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