"Wouldst see
A man I' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?"
Who has not read Pilgrim's Progress? Who has not, in childhood,
followed the wandering Christian on his way to the Celestial City? Who
has not laid at night his young head on the pillow, to paint on the
walls of darkness pictures of the Wicket Gate and the Archers, the Hill
of Difficulty, the Lions and Giants, Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair,
the sunny Delectable Mountains and the Shepherds, the Black River and
the wonderful glory beyond it; and at last fallen asleep, to dream over
the strange story, to hear the sweet welcomings of the sisters at the
House Beautiful, and the song of birds from the window of that "upper
chamber which opened towards the sunrising?" And who, looking back to
the green spots in his childish experiences, does not bless the good
Tinker of Elstow?
And who, that has reperused the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age,
and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the
soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or
grateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of taste
and feeling, who does not, with Cowper,
"Even in transitory life's late day,
Revere the man whose Pilgrim marks the road,
And guides the Progress of the soul to God!"
We have just been reading, with no slight degree of interest, that simple
but wonderful piece of autobiography, entitled Grace abounding to the
Chief of Sinners, from the pen of the author of Pilgrim's Progress. It
is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim;
"truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit
from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air of
Hope and Faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entire
unveiling of a human heart; the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of
its sin. The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not so
much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the
last solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as
the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the
Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to
self-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to
convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of his
inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to give
glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him,
like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Castle,
and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and pleasant,
and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and the Shining
Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. In the
introductory pages he says "he could have dipped into a style higher than
this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more
than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play in
tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a
bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may
not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the
thing as it was."
This book, as well as Pilgrim's Progress, was written in Bedford prison,
and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his
"children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his
ministry." In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken from
them, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions
of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and
Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards, would
look after then with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting
welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are
tempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think God
fights against you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it
was so with your father. But out of all the Lord delivered me."
He gives no dates; be affords scarcely a clue to his localities; of the
man, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors and
contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we have
only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is the
story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and place
to do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of an
immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell and
the splendors of heaven? We gather, indeed, from his record, that he was
not an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle for
freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament, in his young years, among the
praying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts
whom he has immortalized in his allegory; but the only allusion which he
makes to this portion of his experience is by way of illustration of the
goodness of God in preserving him on occasions of peril.
He was born at Elstow, in Bedfordshire, in 1628; and, to use his own
words, his "father's house was of that rank which is the meanest and most
despised of all the families of the land." His father was a tinker, and
the son followed the same calling, which necessarily brought him into
association with the lowest and most depraved classes of English society.
The estimation in which the tinker and his occupation were held, in the
seventeenth century, may be learned from the quaint and humorous
description of Sir Thomas Overbury. "The tinker," saith he, "is a
movable, for he hath no abiding in one place; he seems to be devout, for
his life is a continual pilgrimage, and sometimes, in humility, goes
barefoot, therein making necessity a virtue; he is a gallant, for he
carries all his wealth upon his back; or a philosopher, for he bears all
his substance with him. He is always furnished with a song, to which his
hammer, keeping tune, proves that he was the first founder of the kettle-
drum; where the best ale is, there stands his music most upon crotchets.
The companion of his travel is some foul, sun-burnt quean, that, since
the terrible statute, has recanted gypsyism, and is turned pedlaress. So
marches he all over England, with his bag and baggage; his conversation
is irreprovable, for he is always mending. He observes truly the
statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg. He is so strong an
enemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make three
than want work; and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his faults
behind him. His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting, proves him
a linguist. He is entertained in every place, yet enters no farther than
the door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape Tyburn and
Banbury, he dies a beggar."
Truly, but a poor beginning for a pious life was the youth of John
Bunyan. As might have been expected, he was a wild, reckless, swearing
boy, as his father doubtless was before him. "It was my delight," says
he, "to be taken captive by the Devil. I had few equals, both for
cursing and swearing, lying and blaspheming." Yet, in his ignorance and
darkness, his powerful imagination early lent terror to the reproaches of
conscience. He was scared, even in childhood, with dreams of hell and
apparitions of devils. Troubled with fears of eternal fire, and the
malignant demons who fed it in the regions of despair, he says that he
often wished either that there was no hell, or that he had been born a
devil himself, that he might be a tormentor rather than one of the
tormented.
At an early age he appears to have married. His wife was as poor as
himself, for he tells us that they had not so much as a dish or spoon
between them; but she brought with her two books on religious subjects,
the reading of which seems to have had no slight degree of influence on
his mind. He went to church regularly, adored the priest and all things
pertaining to his office, being, as he says, "overrun with superstition."
On one occasion, a sermon was preached against the breach of the Sabbath
by sports or labor, which struck him at the moment as especially designed
for himself; but by the time he had finished his dinner he was prepared
to "shake it out of his mind, and return to his sports and gaming."
"But the same day," he continues, "as I was in the midst of a game of
cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to
strike it a second time, a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my
soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy
sins and go to hell?' At this, I was put to an exceeding maze;
wherefore, leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven, and it
was as if I had, with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus
look down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if He
did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for those and
other ungodly practices.
"I had no sooner thus conceived in my mind, but suddenly this conclusion
fastened on my spirit, (for the former hint did set my sins again before
my face,) that I had been a great and grievous sinner, and that it was
now too late for me to look after Heaven; for Christ would not forgive me
nor pardon my transgressions. Then, while I was thinking of it, and
fearing lest it should be so, I felt my heart sink in despair, concluding
it was too late; and therefore I resolved in my mind to go on in sin;
for, thought I, if the case be thus, my state is surely miserable;
miserable if I leave my sins, and but miserable if I follow them; I can
but be damned; and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins
as be damned for few."
The reader of Pilgrim's Progress cannot fail here to call to mind the
wicked suggestions of the Giant to Christian, in the dungeon of Doubting
Castle.
"I returned," he says, "desperately to my sport again; and I well
remember, that presently this kind of despair did so possess my soul,
that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what I
should get in sin; for Heaven was gone already, so that on that I must
not think; wherefore, I found within me great desire to take my fill of
sin, that I might taste the sweetness of it; and I made as much haste as
I could to fill my belly with its delicates, lest I should die before I
had my desires; for that I feared greatly. In these things, I protest
before God, I lie not, neither do I frame this sort of speech; these were
really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires; the good Lord, whose
mercy is unsearchable, forgive my transgressions."
One day, while standing in the street, cursing and blaspheming, he met
with a reproof which startled him. The woman of the house in front of
which the wicked young tinker was standing, herself, as he remarks, "a
very loose, ungodly wretch," protested that his horrible profanity made
her tremble; that he was the ungodliest fellow for swearing she had ever
heard, and able to spoil all the youth of the town who came in his
company. Struck by this wholly unexpected rebuke, he at once abandoned
the practice of swearing; although previously he tells us that "he had
never known how to speak, unless he put an oath before and another
behind."
The good name which he gained by this change was now a temptation to him.
"My neighbors," he says, "were amazed at my great conversion from
prodigious profaneness to something like a moral life and sober man.
Now, therefore, they began to praise, to commend, and to speak well of
me, both to my face and behind my back. Now I was, as they said, become
godly; now I was become a right honest man. But oh! when I understood
those were their words and opinions of me, it pleased me mighty well; for
though as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, yet I loved to
be talked of as one that was truly godly. I was proud of my godliness,
and, indeed, I did all I did either to be seen of or well spoken of by
men; and thus I continued for about a twelvemonth or more."
The tyranny of his imagination at this period is seen in the following
relation of his abandonment of one of his favorite sports.
"Now, you must know, that before this I had taken much delight in
ringing, but my conscience beginning to be tender, I thought such
practice was but vain, and therefore forced myself to leave it; yet my
mind hankered; wherefore, I would go to the steeple-house and look on,
though I durst not ring; but I thought this did not become religion
neither; yet I forced myself, and would look on still. But quickly
after, I began to think, 'How if one of the bells should fall?' Then I
chose to stand under a main beam, that lay overthwart the steeple, from
side to side, thinking here I might stand sure; but then I thought again,
should the bell fall with a swing, it might first hit the wall, and then,
rebounding upon me, might kill me for all this beam. This made me stand
in the steeple door; and now, thought I, I am safe enough; for if a bell
should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be
preserved notwithstanding.
"So after this I would yet go to see them ring, but would not go any
farther than the steeple-door. But then it came in my head, 'How if the
steeple itself should fall?' And this thought (it may, for aught I know,
when I stood and looked on) did continually so shake my mind, that I
durst not stand at the steeple-door any longer, but was forced to flee,
for fear the steeple should fall upon my head."
About this time, while wandering through Bedford in pursuit of
employment, he chanced to see three or four poor old women sitting at a
door, in the evening sun, and, drawing near them, heard them converse
upon the things of God; of His work in their hearts; of their natural
depravity; of the temptations of the Adversary; and of the joy of
believing, and of the peace of reconciliation. The words of the aged
women found a response in the soul of the listener. "He felt his heart
shake," to use his own words; he saw that he lacked the true tokens of a
Christian. He now forsook the company of the profane and licentious, and
sought that of a poor man who had the reputation of piety, but, to his
grief, he found him "a devilish ranter, given up to all manner of
uncleanness; he would laugh at all exhortations to sobriety, and deny
that there was a God, an angel, or a spirit."
"Neither," he continues, "was this man only a temptation to me, but, my
calling lying in the country, I happened to come into several people's
company, who, though strict in religion formerly, yet were also drawn
away by these ranters. These would also talk with me of their ways, and
condemn me as illegal and dark; pretending that they only had attained to
perfection, that they could do what they would, and not sin. Oh! these
temptations were suitable to my flesh, I being but a young man, and my
nature in its prime; but God, who had, as I hope, designed me for better
things, kept me in the fear of His name, and did not suffer me to accept
such cursed principles."
At this time he was sadly troubled to ascertain whether or not he had
that faith which the Scriptures spake of. Travelling one day from Elstow
to Bedford, after a recent rain, which had left pools of water in the
path, he felt a strong desire to settle the question, by commanding the
pools to become dry, and the dry places to become pools. Going under the
hedge, to pray for ability to work the miracle, he was struck with the
thought that if he failed he should know, indeed, that he was a castaway,
and give himself up to despair. He dared not attempt the experiment, and
went on his way, to use his own forcible language, "tossed up and down
between the Devil and his own ignorance."
Soon after, he had one of those visions which foreshadowed the wonderful
dream of his Pilgrim's Progress. He saw some holy people of Bedford on
the sunny side of an high mountain, refreshing themselves in the pleasant
air and sunlight, while he was shivering in cold and darkness, amidst
snows and never-melting ices, like the victims of the Scandinavian hell.
A wall compassed the mountain, separating him from the blessed, with one
small gap or doorway, through which, with great pain and effort, he was
at last enabled to work his way into the sunshine, and sit down with the
saints, in the light and warmth thereof.
But now a new trouble assailed him. Like Milton's metaphysical spirits,
who sat apart,
"And reasoned of foreknowledge, will, and fate," he grappled with one of
those great questions which have always perplexed and baffled human
inquiry, and upon which much has been written to little purpose. He was
tortured with anxiety to know whether, according to the Westminster
formula, he was elected to salvation or damnation. His old adversary
vexed his soul with evil suggestions, and even quoted Scripture to
enforce them. "It may be you are not elected," said the Tempter; and the
poor tinker thought the supposition altogether too probable. "Why,
then," said Satan, "you had as good leave off, and strive no farther; for
if, indeed, you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no hope
of your being saved; for it is neither in him that willeth nor in him
that runneth, but in God who showeth mercy." At length, when, as he
says, he was about giving up the ghost of all his hopes, this passage
fell with weight upon his spirit: "Look at the generations of old, and
see; did ever any trust in God, and were confounded?" Comforted by these
words, he opened his Bible took note them, but the most diligent search
and inquiry of his neighbors failed to discover them. At length his eye
fell upon them in the Apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus. This, he says,
somewhat doubted him at first, as the book was not canonical; but in the
end he took courage and comfort from the passage. "I bless God," he
says, "for that word; it was good for me. That word doth still
oftentimes shine before my face."
A long and weary struggle was now before him. "I cannot," he says,
"express with what longings and breathings of my soul I cried unto Christ
to call me. Gold! could it have been gotten by gold, what would I have
given for it. Had I a whole world, it had all gone ten thousand times
over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state. How
lovely now was every one in my eyes, that I thought to be converted men
and women. They shone, they walked like a people who carried the broad
seal of Heaven with them."
With what force and intensity of language does he portray in the
following passage the reality and earnestness of his agonizing
experience:--
"While I was thus afflicted with the fears of my own damnation, there
were two things would make me wonder: the one was, when I saw old people
hunting after the things of this life, as if they should live here
always; the other was, when I found professors much distressed and cast
down, when they met with outward losses; as of husband, wife, or child.
Lord, thought I, what seeking after carnal things by some, and what grief
in others for the loss of them! If they so much labor after and shed so
many tears for the things of this present life, how am I to be bemoaned,
pitied, and prayed for! My soul is dying, my soul is damning. Were my
soul but in a good condition, and were I but sure of it, ah I how rich
should I esteem myself, though blessed but with bread and water! I
should count these but small afflictions, and should bear them as little
burdens. 'A wounded spirit who can bear!'"
He looked with envy, as he wandered through the country, upon the birds
in the trees, the hares in the preserves, and the fishes in the streams.
They were happy in their brief existence, and their death was but a
sleep. He felt himself alienated from God, a discord in the harmonies of
the universe. The very rooks which fluttered around the old church spire
seemed more worthy of the Creator's love and care than himself. A vision
of the infernal fire, like that glimpse of hell which was afforded to
Christian by the Shepherds, was continually before him, with its
"rumbling noise, and the cry of some tormented, and the scent of
brimstone." Whithersoever he went, the glare of it scorched him, and its
dreadful sound was in his ears. His vivid but disturbed imagination lent
new terrors to the awful figures by which the sacred writers conveyed the
idea of future retribution to the Oriental mind. Bunyan's World of Woe,
if it lacked the colossal architecture and solemn vastness of Milton's
Pandemonium, was more clearly defined; its agonies were within the pale
of human comprehension; its victims were men and women, with the same
keen sense of corporeal suffering which they possessed in life; and who,
to use his own terrible description, had "all the loathed variety of hell
to grapple with; fire unquenchable, a lake of choking brimstone, eternal
chains, darkness more black than night, the everlasting gnawing of the
worm, the sight of devils, and the yells and outcries of the damned."
His mind at this period was evidently shaken in some degree from its
balance. He was troubled with strange, wicked thoughts, confused by
doubts and blasphemous suggestions, for which he could only account by
supposing himself possessed of the Devil. He wanted to curse and swear,
and had to clap his hands on his mouth to prevent it. In prayer, he
felt, as he supposed, Satan behind him, pulling his clothes, and telling
him to have done, and break off; suggesting that he had better pray to
him, and calling up before his mind's eye the figures of a bull, a tree,
or some other object, instead of the awful idea of God.
He notes here, as cause of thankfulness, that, even in this dark and
clouded state, he was enabled to see the "vile and abominable things
fomented by the Quakers," to be errors. Gradually, the shadow wherein he
had so long
"Walked beneath the day's broad glare,
A darkened man,"
passed from him, and for a season he was afforded an "evidence of his
salvation from Heaven, with many golden seals thereon hanging in his
sight." But, ere long, other temptations assailed him. A strange
suggestion haunted him, to sell or part with his Saviour. His own
account of this hallucination is too painfully vivid to awaken any other
feeling than that of sympathy and sadness.
"I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine
eye to look on this or that, but still the temptation would come, Sell
Christ for this, or sell Christ for that; sell him, sell him.
"Sometimes it would run in my thoughts, not so little as a hundred times
together, Sell him, sell him; against which, I may say, for whole hours
together, I have been forced to stand as continually leaning and forcing
my spirit against it, lest haply, before I were aware, some wicked
thought might arise in my heart, that might consent thereto; and
sometimes the tempter would make me believe I had consented to it; but
then I should be as tortured upon a rack, for whole days together.
"This temptation did put me to such scares, lest I should at sometimes, I
say, consent thereto, and be overcome therewith, that, by the very force
of my mind, my very body would be put into action or motion, by way of
pushing or thrusting with my hands or elbows; still answering, as fast as
the destroyer said, Sell him, I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not
for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds; thus reckoning, lest I
should set too low a value on him, even until I scarce well knew where I
was, or how to be composed again.
"But to be brief: one morning, as I did lie in my bed, I was, as at other
times, most fiercely assaulted with this temptation, to sell and part
with Christ; the wicked suggestion still running in my mind, Sell him,
sell him, sell him, sell him, sell him, as fast as a man could speak;
against which, also, in my mind, as at other times, I answered, No, no,
not for thousands, thousands, thousands, at least twenty times together;
but at last, after much striving, I felt this thought pass through my
heart, Let him go if he will; and I thought also, that I felt my heart
freely consent thereto. Oh, the diligence of Satan! Oh, the
desperateness of man's heart!
"Now was the battle won, and down fell I, as a bird that is shot from the
top of a tree, into great guilt, and fearful despair. Thus getting out
of my bed, I went moping into the field; but God knows with as heavy a
heart as mortal man, I think, could bear; where, for the space of two
hours, I was like a man bereft of life; and, as now, past all recovery,
and bound over to eternal punishment.
"And withal, that Scripture did seize upon my soul: 'Or profane person,
as Esau, who, for one morsel of meat, sold his birthright; for ye know,
how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was
rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it
carefully with tears."
For two years and a half, as he informs us, that awful scripture sounded
in his ears like the knell of a lost soul. He believed that he had
committed they unpardonable sin. His mental anguish 'was united with
bodily illness and suffering. His nervous system became fearfully
deranged; his limbs trembled; and he supposed this visible tremulousness
and agitation to be the mark of Cain. 'Troubled with pain and
distressing sensations in his chest, he began to fear that his breast-
bone would split open, and that he should perish like Judas Iscariot. He
feared that the tiles of the houses would fall upon him as he walked in
the streets. He was like his own Man in the Cage at the House of the
Interpreter, shut out from the promises, and looking forward to certain
judgment. "Methought," he says, "the very sun that shineth in heaven did
grudge to give me light." And still the dreadful words, "He found no
place for repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears," sounded
in the depths of his soul. They were, he says, like fetters of brass to
his legs, and their continual clanking followed him for months.
Regarding himself elected and predestined for damnation, he thought that
all things worked for his damage and eternal overthrow, while all things
wrought for the best and to do good to the elect and called of God unto
salvation. God and all His universe had, he thought, conspired against
him; the green earth, the bright waters, the sky itself, were written
over with His irrevocable curse.
Well was it said by Bunyan's contemporary, the excellent Cudworth, in his
eloquent sermon before the Long Parliament, that "We are nowhere
commanded to pry into the secrets of God, but the wholesome advice given
us is this: 'To make our calling and election sure.' We have no warrant
from Scripture to peep into the hidden rolls of eternity, to spell out
our names among the stars." "Must we say that God sometimes, to exercise
His uncontrollable dominion, delights rather in plunging wretched souls
down into infernal night and everlasting darkness? What, then, shall we
make the God of the whole world? Nothing but a cruel and dreadful
Erinnys, with curled fiery snakes about His head, and firebrands in His
hand; thus governing the world! Surely, this will make us either
secretly think there is no God in the world, if He must needs be such, or
else to wish heartily there were none." It was thus at times with
Bunyan. He was tempted, in this season of despair, to believe that there
was no resurrection and no judgment.
One day, he tells us, a sudden rushing sound, as of wind or the wings of
angels, came to him through the window, wonderfully sweet and pleasant;
and it was as if a voice spoke to him from heaven words of encouragement
and hope, which, to use his language, commanded, for the time, "a silence
in his heart to all those tumultuous thoughts that did use, like
masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise
within him." About this time, also, some comforting passages of
Scripture were called to mind; but he remarks, that whenever he strove to
apply them to his case, Satan would thrust the curse of Esau in his face,
and wrest the good word from him. The blessed promise "Him that cometh
to me, I will in no wise cast out" was the chief instrumentality in
restoring his lost peace. He says of it: "If ever Satan and I did strive
for any word of God in all my life, it was for this good word of Christ;
he at one end, and I at the other. Oh, what work we made! It was for
this in John, I say, that we did so tug and strive; he pulled, and I
pulled, but, God be praised! I overcame him; I got sweetness from it.
Oh, many a pull hath my heart had with Satan for this blessed sixth
chapter of John!" Who does not here call to mind the struggle between
Christian and Apollyon in the valley!
That was no fancy sketch; it was the narrative of the author's own
grapple with the Spirit of Evil. Like his ideal Christian, he "conquered
through Him that loved him." Love wrought the victory the Scripture of
Forgiveness overcame that of Hatred.
He never afterwards relapsed into that state of religious melancholy from
which he so hardly escaped. He speaks of his deliverance as the waking
out of a troublesome dream. His painful experience was not lost upon
him; for it gave him, ever after, a tender sympathy for the weak, the
sinful, the ignorant, and desponding. In some measure, he had been
"touched with the feeling of their infirmities." He could feel for those
in the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as
a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all
the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month
in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy
bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the
hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his
difficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt. Who better than
himself could describe the condition of Despondency, and his daughter
Much-afraid, in the dungeon of Doubting Castle? Had he not also fallen
among thieves, like Little-faith?
His account of his entering upon the solemn duties of a preacher of the
Gospel is at once curious and instructive. He deals honestly with
himself, exposing all his various moods, weaknesses, doubts, and
temptations. "I preached," he says, "what I felt; for the terrors of the
law and the guilt of transgression lay heavy on my conscience. I have
been as one sent to them from the dead. I went, myself in chains, to
preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my conscience which I
persuaded them to beware of." At times, when he stood up to preach,
blasphemies and evil doubts rushed into his mind, and he felt a strong
desire to utter them aloud to his congregation; and at other seasons,
when he was about to apply to the sinner some searching and fearful text
of Scripture, he was tempted to withhold it, on the ground that it
condemned himself also; but, withstanding the suggestion of the Tempter,
to use his own simile, he bowed himself like Samson to condemn sin
wherever he found it, though he brought guilt and condemnation upon
himself thereby, choosing rather to die with the Philistines than to deny
the truth.
Foreseeing the consequences of exposing himself to the operation of the
penal laws by holding conventicles and preaching, he was deeply afflicted
at the thought of the suffering and destitution to which his wife and
children might be exposed by his death or imprisonment. Nothing can be
more touching than his simple and earnest words on this point. They show
how warm and deep were him human affections, and what a tender and loving
heart he laid as a sacrifice on the altar of duty.
"I found myself a man compassed with infirmities; the parting with my
wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling
the flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the many
hardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to meet
with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who
lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I
thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.
"Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion
in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold,
nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind
should blow upon thee. But yet, thought I, I must venture you all with
God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as a man
who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children;
yet I thought on those 'two milch kine that were to carry the ark of God
into another country, and to leave their calves behind them.'
"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations:
the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, 'Leave thy
fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust
in me;' and again, 'The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thy
remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the time
of evil.'"
He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
conventicles." At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
sentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was never
executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
for twelve years.
Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
Fox's Martyrs, he penned that great work which has attained a wider and
more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue. It is
alike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many experienced
Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself would
not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with delight, as in
the main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, without
indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the month
of his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced from
some other portions of his allegory. A recollection of his fearful
sufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures,
relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder tone
to the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with the
Calvinism of the seventeenth century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory."
In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight of the
fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of
his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and
arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no
longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
of its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary prisoner,
addressed to his Muse:--
"The dull loneness, the black shade
Which these hanging vaults have made,
The rude portals that give light
More to terror than delight;
This my chamber of neglect,
Walled about with disrespect,--
From all these, and this dull air,
A fit object for despair,
She hath taught me by her might,
To draw comfort and delight."
That stony cell of his was to him like the rock of Padan-aram to the
wandering Patriarch. He saw angels ascending and descending. The House
Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him. He
looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The Valley of
Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious,
melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in the
spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and make
the woods and groves and solitary places glad." Side by side with the
good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green and
lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over," through "meadows
beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but fresh-faced shepherd-
boy, who lived a merry life, and wore the herb heartsease in his bosom,
sounded through his cell:--
"He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low no pride."
The broad and pleasant "river of the Water of Life" glided peacefully
before him, fringed "on either side with green trees, with all manner of
fruit," and leaves of healing, with "meadows beautified with lilies, and
green all the year long;" he saw the Delectable Mountains, glorious with
sunshine, overhung with gardens and orchards and vineyards; and beyond
all, the Land of Beulah, with its eternal sunshine, its song of birds,
its music of fountains, its purple clustered vines, and groves through
which walked the Shining Ones, silver-winged and beautiful.
What were bars and bolts and prison-walls to him, whose eyes were
anointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and the
rejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to its
golden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the sounding
trumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweet
voices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and the
songs of the redeemed ones? In reading the concluding pages of the first
part of Pilgrim's Progress, we feel as if the mysterious glory of the
Beatific Vision was unveiled before us. We are dazzled with the excess
of light. We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by the
great anthem of rejoicing spirits. It can only be adequately described
in the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as "a seven-fold
chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies."
Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old English
confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution baffled and in
the end overcame the tyranny of the Established Church in the reign of
Charles II. What Milton and Penn and Locke wrote in defence of Liberty,
Bunyan lived out and acted. He made no concessions to worldly rank.
Dissolute lords and proud bishops he counted less than the humblest and
poorest of his disciples at Bedford. When first arrested and thrown into
prison, he supposed he should be called to suffer death for his faithful
testimony to the truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meet
his fate with the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of his
Master. And when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a
sufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with
him, he girded up his soul with the reflection, that, as he suffered for
the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wilt
catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"
The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the
false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the
development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history is
bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts
of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of its
fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly
acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that
it was the golden age of England? Who that regards freedom above
slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those
interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the
prevalence of sects and schism, but who, at the same time, as Milton
shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves
than the rending of the Church? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with
the Defence of Unlicensed Printing before him? Who scoff at Quakerism
over the Journal of George Fox? Who shall join with debauched lordlings
and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers,
after rising from the perusal of Pilgrim's Progress? "There were giants
in those days." And foremost amidst that band of liberty-loving and God-
fearing men,
"The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,
Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight,"
stands the subject of our sketch, the Tinker of Elstow. Of his high
merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinburgh Review
expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared
that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those
which produced Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress.
|
