JOHN BUNYAN

§ 1

F Milton stands in literature for Puritan culture, Bunyan stands for Puritan fervour.

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The Pilgrim's Progress is a human drama. Most allegories are fantastic and many of them are apt to be tedious. But Bunyan is always dramatic. His allegory is ingenious in its contruction and seasoned by homely wit, and it has, as Macaulay said, been "read by many thousands with tears." The critic of letters has been moved by The Pilgrim's Progress to enthusiasm. Dr. Johnson hated to read books through, but he made an exception of The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, he wished it were longer.

Bunyan, Macaulay says, was "almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete." His mind was so imaginative that "personifications, when he dealt with them, became men." His mind was so dramatic that a dialogue between two qualities in The Pilgrim's Progress has a more convincing realism than "a dialogue between two human beings in most plays." And what a marvel it is that this great book should have been written by a tinker, and the son of a tinker, who himself has told us: "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."

Not only was John Bunyan a great writer born with a complete power of expression, he was, and he remains, the

spokesman of the people articulate among the generally inarticulate, one of the two great English writers (Dickens was the other) who belonged to the common people, loved the common people, and possessed a perfect knowledge of what the common people dream and hope and fear.

Bunyan's Life

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village near Bedford, in 1628; the son of "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." He was sent to the Grammar School at Bedford, where he was taught "to read and write, according to the rate of other poor men's children." After he left school, his father taught him his own trade of a tinker, and he went on living in Elstow. Bunyan was a passionate and imaginative boy, the ringleader in most of the village mischief. After his conversion, he was fond of referring in lurid terms to the wickedness of his youth, but there is little doubt that this wickedness was grotesquely exaggerated. In our days at every Salvation Army meeting, one can hear from the simple converted obviously over-coloured accounts of sins committed in unregenerate days. This is indeed quite natural, nothing more than perfectly harmless vanity, as well as the desire to emphasise the "saving power of grace." Bunyan tells us that he swore and lied and poached and robbed orchards. But he was never drunk, and he more than once declares that he was never unchaste. However great a sinner Bunyan may have been, he suffered grievously for his sins. The English people in the seventeenth century had learned to read the Bible, which they accepted literally, and Bunyan, as a boy, was convinced that the sins he committed would bring him awful and eternal punishment. Like Joan of Arc he had visions, and all his visions were prophecies of torment.

At the beginning of the Civil War Bunyan served as a

"Christian went on his Way, but still with his Sword drawn in his hand, for fear lest he should be assaulted."

Photo: Rischgitz Collection.

soldier. His soldiering lasted only a year, and then he went back to Elstow and married. He says:

I lighted on a wife whose father was counted godly. We came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon between us. But she had for her portion two books, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, which her father had left her when he died. In these two books I sometimes read with her. I found some things pleasing to me, but all this while I met with no conviction. She often told me what a godly man her father was, how he would reprove and correct vice both in his house and among his neighbours, what a strict and holy life he lived in his day, both in word and deed. These books, though they did not reach my heart, did light in me some desire to religion.

At this time of his life Bunyan was a regular attendant at the parish church, though "retaining my wicked life." He read the Bible, grieved for his sins, and was miserably unhappy, finding nowhere any hope or any satisfaction. Then light came to him miraculously as it came to St. Paul. He writes:

One day as I was travelling into the country, musing on the wickedness of my heart, and considering the enmity that was in me to God, the Scripture came into my mind, "He hath made peace through the blood of His cross." I saw that the justice of God and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other. I was ready to swoon, not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace.

Bunyan joined the Baptist Congregation in Bedford, and was baptised in the River Ouse. Soon after his conversion, Bunyan began to preach, and in a very short time he gained a great reputation among the sects which in the middle of the seventeenth century were, as Froude says, "springing up all over England as weeds in a hotbed."

The Act of Uniformity, passed after the Restoration, made