

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 apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as
I then thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which I could
never be rid. I was afflicted with thoughts of the Day of Judgment
night and day, trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of
hell fire.' When, at ten years old, he was running about with his
companions in 'his sports and childish vanities,' these terrors
continually recurred to him, yet 'he would not let go his sins.'

Such a boy required rather to be encouraged than checked in seeking
innocent amusements. Swearing and lying were definite faults which
ought to have been corrected; but his parents, perhaps, saw that there
was something unusual in the child. To them he probably appeared not
worse than other boys, but considerably better. They may have thought
it more likely that he would conquer his own bad inclinations by his
own efforts, than that they could mend him by rough rebukes.

When he left school he would naturally have been bound apprentice,
but his father brought him up at his own trade. Thus he lived at home,
and grew to manhood there, forming his ideas of men and things out of
such opportunities as the Elstow neighbourhood afforded.

From the time when the Reformation brought them a translation of it,
the Bible was the book most read--it was often the only book which was
read--in humble English homes. Familiarity with the words had not yet
trampled the sacred writings into practical barrenness. No doubts or
questions had yet risen about the Bible's nature or origin. It was
received as the authentic word of God Himself. The Old and New
Testament alike represented the world as the scene of a struggle
between good and evil spirits; and thus every ordinary incident of
daily life was an instance or illustration of God's Providence. This
was the universal popular belief, not admitted only by the intellect,
but accepted and realised by the imagination. No one questioned it,
save a few speculative philosophers in their closets. The statesman in
the House of Commons, the judge on the Bench, the peasant in a midland
village, interpreted literally by this rule the phenomena which they
experienced or saw. They not only believed that God had miraculously
governed the Israelites, but they believed that as directly and
immediately He governed England in the seventeenth century. They not
only believed that there had been a witch at Endor, but they believed
that there were witches in their own villages, who had made compacts
with the devil himself. They believed that the devil still literally
walked the earth like a roaring lion: that he and the evil angels were
perpetually labouring to destroy the souls of men; and that God was
equally busy overthrowing the devil's work, and bringing sin and
crimes to eventual punishment.

In this light the common events of life were actually looked at and
understood, and the air was filled with anecdotes so told as to
illustrate the belief. These stories and these experiences were
Bunyan's early mental food. One of them, which had deeply impressed
the imagination of the Midland counties, was the story of 'Old Tod.'
This man came one day into court, in the Summer Assizes at Bedford,
'all in a dung sweat,' to demand justice upon himself as a felon. No
one had accused him, but God's judgment was not to be escaped, and he
was forced to accuse himself. 'My Lord,' said Old Tod to the judge, 'I
have been a thief from my childhood. I have been a thief ever since.
There has not been a robbery committed these many years, within so
many miles of this town, but I have been privy to it.' The judge,
after a conference, agreed to indict him of certain felonies which he
had acknowledged. He pleaded guilty, implicating his wife along with
him, and they were both hanged.

An intense belief in the moral government of the world creates what it
insists upon. Horror at sin forces the sinner to confess it, and makes
others eager to punish it. 'God's revenge against murder and adultery'
becomes thus an actual fact, and justifies the conviction in which it
rises. Bunyan was specially attentive to accounts of judgments upon
swearing, to which he was himself addicted. He tells a story of a man
at Wimbledon, who, after uttering some strange blasphemy, was struck
with sickness, and died cursing. Another such scene he probably
witnessed himself,[1] and never forgot. An alehouse-keeper in the
neighbourhood of Elstow had a son who was half-witted. The favourite
amusement, when a party was collected drinking, was for the father to
provoke the lad's temper, and for the lad to curse his father and wish
the devil had him. The devil at last did have the alehouse-keeper, and
rent and tore him till he died. 'I,' says Bunyan, 'was eye and ear
witness of what I here say. I have heard Ned in his roguery cursing
his father, and his father laughing thereat most heartily, still
provoking of Ned to curse that his mirth might be increased. I saw his
father also when he was possessed. I saw him in one of his fits, and
saw his flesh as it was thought gathered up in an heap about the
bigness of half an egg, to the unutterable torture and affliction of
the old man. There was also one Freeman, who was more than an ordinary
doctor, sent for to cast out the devil, and I was there when he
attempted to do it. The manner whereof was this. They had the
possessed in an outroom, and laid him upon his belly upon a form, with
his head hanging down over the form's end. Then they bound him down
thereto; which done, they set a pan of coals under his mouth, and put
something therein which made a great smoke--by this means, as it was
said, to fetch out the devil. There they kept the man till he was
almost smothered in the smoke, but no devil came out of him, at which
Freeman was somewhat abashed, the man greatly afflicted, and I made to
go away wondering and fearing