The pilgrim's progress from this world to that which is to come delivered under the similitude of a dream, wherein is discovered the manner of his setting out, his dangerous journey, and safe arrival at the desired country

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t • o r oK

FROM THIS WORLD TO THAT WHICH IS TO COME

DELIVERED UNDER THE SIMILITUDE OF

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John Bunyan's life fell in an epoch peculiarly congenial to the development of his spiritual powers. For a quarter century before his birth the temper of England had been rapidly changing. A spirit of intense earnestness, deepening to gloom, had gradually taken the place of the easy gaiety and exuberance which were the heritage of the age of Elizabeth. As the Stuart doctrine of absolute sovereignty became more insistent, and the aristocratic society grouped around the throne gave way more and more to moral license, the great body of the Commons grew sterner in its assertion of popular rights, and more fanatically grim in its devotion to the Puritan ideal of living. The great political drama left quite untouched the little Bedfordshire hamlet where Bunyan spent his boyhood ; but the religious zeal which was the flaming core of the mighty quarrel burned here as fiercely as anywhere in England. It is the working of this subtle fire upon his intensely sensitive temperament and vivid imagination, which lifts the history of Bunyan's obscure youth into unique interest.

Bunyan's father was a tinker, a term which in the early seventeenth century meant something between vagrant mechanic and petty thief. He was evidently considerably higher in the social scale, however, than his calling would imply, for he had a fixed residence, and was wealthy enough to send his son John to the village school at Elstow. Here the boy led the ordinary zestful life of a vigorous country lad- Besides the habit of swearing, of which he was cured by a single reproof, his vices appear to have been nothing iv THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

worse than playing at tip-cat, bell-ringing, and dancing on the village green. Innocent as these amusements seem to us to-day, to the Puritan mind of that time they were the snares of the devil, stretched alluringly to destroy the souls of men. Upon Bunyan's sensitive nature the awful imagery of Calvin's theology laid an irresistible spell, even in early childhood. When only nine or ten years old, he tells us, he was continually tormented with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, and often so shaken by dreams of devils that he trembled for whole days afterward. Still he could not bring himself to give up his " sports and childish vanities," or desert the " vain companions " of whom he was the ringleader.

In his seventeenth year he enlisted as a soldier. We do not know in which army he served, nor precisely for how long. The experience is noteworthy chiefly for the effect which it exercised upon his writings in mature life. The pomp and splendor of war continued to furnish him with images of the battle waged by the soul with sin. The Pilgrim's Progress, and more particularly The Holy War, are crowded with vivid passages the material for which he gathered during this year of soldiering ; and the famous figures of Great Heart and Captain Boanerges are perhaps, as Macaulay confidently asserts, portrait studies of praying captains under whom Bunyan had served in Fairfax's army.

On his return he married a poor but godly wife, who brought with her as dowry " neither a dish nor a spoon," but two pious books the titles of which are drolly significant of the kind of literature that prevailed in Puritan households of the time, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety. It was now that Bunyan's real spiritual agony began. He has left us a record of it in a work entitled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Shiners, which is the most startlingly vivid and minute transcript of the workings of an overwrought conscience ever put on paper. One day as he was in the

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midst of a game of cat, and had struck the peg one blow from the hole, he heard a voice from the sky saying, " Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell ? " and looking up he saw the Lord Jesus gazing down upon him, " as being very hotly displeased." The thought that the steeple might 'fall and crush him in his sins drove him in a panic of fear from the door of the belltower, where he stood to look on at the ringing. Having found in the Bible a passage concerning faith, which gave him comfort, he was seized with the longing to try to work a miracle. " Nay, one day," he says in that wonderful simple diction which bites into the memory the pictures of his struggle, — " one day as I was between Elstow and Bedford, the temptation was hot upon me to try if I had Faith, by doing of some Miracle ; which Miracle at that time was this ; I must say to the Puddles that were in the horsepads, Be dry ; and to the dry places, Be you the Puddles:' But just as he was about to utter the words, the awful fear that his command might be unheeded and himself proved faithless and a castaway, held his lips sealed. His strained imagination peopled the air with warning or malevolent presences. Once he turned on the highroad because he thought he heard a man calling behind him from a great distance, " Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you." As he sat on a street bench in Bedford the very tiles on the houses seemed to point at him and mock him. He began to be tormented by insane temptations to blasphemy and idolatry, and envied the beasts of the field because, by reason of their low estate, they were incapable of sin. By one of those vigorous unforgettable figures which illumine the pages of Grace Abounding, he compares himself while in this state of terrified obsession to a little child seized by a gypsy and carried off, frightened and weeping, to a strange people.

Even so robust a nature as Bunyan's could not long endure such a strain. He had the good fortune to meet with vi THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

Mr. Gifford, pastor of a Baptist congregation at Bedford, who soothed him with sensible talk. Once relieved from the ghostly despair which had beset him, he threw himself with the same imaginative fervor into the mystical joys of the saved. Going home one day from a neighboring village, where he had heard a sermon preached on the words of Solomon's Song, " Behold, thou art fair, my Love," his spirit was so kindled by the amorous exaltation of the text that he was fain to cry out concerning God's love and mercy " even to the very Crows that sat upon the plowed lands." It is worth while, even in a hasty consideration of Bunyan's life, to rest upon these troubled years of his youth and early manhood, because, though they are almost devoid of external incident, they show us the springs of his nature and let us into the secret of his creative powers as a writer. The dreams and visions which peopled his world with supernatural presences, malign and benignant, the uncontrollable waves of feeling which plunged him into maniacal despair, and without warning lifted him to heights of mystical ecstasy, betray the poetic temperament which was to utter itself in the most vivid and concrete symbols at its disposal ; the seriousness which urged him to confront desperately the large issues of life and destiny show that this poetry was to be, above all, instinct with moral purpose. The Pilgrim's Progress was a natural outcome of the far stranger journey which the spirit of the Elstow tinker lad took, as he went about his tasks along the fields and roads of Bedfordshire.

When he had once found his way to the light, it was not in Bunyan's nature to rest in passive enjoyment of the comfort which had fallen to him. Urged by his neighbors, who had doubtless often been impressed by his homely eloquence, he began to speak at small religious gatherings in the neighborhood, and finally entered upon a regular course of preaching. There is a touch of pride in the tone in which he speaks of exercising " his Gift." and indeed the

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hints which we get of the intensity of his preaching might well justify such pride. He had been preaching five years when, in November, 1660, he was arrested under the edict of Charles II. for the suppression of the Dissenters, and thrown into Bedford jail. Here he remained, with intervals of partial liberty, for twelve years, earning a meagre support for his family by the manufacture of tags for bootlaces, expounding the Scriptures to his little flock of fellowprisoners, studying indefatigably the few books he possessed, chiefly the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, and writing many works of a religious and controversial character. At any moment during this long imprisonment, Bunyan could have gained his release by a simple promise not to preach in public. Such a promise he would not and could not give. After a few years, however, his confinement was less strict, and in 1672 he was set at liberty by the decree of toleration. He spent the rest of his life in dignity and honor. Although he still nominally kept up his tinker's trade, he gave the greater part of his time to his pastorate at Bedford. His fame as a preacher spread rapidly, and was strongly supplemented, after the publication of The Pilgrim's Progress and The Holy War, by his fame as a writer. He made a yearly trip to London, where he preached to large congregations. He came to be known throughout a large part of England by the half-jesting, half-affectionate title of " Bishop Bunyan." His death occurred in 1688, from a fever which he caught while riding in the rain to intercede for a son with an angry father. It was fitting that such an act of practical charity should close the life history of a man like Bunyan, — a man who may stand as a type of much that is most sterling in Anglo-Saxon character. The sketch which a contemporary has left of the man, with his tall, large-boned frame, his reddish hair sprinkled with gray, his stern countenance softened by a ruddy flush and lightened by sparkling eyes, his modest habit and gentle manner, makes us feel more viii THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

keenly the genial fibre of his nature, — its homely earnestness, its imaginative ardor, its bluff wholesome humor, its capacity for brotherhood and common helpfulness.