

E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Bill Tozier, Barbara Tozier, and
the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)



English Men of Letters

Edited by John Morley

BUNYAN

by

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE







London
Macmillan and Co.
1880




CONTENTS.


   CHAPTER I.                                           PAGE

   EARLY LIFE                                             1

   CHAPTER II.

   CONVICTION OF SIN                                     16

   CHAPTER III.

   GRACE ABOUNDING                                       35

   CHAPTER IV.

   CALL TO THE MINISTRY                                  52

   CHAPTER V.

   ARREST AND TRIAL                                      65

   CHAPTER VI.

   THE BEDFORD GAOL                                      78

   CHAPTER VII.

   LIFE AND DEATH OF MR. BADMAN                          90

   CHAPTER VIII.

   THE HOLY WAR                                         114

   CHAPTER IX.

   THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS                               151

   CHAPTER X.

   LAST DAYS AND DEATH                                  173





BUNYAN.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY LIFE.


'I was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being
of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all families in the
land.' 'I never went to school, to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought
up in my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company of
poor countrymen.' 'Nevertheless, I bless God that by this door He
brought me into the world to partake of the grace and life that is by
Christ in His Gospel.' This is the account given of himself and his
origin by a man whose writings have for two centuries affected the
spiritual opinions of the English race in every part of the world more
powerfully than any book or books, except the Bible.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village near Bedford, in the year
1628. It was a memorable epoch in English history, for in that year
the House of Commons extorted the consent of Charles I. to the
Petition of Right. The stir of politics, however, did not reach the
humble household into which the little boy was introduced. His father
was hardly occupied in earning bread for his wife and children as a
mender of pots and kettles: a tinker,--working in neighbours' houses
or at home, at such business as might be brought to him. 'The
Bunyans,' says a friend, 'were of the national religion, as men of
that calling commonly were.' Bunyan himself, in a passage which has
been always understood to refer to his father, describes him 'as an
honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the
world to get his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his
family.' In those days there were no village schools in England; the
education of the poor was an apprenticeship to agriculture or
handicraft; their religion they learnt at home or in church. Young
Bunyan was more fortunate. In Bedford there was a grammar school,
which had been founded in Queen Mary's time by the Lord Mayor of
London, Sir William Harper. Hither, when he was old enough to walk to
and fro, over the mile of road between Elstow and Bedford, the child
was sent, if not to learn Aristotle and Plato, to learn at least 'to
read and write according to the rate of other poor men's children.'

If religion was not taught at school, it was taught with some care in
the cottages and farmhouses by parents and masters. It was common in
many parts of England, as late as the end of the last century, for the
farmers to gather their apprentices about them on Sunday afternoons,
and to teach them the Catechism. Rude as was Bunyan's home, religious
notions of some kind had been early and vividly impressed upon him. He
caught, indeed, the ordinary habits of the boys among whom he was
thrown. He learnt to use bad language, and he often lied. When a
child's imagination is exceptionally active, the temptations to
untruth are correspondingly powerful. The inventive faculty has its
dangers, and Bunyan was eminently gifted in that way. He was a
violent, passionate boy besides, and thus he says of himself that for
lying and swearing he had no equal, and that his parents did not
sufficiently correct him. Wickedness, he declares in his own
remorseful story of his early years, became a second nature to him.
But the estimate which a man forms of himself in later life, if he has
arrived at any strong abhorrence of moral evil, is harsher than others
at the time would have been likely to have formed. Even then the poor
child's conscience must have been curiously sensitive, and it revenged
itself upon him in singular tortures.

'My sins,' he says, 'did so offend the Lord that even in my childhood
He did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me
with dreadful visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted while
asleep, with