debts, ready money, plate, rings, household stuff,
apparel, utensils, brass, pewter, bedding, and all other his substance
whatsoever--to his well-beloved wife Elizabeth Bunyan."  Towards the
close of the first year of James the Second, 1685, the apprehensions
under which Bunyan executed this document were far from groundless.  At
no time did the persecution of Nonconformists rage with greater
fierceness.  Never, not even under the tyranny of Laud, as Lord Macaulay
records had the condition of the Puritans been so deplorable.  Never had
spies been so actively employed in detecting congregations.  Never had
magistrates, grand-jurors, rectors, and churchwardens been so much on the
alert.  Many Nonconformists were cited before the ecclesiastical courts.
Others found it necessary to purchase the connivance of the agents of the
Government by bribes.  It was impossible for the sectaries to pray
together without precautions such as are employed by coiners and
receivers of stolen goods.  Dissenting ministers, however blameless in
life, however eminent in learning, could not venture to walk the streets
for fear of outrages which were not only not repressed, but encouraged by
those whose duty it was to preserve the peace.  Richard Baxter was in
prison.  Howe was afraid to show himself in London for fear of insult,
and had been driven to Utrecht.  Not a few who up to that time had borne
up boldly lost heart and fled the kingdom.  Other weaker spirits were
terrified into a show of conformity.  Through many subsequent years the
autumn of 1685 was remembered as a time of misery and terror.  There is,
however, no indication of Bunyan having been molested.  The "deed of
gift" by which he sought to avoid the confiscation of his goods was never
called into exercise.  Indeed its very existence was forgotten by his
wife in whose behalf it had been executed.  Hidden away in a recess in
his house in St. Cuthbert's, this interesting document was accidentally
discovered at the beginning of the present century, and is preserved
among the most valued treasures of the congregation which bears his name.

Quieter times for Nonconformists were however at hand.  Active
persecution was soon to cease for them, and happily never to be renewed
in England.  The autumn of 1685 showed the first indications of a great
turn of fortune, and before eighteen months had elapsed, the intolerant
king and the intolerant Church were eagerly bidding against each other
for the support of the party which both had so deeply injured.  A new
form of trial now awaited the Nonconformists.  Peril to their personal
liberty was succeeded by a still greater peril to their honesty and
consistency of spirit.  James the Second, despairing of employing the
Tories and the Churchmen as his tools, turned, as his brother had turned
before him, to the Dissenters.  The snare was craftily baited with a
Declaration of Indulgence, by which the king, by his sole authority,
annulled a long series of statutes and suspended all penal laws against
Nonconformists of every sort.  These lately political Pariahs now held
the balance of power.  The future fortunes of England depended mainly on
the course they would adopt.  James was resolved to convert the House of
Commons from a free deliberative assembly into a body subservient to his
wishes, and ready to give parliamentary sanction to any edict he might
issue.  To obtain this end the electors must be manipulated.  Leaving the
county constituencies to be dealt with by the lords-lieutenants, half of
whom preferred dismissal to carrying out the odious service peremptorily
demanded of them, James's next concern was to "regulate" the
Corporations.  In those days of narrowly restricted franchise, the
municipalities virtually returned the town members.  To obtain an
obedient parliament, he must secure a roll of electors pledged to return
the royal nominees.  A committee of seven privy councillors, all Roman
Catholics but the infamous Jeffreys, presided over the business, with
local sub-committees scattered over the country to carry out the details.
Bedford was dealt with in its turn.  Under James's policy of courting the
Puritans, the leading Dissenters were the first persons to be approached.
Two are specially named, a Mr. Margetts, formerly Judge-Advocate-General
of the Army under General Monk, and John Bunyan.  It is no matter of
surprise that Bunyan, who had been so severe a sufferer under the old
penal statutes, should desire their abrogation, and express his readiness
to "steer his friends and followers" to support candidates who would
pledge themselves to vote for their repeal.  But no further would he go.
The Bedford Corporation was "regulated," which means that nearly the
whole of its members were removed and others substituted by royal order.
Of these new members some six or seven were leading persons of Bunyan's
congregation.  But, with all his ardent desire for religious liberty,
Bunyan was too keen-witted not to see through James's policy, and too
honest to give it any direct insidious support.  "In vain is the net
spread in the sight of any bird."  He clearly saw that it was not for any
love of the Dissenters that they were so suddenly delivered from their
persecutions, and placed on a kind of equality with the Church.  The
king's object was the establishment of Popery.  To this the Church was
the chief obstacle.  That must be undermined and subverted first.  That
done, all other religious denominations would follow.  All that the
Nonconformists would gain by yielding, was the favour Polyphemus promised
Ulysses, to be devoured last.  Zealous as he was for the "liberty of
prophesying," even that might be purchased at too high a price.  The boon
offered by the king was "good in itself," but not "so intended."  So, as
his biographer describes, when the regulators came, "he expressed his
zeal with some weariness as perceiving the bad consequences that would
ensue, and laboured with his congregation" to prevent their being imposed
on by the fair promises of those who were at heart the bitterest enemies
of the cause they professed to advocate.  The newly-modelled corporation
of Bedford seems like the other corporations through the country, to have
proved as unmanageable as the old.  As Macaulay says, "The sectaries who
had declared in favour of the Indulgence had become generally ashamed of
their error, and were desirous to make atonement."  Not knowing the man
they had to deal with, the "regulators" are said to have endeavoured to
buy Bunyan's support by the offer of some place under government.  The
bribe was indignantly rejected.  Bunyan even refused to see the
government agent who offered it,--"he would, by no means come to him, but
sent his excuse."  Behind the treacherous sunshine he saw a black cloud,
ready to break.  The Ninevites' remedy he felt was now called for.  So he
gathered his congregation together and appointed a day of fasting and
prayer to avert the danger that, under a specious pretext, again menaced
their civil and religious liberties.  A true, sturdy Englishman, Bunyan,
with Baxter and Howe, "refused an indulgence which could only be
purchased by the violent overthrow of the law."

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution.  Four months after he had
witnessed the delirious joy which hailed the acquittal of the seven
bishops, the Pilgrim's earthly Progress ended, and he was bidden to cross
the dark river which has no bridge.  The summons came to him in the very
midst of his religious activity, both as a preacher and as a writer.  His
pen had never been more busy than when he was bidden to lay it down
finally.  Early in 1688, after a two years' silence, attributable perhaps
to the political troubles of the times, his "Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or a
Help to Despairing Souls," one of the best known and most powerfully
characteristic of his works, had issued from the press, and had been
followed by four others between March and August, the month of his death.
These books were, "The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate;" a poetical
composition entitled "The Building, Nature, and Excellency of the House
of God," a discourse on the constitution and government of the Christian
Church; the "Water of Life," and "Solomon's Temple Spiritualized."  At
the time of his death he was occupied in seeing through the press a sixth
book, "The Acceptable Sacrifice," which was published after his funeral.
In addition to these, Bunyan left behind him no fewer than fourteen works
in manuscript, written at this time, as the fruit of his fertile
imagination and untiring pen.  Ten of these were given to the world soon
after Bunyan's death, by one of Bunyan's most devoted followers, Charles
Doe, the combmaker of London Bridge (who naively tells us how one day
between the stairhead and the middle of the stairs, he resolved that the
best work he could do for God was to get Bunyan's books printed and sell
them--adding, "I have sold about 3,000"), and others, a few years later,
including one of the raciest of his compositions, "The Heavenly Footman,"
bought by Doe of Bunyan's eldest son, and, he says, "put into the World
in Print Word for Word as it came from him to Me."

At the time that death surprised him, Bunyan had gained no small
celebrity in London as a popular preacher, and approached the nearest to
a position of worldly honour.  Though we must probably reject the idea
that he ever filled the office of Chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London,
Sir John Shorter, the fact that he is styled "his Lordship's teacher"
proves that there was some relation more than that of simple friendship
between the chief magistrate and the Bedford minister.  But the society
of the great was never congenial to him.  If they were godly as well as
great, he would not shrink from intercourse, with those of a rank above
his own, but his heart was with his own humble folk at Bedford.  Worldly
advancement he rejected for his family as well as for himself.  A London
merchant, it is said, offered to take his son Joseph into his house of
business without the customary premium.  But the offer was declined with
what we may consider an overstrained independence.  "God," he said, "did
not send me to advance my family but to preach the gospel."  "An instance
of other-worldliness," writes Dr. Brown, "perhaps more consistent with
the honour of the father than with the prosperity of the son."

Bunyan's end was in keeping with his life.  He had ever sought to be a
peacemaker and to reconcile differences, and thus had "hindered many
mishaps and saved many families from ruin."  His last effort of the kind
caused his death.  The father of a young man in whom he took an interest,
had resolved, on some offence, real or supposed, to disinherit his son.
The young man sought Bunyan's mediation.  Anxious to heal the breach,
Bunyan mounted his horse and took the long journey to the father's house
at Reading--the scene, as we have noticed, of his occasional
ministrations--where he pleaded the offender's cause so effectually as to
obtain a promise of forgiveness.  Bunyan returned homewards through
London, where he was appointed to preach at Mr. Gamman's meeting-house
near Whitechapel.  His forty miles' ride to London was through heavy
driving rain.  He was weary and drenched to the skin when he reached the
house of his "very loving friend," John Strudwick, grocer and chandler,
at the sign of the Star, Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Snow Hill, and
deacon of the Nonconformist meeting in Red Cross Street.  A few months
before Bunyan had suffered from the sweating sickness.  The exposure
caused a return of the malady, and though well enough to fulfil his
pulpit engagement on Sunday, the 19th of August, on the following Tuesday
dangerous symptoms declared themselves, and in ten days the disease
proved fatal.  He died within two months of completing his sixtieth year,
on the 31st of August, 1688, just a month before the publication of the
Declaration of the Prince of Orange opened a new era of civil and
religious liberty, and between two and three months before the Prince's
landing in Torbay.  He was buried in Mr. Strudwick's newly-purchased
vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the
burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field,
from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of
St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549.  At a later period it served as a place of
interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665.  The day after
Bunyan's funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor,
had a fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, and "followed him across
the river."

By his first wife, whose Christian name is nowhere recorded, Bunyan had
four children--two sons and two daughters; and by his second wife, the
heroic Elizabeth, one son and one daughter.  All of these survived him
except his eldest daughter Mary, his tenderly-loved blind child, who died
before him.  His wife only survived him for a brief period, "following
her faithful pilgrim from this world to the other whither he was gone
before her" either in 1691 or 1692.  Forgetful of the "deed of gift," or
ignorant of its bearing, Bunyan's widow took out letters of
administration of her late husband's estate, which appears from the
Register Book to have amounted to no more than, 42 pounds 19s.  On this,
and the proceeds of his books, she supported herself till she rejoined
him.

Bunyan's character and person are thus described by Charles Doe: "He
appeared in countenance to be of a stern and rough temper.  But in his
conversation he was mild and affable, not given to loquacity or much
discourse in company, unless some urgent occasion required it.  Observing
never to boast of himself or his parts, but rather to seem low in his own
eyes and submit himself to the judgment of others.  Abhorring lying and
swearing, being just, in all that lay in his power, to his word.  Not
seeming to revenge injuries; loving to reconcile differences and make
friendship with all.  He had a sharp, quick eye, with an excellent
discerning of persons, being of good judgment and quick wit.  He was tall
of stature, strong-boned, though not corpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face,
with sparkling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper lip after the old
British fashion.  His hair reddish, but in his later days time had
sprinkled it with grey.  His nose well set, but not declining or bending.
His mouth moderately large, his forehead something high, and his habit
always plain and modest.  Not puffed up in prosperity, nor shaken in
adversity, always holding the golden mean."

We may add the portrait drawn by one who had been his companion and
fellow-sufferer for many years, John Nelson: "His countenance was grave
and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame of his
heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and did strike something
of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God."

The same friend speaks thus of Bunyan's preaching: "As a minister of
Christ he was laborious in his work of preaching, diligent in his
preparation for it, and faithful in dispensing the Word, not sparing
reproof whether in the pulpit or no, yet ready to succour the tempted; a
son of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunder to secure
and dead sinners.  His memory was tenacious, it being customary with him
to commit his sermons to writing after he had preached them.  A rich
anointing of the Spirit was upon him, yet this great saint was always in
his own eyes the chiefest of sinners and the least of saints."

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

Although much of Bunyan's literary activity was devoted to controversy,
he had none of the narrowness or bitter spirit of a controversialist.  It
is true that his zeal for what he deemed to be truth led him into
vehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as its
perverters.  But this intensity of speech was coupled with the utmost
charity of spirit towards those who differed from him.  Few ever had less
of the sectarian temper which lays greater stress on the infinitely small
points on which all true Christians differ than on the infinitely great
truths on which they are agreed.  Bunyan inherited from his spiritual
father, John Gifford, a truly catholic spirit.  External differences he
regarded as insignificant where he found real Christian faith and love.
"I would be," he writes, "as I hope I am, a Christian.  But for those
factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I
conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from
Hell or from Babylon."  "He was," writes one of his early biographers, "a
true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus, and did often bewail the
different and distinguishing appellations that are among the godly,
saying he did believe a time would come when they should be all buried."
The only persons he scrupled to hold communion with were those whose
lives were openly immoral.  "Divisions about non-essentials," he said,
"were to churches what wars were to countries.  Those who talked most
about religion cared least for it; and controversies about doubtful
things and things of little moment, ate up all zeal for things which were
practical and indisputable."  His last sermon breathed the same catholic
spirit, free from the trammels of narrow sectarianism.  "If you are the
children of God live together lovingly.  If the world quarrel with you it
is no matter; but it is sad if you quarrel together.  If this be among
you it is a sign of ill-breeding.  Dost thou see a soul that has the
image of God in him?  Love him, love him.  Say, 'This man and I must go
to heaven one day.'  Serve one another.  Do good for one another.  If any
wrong you pray to God to right you, and love the brotherhood."  The
closing words of this his final testimony are such as deserve to be
written in letters of gold as the sum of all true Christian teaching: "Be
ye holy in all manner of conversation: Consider that the holy God is your
Father, and let this oblige you to live like the children of God, that
you may look your Father in the face with comfort another day."  "There
is," writes Dean Stanley, "no compromise in his words, no faltering in
his convictions; but his love and admiration are reserved on the whole
for that which all good men love, and his detestation on the whole is
reserved for that which all good men detest."  By the catholic spirit
which breathes through his writings, especially through "The Pilgrim's
Progress," the tinker of Elstow "has become the teacher not of any
particular sect, but of the Universal Church."




CHAPTER IX.


We have, in this concluding chapter, to take a review of Bunyan's merits
as a writer, with especial reference to the works on which his fame
mainly rests, and, above all, to that which has given him his chief title
to be included in a series of Great Writers, "The Pilgrim's Progress."
Bunyan, as we have seen, was a very copious author.  His works, as
collected by the late industrious Mr. Offor, fill three bulky quarto
volumes, each of nearly eight hundred double-columned pages in small
type.  And this copiousness of production is combined with a general
excellence in the matter produced.  While few of his books approach the
high standard of "The Pilgrim's Progress" or "Holy War," none, it may be
truly said, sink very far below that standard.  It may indeed be affirmed
that it was impossible for Bunyan to write badly.  His genius was a
native genius.  As soon as he began to write at all, he wrote well.
Without any training, is he says, in the school of Aristotle or Plato, or
any study of the great masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a
high level of thought and composition.  His earliest book, "Some Gospel
Truths Opened," "thrown off," writes Dr. Brown, "at a heat," displays the
same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted
phraseology which he maintained to the end.  The great charm which
pervades all Bunyan's writings is their naturalness.  You never feel that
he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of
task-work.  He writes because he had something to say which was worth
saying, a message to deliver on which the highest interests of others
were at stake, which demanded nothing more than a straightforward
earnestness and plainness of speech, such as coming from the heart might
best reach the hearts of others.  He wrote as he spoke, because a
necessity was laid upon him which he dared not evade.  As he says in a
passage quoted in a former chapter, he might have stepped into a much
higher style, and have employed more literary ornament.  But to attempt
this would be, to one of his intense earnestness, to degrade his calling.
He dared not do it.  Like the great Apostle, "his speech and preaching
was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the
Spirit and in power."  God had not played with him, and he dared not play
with others.  His errand was much too serious, and their need and danger
too urgent to waste time in tricking out his words with human skill.  And
it is just this which, with all their rudeness, their occasional bad
grammar, and homely colloquialisms, gives to Bunyan's writings a power of
riveting the attention and stirring the affections which few writers have
attained to.  The pent-up fire glows in every line, and kindles the
hearts of his readers.  "Beautiful images, vivid expressions, forcible
arguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings, solemn warnings, make
those who read him all eye, all ear, all soul."  This native vigour is
attributable, in no small degree, to the manner in which for the most
part Bunyan's works came into being.  He did not set himself to compose
theological treatises upon stated subjects, but after he had preached
with satisfaction to himself and acceptance with his audience, he usually
wrote out the substance of his discourse from memory, with the
enlargements and additions it might seem to require.  And thus his
religious works have all the glow and fervour of the unwritten utterances
of a practised orator, united with the orderliness and precision of a
theologian, and are no less admirable for the excellence of their
arrangement than for their evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine.
Originally meant to be heard, they lose somewhat by being read.  But few
can read them without being delighted with the opulence of his
imagination and impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions.
Like the subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the
Interpreter, he stands "like one who pleads with men, the law of truth
written upon his lips, the world behind his back, and a crown of gold
above his head."

These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer from most of
his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the works by which he
is chiefly known, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the "Holy War," the "Grace
Abounding," and we may add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject
the book is now scarcely read at all, the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman."

One great charm of these works, especially of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are written, which render
them models of the English speech, plain but never vulgar, homely but
never coarse, and still less unclean, full of imagery but never obscure,
always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to the point in the
fewest and simplest words; "powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam,
"from concise simplicity."  Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord
Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide
command over his mother tongue.  Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
common people.  "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of
theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant."  We may, look through
whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables.  Nor is the
source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.
Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best,
not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the
English Bible.  "In no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more
clearly than in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginative force which
had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the
Bible.  Bunyan's English is the simplest and homeliest English that has
ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English of the
Bible.  His images are the images of prophet and evangelist.  So
completely had the Bible become Bunyan's life that one feels its phrases
as the natural expression of his thoughts.  He had lived in the Bible
till its words became his own."

All who have undertaken to take an estimate of Bunyan's literary genius
call special attention to the richness of his imaginative power.  Few
writers indeed have possessed this power in so high a degree.  In
nothing, perhaps, is its vividness more displayed than in the reality of
its impersonations.  The _dramatis persons_ are not shadowy abstractions,
moving far above us in a mystical world, or lay figures ticketed with
certain names, but solid men and women of our own flesh and blood, living
in our own everyday world, and of like passions with ourselves.  Many of
them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to
meet any day.  This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the
highest degree to "The Pilgrim's Progress."  It is hardly inferior in
"The Holy War," though with some exceptions the people of "Mansoul" have
failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of
the earlier allegory have done.  The secret of this graphic power, which
gives "The Pilgrim's Progress" its universal popularity, is that Bunyan
describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen
them.  They are not fancy pictures, but literal portraits.  Though the
features may be exaggerated, and the colours laid on with an unsparing
brush, the outlines of his bold personifications are truthfully drawn
from his own experience.  He had had to do with every one of them.  He
could have given a personal name to most of them, and we could do the
same to many.  We are not unacquainted with Mr Byends of the town of Fair
Speech, who "always has the luck to jump in his judgment with the way of
the times, and to get thereby," who is zealous for Religion "when he goes
in his silver slippers," and "loves to walk with him in the streets when
the sun shines and the people applaud him."  All his kindred and
surroundings are only too familiar to us--his wife, that very virtuous
woman my Lady Feigning's daughter, my Lord Fair-speech, my Lord
Time-server, Mr. Facingbothways, Mr. Anything, and the Parson of the
Parish, his mother's own brother by the father's side, Mr. Twotongues.
Nor is his schoolmaster, one Mr. Gripeman, of the market town of
Lovegain, in the county of Coveting, a stranger to us.  Obstinate, with
his dogged determination and stubborn common-sense, and Pliable with his
shallow impressionableness, are among our acquaintances.  We have, before
now, come across "the brisk lad Ignorance from the town of Conceit," and
have made acquaintance with Mercy's would-be suitor, Mr. Brisk, "a man of
some breeding and that pretended to religion, but who stuck very close to
the world."  The man Temporary who lived in a town two miles off from
Honesty, and next door to Mr. Turnback; Formalist and Hypocrisy, who were
"from the land of Vainglory, and were going for praise to Mount Sion";
Simple, Sloth, and Presumption, "fast asleep by the roadside with fetters
on their heels," and their companions, Shortwind, Noheart,
Lingerafterlust, and Sleepyhead, we know them all.  "The young woman
whose name was Dull" taxes our patience every day.  Where is the town
which does not contain Mrs. Timorous and her coterie of gossips, Mrs.
Bats-eyes, Mrs. Inconsiderate, Mrs. Lightmind, and Mrs. Knownothing, "all
as merry as the maids," with that pretty fellow Mr. Lechery at the house
of Madam Wanton, that "admirably well-bred gentlewoman"?  Where shall we
find more lifelike portraits than those of Madam Bubble, a "tall, comely
dame, somewhat of a swarthy complexion, speaking very smoothly with a
smile at the end of each sentence, wearing a great purse by her side,
with her hand often in it, fingering her money as if that was her chief
delight;" of poor Feeblemind of the town of Uncertain, with his "whitely
look, the cast in his eye, and his trembling speech;" of Littlefaith, as
"white as a clout," neither able to fight nor fly when the thieves from
Dead Man's Lane were on him; of Ready-to-halt, at first coming along on
his crutches, and then when Giant Despair had been slain and Doubting
Castle demolished, taking Despondency's daughter Much-afraid by the hand
and dancing with her in the road?  "True, he could not dance without one
crutch in his hand, but I promise you he footed it well.  Also the girl
was to be commanded, for she answered the musick handsomely."  In
Bunyan's pictures there is never a superfluous detail.  Every stroke
tells, and helps to the completeness of the portraiture.

The same reality characterizes the descriptive part of "The Pilgrim's
Progress."  As his characters are such as he must meet with every day in
his native town, so also the scenery and surroundings of his allegory are
part of his own everyday life, and reproduce what he had been brought up
amidst in his native county, or had noticed in his tinker's wanderings.
"Born and bred," writes Kingsley, "in the monotonous Midland, he had no
natural images beyond the pastures and brooks, the town and country
houses, he saw about him."  The Slough of Despond, with its treacherous
quagmire in the midst of the plain, into which a wayfarer might
heedlessly fall, with its stepping-stones half drowned in mire;
Byepathmeadow, promising so fair, with its stile and footpath on the
other side of the fence; the pleasant river fringed with meadows, green
all the year long and overshadowed with trees; the thicket all overgrown
with briars and thorns, where one tumbled over a bush, another stuck fast
in the dirt, some lost their shoes in the mire, and others were fastened
from behind with the brambles; the high wall by the roadside over which
the fruit trees shot their boughs and tempted the boys with their unripe
plums; the arbour with its settle tempting the footsore traveller to
drowsiness; the refreshing spring at the bottom of Hill Difficulty; all
are evidently drawn from his own experience.  Bunyan, in his long tramps,
had seen them all.  He had known what it was to be in danger of falling
into a pit and being dashed to pieces with Vain Confidence, of being
drowned in the flooded meadows with Christian and Hopeful; of sinking in
deep water when swimming over a river, going down and rising up half
dead, and needing all his companion's strength and skill to keep his head
above the stream.  Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life.  The
great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had
probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths
filled with "wares of all kinds from all countries," its "shows,
jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that
of every kind," its "great one of the fair," its court of justice and
power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture.
Scenes like these he draws with sharp defined outlines.  When he had to
describe what he only knew by hearsay, his pictures are shadowy and cold.
Never having been very far from home, he had had no experience of the
higher types of beauty and grandeur in nature, and his pen moves in
fetters when he attempts to describe them.  When his pilgrims come to the
Hill Difficulty and the Delectable Mountains, the difference is at once
seen.  All his nobler imagery is drawn from Scripture.  As Hallam has
remarked, "There is scarcely a circumstance or metaphor in the Old
Testament which does not find a place bodily and literally in 'The
Pilgrim's Progress,' and this has made his imagination appear more
creative than it really is."

It would but weary the reader to follow the details of a narrative which
is so universally known.  Who needs to be told that in the pilgrimage
here described is represented in allegorical dress the course of a human
soul convinced of sin, struggling onwards to salvation through the trials
and temptations that beset its path to its eternal home?  The book is so
completely wrought into the mind and memory, that most of us can at once
recall the incidents which chequer the pilgrim's way, and realize their
meaning; the Slough of Despond, in which the man convinced of his guilt
and fleeing from the wrath to come, in his agonizing self-consciousness
is in danger of being swallowed up in despair; the Wicket Gate, by which
he enters on the strait and narrow way of holiness; the Interpreter's
House, with his visions and acted parables; the Wayside Cross, at the
sight of which the burden of guilt falls from the pilgrim's back, and he
is clothed with change of raiment; the Hill Difficulty, which stands
right in his way, and which he must surmount, not circumvent; the lions
which he has to pass, not knowing that they are chained; the Palace
Beautiful, where he is admitted to the communion of the faithful, and
sits down to meat with them; the Valley of Humiliation, the scene of his
desperate but victorious encounter with Apollyon; the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, with its evil sights and doleful sounds, where one of
the wicked ones whispers into his ear thoughts of blasphemy which he
cannot distinguish from the suggestions of his own mind; the cave at the
valley's mouth, in which, Giant Pagan having been dead this many a day,
his brother, Giant Pope, now sits alone, grinning at pilgrims as they
pass by, and biting his nails because he cannot get at them; Vanity Fair,
the picture of the world, as St. John describes it, hating the light that
puts to shame its own self-chosen darkness, and putting it out if it can,
where the Pilgrim's fellow, Faithful, seals his testimony with his death,
and the Pilgrim himself barely escapes; the "delicate plain" called Ease,
and the little hill, Lucre, where Demas stood "gentlemanlike," to invite
the passersby to come and dig in his silver mine; Byepath Meadow, into
which the Pilgrim and his newly-found companion stray, and are made
prisoners by Giant Despair and shut up in the dungeons of Doubting
Castle, and break out of prison by the help of the Key of Promise; the
Delectable Mountains in Immanuel's Land, with their friendly shepherds
and the cheering prospect of the far-off heavenly city; the Enchanted
Land, with its temptations to spiritual drowsiness at the very end of the
journey; the Land of Beulah, the ante-chamber of the city to which they
were bound; and, last stage of all, the deep dark river, without a
bridge, which had to be crossed before the city was entered; the entrance
into its heavenly gates, the pilgrim's joyous reception with all the
bells in the city ringing again for joy; the Dreamer's glimpse of its
glories through the opened portals--is not every stage of the journey,
every scene of the pilgrimage, indelibly printed on our memories, for our
warning, our instruction, our encouragement in the race we, as much as
they, have each one to run?  Have we not all, again and again, shared the
Dreamer's feelings--"After that they shut up the Gates; which, when I had
seen, I wished myself among them," and prayed, God helping us, that our
"dangerous journey"--ever the most dangerous when we see its dangers the
least--might end in our "safe arrival at the desired country"?

"The Pilgrim's Progress" exhibits Bunyan in the character by which he
would have most desired to be remembered, as one of the most influential
of Christian preachers.  Hallam, however, claims for him another
distinction which would have greatly startled and probably shocked him,
as the father of our English novelists.  As an allegorist Bunyan had many
predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the
natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their
works.  But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way.  Bunyan was
the first to break ground in a field which has since then been so
overabundantly worked that the soil has almost lost its productiveness;
while few novels written purely with the object of entertainment have
ever proved so universally entertaining.  Intensely religious as it is in
purpose, "The Pilgrim's Progress" may be safely styled the first English
novel.  "The claim to be the father of English romance," writes Dr.
Allon, "which has been sometimes preferred for Defoe, really pertains to
Bunyan.  Defoe may claim the parentage of a species, but Bunyan is the
creator of the genus."  As the parent of fictitious biography it is that
Bunyan has charmed the world.  On its vivid interest as a story, its
universal interest and lasting vitality rest.  "Other allegorises,"
writes Lord Macaulay, "have shown great ingenuity, but no other
allegorist has ever been able to touch the heart, and to make its
abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of love."  Whatever its
deficiencies, literary and religious, may be; if we find incongruities in
the narrative, and are not insensible to some grave theological
deficiencies; if we are unable without qualification to accept
Coleridge's dictum that it is "incomparably the best 'Summa Theologiae
Evangelicae' ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired;" even
if, with Hallam, we consider its "excellencies great indeed, but not of
the highest order," and deem it "a little over-praised," the fact of its
universal popularity with readers of all classes and of all orders of
intellect remains, and gives this book a unique distinction.  "I have,"
says Dr. Arnold, when reading it after a long interval, "always been
struck by its piety.  I am now struck equally or even more by its
profound wisdom.  It seems to be a complete reflexion of Scripture."  And
to turn to a critic of very different character, Dean Swift: "I have been
better entertained and more improved," writes that cynical pessimist, "by
a few pages of this book than by a long discourse on the will and
intellect."  The favourite of our childhood, as "the most perfect and
complex of fairy tales, so human and intelligible," read, as Hallam says,
"at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little perceived or
little regarded," the "Pilgrim's Progress" becomes the chosen companion
of our later years, perused with ever fresh appreciation of its teaching,
and enjoyment of its native genius; "the interpreter of life to all who
are perplexed with its problems, and the practical guide and solace of
all who need counsel and sympathy."

The secret of this universal acceptableness of "The Pilgrim's Progress"
lies in the breadth of its religious sympathies.  Rigid Puritan as Bunyan
was, no book is more completely free from sectarian narrowness.  Its
reach is as wide as Christianity itself, and it takes hold of every human
heart because it is so intensely human.  No apology is needed for
presenting Mr. Froude's eloquent panegyric: "The Pilgrim, though in
Puritan dress, is a genuine man.  His experience is so truly human
experience that Christians of every persuasion can identify themselves
with him; and even those who regard Christianity itself as but a natural
outgrowth of the conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly
and make the best of themselves, can recognize familiar footprints in
every step of Christian's journey.  Thus 'The Pilgrim's Progress' is a
book which when once read can never be forgotten.  We too, every one of
us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back
to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and
learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them.
Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease
to be true to experience."  Dr. Brown's appreciative words may be added:
"With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of
us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline
of life.  It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold
which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book
above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them.  And it is
this which makes it one of the first books translated by the missionary
who seeks to give true thoughts of God and life to heathen men."

The Second Part of "The Pilgrim's Progress" partakes of the character of
almost all continuations.  It is, in Mr. Froude's words, "only a feeble
reverberation of the first part, which has given it a popularity it would
have hardly attained by its own merits.  Christiana and her children are
tolerated for the pilgrim's sake to whom they belong."  Bunyan seems not
to have been insensible of this himself, when in his metrical preface he
thus introduces his new work:

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

But although the Second Part must be pronounced inferior, on the whole,
to the first, it is a work of striking individuality and graphic power,
such as Bunyan alone could have written.  Everywhere we find strokes of
his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it
has added not a few portraits to Bunyan's spiritual picture gallery we
should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to
the memory.  The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle
feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still
thoroughly womanly character of Christiana.  Great-Heart is too much of
an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly
champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants.  But the other
new characters have generally a vivid personality.  Who can forget Old
Honesty, the dull good man with no mental gifts but of dogged sincerity,
who though coming from the Town of Stupidity, four degrees beyond the
City of Destruction, was "known for a cock of the right kind," because he
said the truth and stuck to it; or his companion, Mr. Fearing, that most
troublesome of pilgrims, stumbling at every straw, lying roaring at the
Slough of Despond above a month together, standing shaking and shrinking
at the Wicket Gate, but making no stick at the Lions, and at last getting
over the river not much above wetshod; or Mr. Valiant for Truth, the
native of Darkland, standing with his sword drawn and his face all bloody
from his three hours' fight with Wildhead, Inconsiderate, and Pragmatick;
Mr. Standfast, blushing to be found on his knees in the Enchanted Ground,
one who loved to hear his Lord spoken of, and coveted to set his foot
wherever he saw the print of his shoe; Mr. Feeblemind, the sickly,
melancholy pilgrim, at whose door death did usually knock once a day,
betaking himself to a pilgrim's life because he was never well at home,
resolved to run when he could, and go when he could not run, and creep
when he could not go, an enemy to laughter and to gay attire, bringing up
the rear of the company with Mr. Readytohalt hobbling along on his
crutches; Giant Despair's prisoners, Mr. Despondency, whom he had all but
starved to death--and Mistress Much-afraid his daughter, who went through
the river singing, though none could understand what she said?  Each of
these characters has a distinct individuality which lifts them from
shadowy abstractions into living men and women.  But with all its
excellencies, and they are many, the general inferiority of the history
of Christiana and her children's pilgrimage to that of her husband's must
be acknowledged.  The story is less skilfully constructed; the interest
is sometimes allowed to flag; the dialogues that interrupt the narrative
are in places dry and wearisome--too much of sermons in disguise.  There
is also a want of keeping between the two parts of the allegory.  The
Wicket Gate of the First Part has become a considerable building with a
summer parlour in the Second; the shepherds' tents on the Delectable
Mountains have risen into a palace, with a dining-room, and a looking-
glass, and a store of jewels; while Vanity Fair has lost its former bad
character, and has become a respectable country town, where Christiana
and her family, seeming altogether to forget their pilgrimage, settled
down comfortably, enjoy the society of the good people of the place, and
the sons marry and have children.  These same children also cause the
reader no little perplexity, when he finds them in the course of the
supposed journey transformed from sweet babes who are terrified with the
Mastiffs barking at the Wicket Gate, who catch at the boughs for the
unripe plums and cry at having to climb the hill; whose faces are stroked
by the Interpreter; who are catechised and called "good boys" by
Prudence; who sup on bread crumbled into basins of milk, and are put to
bed by Mercy--into strong young men, able to go out and fight with a
giant, and lend a hand to the pulling down of Doubting Castle, and
becoming husbands and fathers.  We cannot but feel the want of
_vraisemblance_ which brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks
of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession,
following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City.  The
four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile,
but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory
has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly
pilgrimage.  Bunyan's mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and
making his band of pilgrims so large.  He could get them together and
make them travel in company without any sacrifice of dramatic truth,
which, however, he was forced to disregard when the time came for their
dismissal.  The exquisite pathos of the description of the passage of the
river by Christian and Hopeful blinds us to what may be almost termed the
impossibility of two persons passing through the final struggle together,
and dying at the same moment, but this charm is wanting in the prosaic
picture of the company of fellow-travellers coming down to the water's
edge, and waiting till the postman blows his horn and bids them cross.
Much as the Second Part contains of what is admirable, and what no one
but Bunyan could have written, we feel after reading it that, in Mr.
Froude's words, the rough simplicity is gone, and has been replaced by a
tone of sentiment which is almost mawkish.  "Giants, dragons, and angelic
champions carry us into a spurious fairyland where the knight-errant is a
preacher in disguise.  Fair ladies and love-matches, however decorously
chastened, suit ill with the sternness of the mortal conflict between the
soul and sin."  With the acknowledged shortcomings of the Second Part of
"The Pilgrim's Progress," we may be well content that Bunyan never
carried out the idea hinted at in the closing words of his allegory:
"Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I may give those that desire it
an account of what I am here silent about; in the meantime I bid my
reader--Adieu."

Bunyan's second great allegorical work, "The Holy War," need not detain
us long.  Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful
attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call "the plan of salvation"
in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of
description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque
nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily
wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man,
like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career.  In
fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race
are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole.  Sin, its
origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that
remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time.  The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan--John Milton--to
bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render
it more perplexing.  The proverbial line tells us that--

   "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but when
both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up into the Council
Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of the ever-blessed
Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving, like a sovereign
and his ministers when a revolted province has to be brought back to its
allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us down to the infernal regions,
and makes us privy to the plots and counterplots of the rebel leaders and
hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feel that, in spite of the
magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely
picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded
if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their
essential mysteries.  In point of individual personal interest, "The Holy
War" contrasts badly with "The Pilgrim's Progress."  The narrative moves
in a more shadowy region.  We may admire the workmanship; but the same
undefined sense of unreality pursues us through Milton's noble epic, the
outcome of a divinely-fired genius, and Bunyan's humble narrative,
drawing its scenes and circumstances, and to some extent its _dramatis
personae_, from the writer's own surroundings in the town and corporation
of Bedford, and his brief but stirring experience as a soldier in the
great Parliamentary War.  The catastrophe also is eminently
unsatisfactory.  When Christian and Hopeful enter the Golden Gates we
feel that the story has come to its proper end, which we have been
looking for all along.  But the conclusion of "The Holy War" is too much
like the closing chapter of "Rasselas"--"a conclusion in which nothing is
concluded."  After all the endless vicissitudes of the conflict, and the
final and glorious victory of Emmanuel and his forces, and the execution
of the ringleaders of the mutiny, the issue still remains doubtful.  The
town of Mansoul is left open to fresh attacks.  Diabolus is still at
large.  Carnal Sense breaks prison and continues to lurk in the town.
Unbelief, that "nimble Jack," slips away, and can never be laid hold of.
These, therefore, and some few others of the more subtle of the
Diabolonians, continue to make their home in Mansoul, and will do so
until Mansoul ceases to dwell in the kingdom of Universe.  It is true
they turn chicken-hearted after the other leaders of their party have
been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close, lurking in
dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel's men.  If
Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselves in the streets,
the whole town is up in arms against them; the very children raise a hue
and cry against them and seek to stone them.  But all in vain.  Mansoul,
it is true, enjoys some good degree of peace and quiet.  Her Prince takes
up his residence in her borders.  Her captains and soldiers do their
duties.  She minds her trade with the heavenly land afar off; also she is
busy in her manufacture.  But with the remnants of the Diabolonians still
within her walls, ready to show their heads on the least relaxation of
strict watchfulness, keeping up constant communication with Diabolus and
the other lords of the pit, and prepared to open the gates to them when
opportunity offers, this peace can not be lasting.  The old battle will
have to be fought over again, only to end in the same undecisive result.
And so it must be to the end.  If untrue to art, Bunyan is true to fact.
Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individual or as the
whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so long as it abides
in "the country of Universe."  The flesh will lust against the spirit,
the regenerated man will be in danger of being brought into captivity to
the law of sin and death unless he keeps up his watchfulness and
maintains the struggle to the end.

And it is here, that, for purposes of art, not for purposes of truth, the
real failing of "The Holy War" lies.  The drama of Mansoul is incomplete,
and whether individually or collectively, must remain incomplete till man
puts on a new nature, and the victory, once for all gained on Calvary, is
consummated, in the fulness of time, at the restitution of all things.
There is no uncertainty what the end will be.  Evil must be put down, and
good must triumph at last.  But the end is not yet, and it seems as far
off as ever.  The army of Doubters, under their several captains,
Election Doubters, Vocation Doubters, Salvation Doubters, Grace Doubters,
with their general the great Lord Incredulity at their head, reinforced
by many fresh regiments under novel standards, unknown and unthought of
in Bunyan's days, taking the place of those whose power is past, is ever
making new attacks upon poor Mansoul, and terrifying feeble souls with
their threatenings.  Whichever way we look there is much to puzzle, much
to grieve over, much that to our present limited view is entirely
inexplicable.  But the mind that accepts the loving will and wisdom of
God as the law of the Universe, can rest in the calm assurance that all,
however mysteriously, is fulfilling His eternal designs, and that though
He seems to permit "His work to be spoilt, His power defied, and even His
victories when won made useless," it is but seeming,--that the triumph of
evil is but temporary, and that these apparent failures and
contradictions, are slowly but surely working out and helping forward

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

"The mysteries and contradictions which the Christian revelation leaves
unsolved are made tolerable by Hope."  To adopt Bunyan's figurative
language in the closing paragraph of his allegory, the day is certainly
coming when the famous town of Mansoul shall be taken down and
transported "every stick and stone" to Emmanuel's land, and there set up
for the Father's habitation in such strength and glory as it never saw
before.  No Diabolonian shall be able to creep into its streets, burrow
in its walls, or be seen in its borders.  No evil tidings shall trouble
its inhabitants, nor sound of Diabolian drum be heard there.  Sorrow and
grief shall be ended, and life, always sweet, always new, shall last
longer than they could even desire it, even all the days of eternity.
Meanwhile let those who have such a glorious hope set before them keep
clean and white the liveries their Lord has given them, and wash often in
the open fountain.  Let them believe in His love, live upon His word;
watch, fight, and pray, and hold fast till He come.

One more work of Bunyan's still remains to be briefly noticed, as bearing
the characteristic stamp of his genius, "The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman."  The original idea of this book was to furnish a contrast to
"The Pilgrim's Progress."  As in that work he had described the course of
a man setting out on his course heavenwards, struggling onwards through
temptation, trials, and difficulties, and entering at last through the
golden gates into the city of God, so in this later work his purpose was
to depict the career of a man whose face from the first was turned in the
opposite direction, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and
more irretrievably evil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his
life full of sin and his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of
his sins in hopeless sinfulness.  That this was the original purpose of
the work, Bunyan tells us in his preface.  It came into his mind, he
says, as in the former book he had written concerning the progress of the
Pilgrim from this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the
life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to
hell.  The new work, however, as in almost every respect it differs from
the earlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it.  It is totally unlike
"The Pilgrim's Progress" both in form and execution.  The one is an
allegory, the other a tale, describing without imagery or metaphor, in
the plainest language, the career of a "vulgar, middle-class,
unprincipled scoundrel."  While "The Pilgrim's Progress" pursues the
narrative form throughout, only interrupted by dialogues between the
leading characters, "Mr. Badman's career" is presented to the world in a
dialogue between a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive.  Mr. Wiseman
tells the story, and Mr. Attentive supplies appropriate reflections on
it.  The narrative is needlessly burdened with a succession of short
sermons, in the form of didactic discourses on lying, stealing, impurity,
and the other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and which
brought him to his miserable end.  The plainness of speech with which
some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman's indulgence
in them described, makes portions of the book very disagreeable, and
indeed hardly profitable reading.  With omissions, however, the book well
deserves perusal, as a picture such as only Bunyan or his rival in
lifelike portraiture, Defoe, could have drawn of vulgar English life in
the latter part of the seventeenth century, in a commonplace country town
such as Bedford.  It is not at all a pleasant picture.  The life
described, when not gross, is sordid and foul, is mean and commonplace.
But as a description of English middle-class life at the epoch of the
Restoration and Revolution, it is invaluable for those who wish to put
themselves in touch with that period.  The anecdotes introduced to
illustrate Bunyan's positions of God's judgment upon swearers and
sinners, convicting him of a credulity and a harshness of feeling one is
sorry to think him capable of, are very interesting for the side-lights
they throw upon the times and the people who lived in them.  It would
take too long to give a sketch of the story, even if a summary could give
any real estimate of its picturesque and vivid power.  It is certainly a
remarkable, if an offensive book.  As with "Robinson Crusoe" and Defoe's
other tales, we can hardly believe that we have not a real history before
us.  We feel that there is no reason why the events recorded should not
have happened.  There are no surprises; no unlooked-for catastrophes; no
providential interpositions to punish the sinner or rescue the good man.
Badman's pious wife is made to pay the penalty of allowing herself to be
deceived by a tall, good-looking, hypocritical scoundrel.  He himself
pursues his evil way to the end, and "dies like a lamb, or as men call
it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear," but the selfsame Mr.
Badman still, not only in name, but in condition; sinning onto the last,
and dying with a heart that cannot repent.

Mr. Froude's summing up of this book is so masterly that we make no
apology for presenting it to our readers.  "Bunyan conceals nothing,
assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing.  He makes his bad man sharp and
shrewd.  He allows sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the reward which
such qualities in fact command.  Badman is successful; is powerful; he
enjoys all the pleasures which money can bring; his bad wife helps him to
ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace.  Bunyan has
made him a brute, because such men do become brutes.  It is the real
punishment of brutal and selfish habits.  There the figure stands--a
picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most
familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire,
as the way to Emmanuel's Land was through the Slough of Despond and the
Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Pleasures are to be found among the
primroses, such pleasures as a brute can be gratified by.  Yet the reader
feels that even if there was no bonfire, he would still prefer to be with
Christian."




FOOTNOTES


{1}  A small enclosure behind a cottage.





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