The Life of
John Bunyan
By
Edmund
Venables M. A.
CONTENTS:
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.”
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
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
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
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