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, ent.i.tled "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 G.o.d, 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 ma.s.s-book, the sc.r.a.ps 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 a.s.semblies 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 surpa.s.sed. 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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l, 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. "G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 t.i.tle-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 n.o.ble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer a.s.sizes, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d"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 t.i.tle-page that it was written "for the support of the weak and tempted people of G.o.d." 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 a.s.serts, 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 G.o.d. With these he will not quarrel about "things that are circ.u.mstantial," 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 unG.o.dly, 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 G.o.d by the superst.i.tious 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 a.s.serted at his trial, and in the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood examined them by the Word of G.o.d and found them good; nor could he dare to revolt from or deny them on pain of eternal d.a.m.nation."
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 ent.i.tled "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 s.p.a.ce 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 coa.r.s.e and unmeasured. He roundly charges Fowler with having "closely, privily, and devilishly turned the grace of G.o.d 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 lat.i.tudinarian that can, as to religion, turn and twist like an eel on the angle, or rather like the weatherc.o.c.k 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 G.o.d, 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 weatherc.o.c.k 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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sertions 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 a.s.serting 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 t.i.tle, 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 G.o.d 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 t.i.tle 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 dest.i.tute of friends, who had all along supported him with necessaries and had been very good to his family, so that by their a.s.sistance 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 G.o.d." 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstance 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 Ill.u.s.trata." 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 t.i.tled 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 G.o.dliness. 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, G.o.d-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 pa.s.sing 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 d.a.m.ned 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 doc.u.ment:--
"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 a.s.sembly 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sumes 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 a.s.signed 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 ma.n.u.script 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 ent.i.tled 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, bra.s.s, 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 doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ment 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 a.s.sembly 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 const.i.tuencies 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 munic.i.p.alities 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.