Chapter II: Part 2

After the short breathing time we just noticed, Bunyan began to sink in the deep waters again. It was in vain that he asked the prayers of God’s people, and equally in vain that he imparted his grief to those who had passed through the same conflicts with the devil. One “ancient Christian,” to whom he stated his fear that he had committed the sin for which there is no forgiveness, thought so too. “Thus was I always sinking, whatever I did think or do. So one day I walked to a neighbouring town, and sat down upon a settle in the street, and fell into a very deep panic about the most fearful state my sin had brought me to; and after long musing, I lifted up my head; but methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give light; and as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me: methought that they all combined together to banish me out of the world; I was abhorred of them, and unfit to dwell among them, or be partaker of their benefits, because I had sinned against the Saviour. Then breaking out in the bitterness of my soul, I said to my soul, with a grievous sigh, ‘How can God comfort such a wretch as I am?’ I had no sooner said it, but this returned upon me, as an echo doth answer a voice, ‘This sin is not unto death.’ At which I was as if raised out of the grave, and cried out again, ‘Lord, how couldst thou find out such a word as this?’ for I was filled with admiration at the fitness and at the unexpectedness of the sentence. The fitness of the word; the rightness of the timing of it; the power and sweetness and light and glory that came with it also, were marvellous to me to find. I was now for the time out of doubt as to that about which I was so much in doubt before. I seemed now to stand upon the same ground with other sinners, and to have as good right to the word and prayer as any of them.”

In coming to this conclusion, he had made a great step in advance. His misery had hitherto been occasioned by a device of the devil, which keeps many anxious souls from comfort. He regarded his own case as a special exception to which a gospel, otherwise general, did not apply; but this snare was now broken, and, though with halting pace, he was on the way to settled rest and joy. Frequently he would feel that his transgressions had cut him off from Christ, and left him “neither foot-hold nor handhold among all the props and stays in the precious word of life;” but presently he would find some gracious assurance—he knew not how—sustaining him. At one time he would appear to himself like a child fallen into a mill-pond, “who thought it could make some shift to sprawl and scramble in the water,” yet, as it could find nothing to which to cling, must sink at last; but by and by he would perceive that an unseen power was buoying him up, and encouraging him to cry from the depths. At another time he would be so discouraged and daunted, that he scarcely dared to pray, and yet in a sort of desperation beginning, he found it true that “men ought always to pray and not to faint.” On one occasion, whilst endeavouring to draw near the throne of grace, the tempter suggested “that neither the mercy of God, nor yet the blood of Christ, at all concerned him, nor could they help him by reason of his sin; therefore it was vain to pray.” Yet he thought with himself, “I will pray.” “But,” said the tempter, “your sin is unpardonable.” “Well,” said he, “I will pray.” “It is to no boot,” said the adversary. And still he answered, “I will pray.” And so he began his prayer, “Lord, Satan tells me that neither they mercy, nor Christ’s blood, is sufficient to save my soul. Lord, shall I honour thee most by believing thou wilt and canst? or him, by believing thou neither wilt nor canst? Lord, I would fain honour thee by believing thou canst and thou wiliest.” And whilst he was thus speaking, “as if some one had clapped him on the back,” that scripture fastened on his mind, “O man great is thy faith.”

Relief came slowly but steadily, and was the more abiding, because he had learned by experience to distrust any comfort which did not come from the word of God. Such passages as these, “My grace is sufficient for thee,” and “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out,” greatly lightened his burden; but he derived still stronger encouragement from considering that the Gospel, with its benignity, is much more expressive of the mind and disposition of God than the law with its severity. “Mercy rejoiceth over judgment. How shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in glory. For even that which was made glorious, had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth.” Or, as the same truth presented itself to his mind in an aspect more arresting to a mind like his, “And Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. For he wist not what to say, for he was sore afraid. And there was a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son, hear him.” “Then I saw that Moses and Elias must both vanish, and leave Christ and his saints alone.”

We have now arrived at the happy time when these doubts and distractions were exchanged for songs of deliverance. We relate it in the words of Bunyan’s own narrative: “One day as I was passing into the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, ‘Thy righteousness is in heaven;’ and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, ‘He wants my righteousness,’ for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ himself, ‘the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and my irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me. Now went I also home rejoicing for the grace and love of God; so when I came home I looked to see if I could find that sentence, ‘Thy righteousness is in heaven,’ but could not find such a saying; wherefore my heart began to sink again, only that was brought to my remembrance, ‘He is made unto us of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption;’ by this word I saw the other sentence true. For, by this scripture, I saw that the man Christ Jesus, as he is distinct from us as touching his bodily presence, so he is our righteousness and sanctification before God. Here, therefore, I lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh! methought, Christ, Christ! There was nothing but Christ that was before my eyes. I was not now for looking upon this and the other benefits of Christ apart, as of his blood, burial, or resurrection, but considering him as a whole Christ, as he is when all these, and all other his virtues, relations, offices, and operations met together, and that he sat on the right hand of God in heaven. ’Twas glorious to me to see his exaltation, and the worth and prevalency of all his benefits; and that because now I could look from myself to him, and would reckon that all those graces of God that now were green on me, were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence-halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home: Oh! I saw my gold was in my trunk at home! in Christ my Lord and Saviour. Now Christ was all; all my _righteousness_, all my _sanctification_, and all my _redemption_.

“Further, the Lord did also lead me into the mystery of union with the Son of God; that I was joined to him, that I was ‘flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone’ (Eph. v. 30); and now was that word of St Paul sweet to me. By this also was my faith in him as my righteousness the more confirmed in me; for if he and I were one, then his righteousness was mine, his merits mine, his victory also mine. Now could I see myself in heaven and earth at once: in heaven by my Christ, by my head, by my righteousness and life; though on earth by my body or person. Now I saw Christ Jesus was looked upon of God, and should also be looked upon by us, as that common or public person, in whom all the whole body of his elect are always to be considered and reckoned; that we fulfilled the law by him, rose from the dead by him, got the victory over sin, death, the devil, and hell by him; when he died, we died; and so of his resurrection. ‘Thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise,’ saith he: and again, ‘After two days he will revive us, and the third day we shall live in his sight:’ which is now fulfilled by the sitting down of the Son of Man on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens, according to that to the Ephesians, ‘He heath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’ Ah! these blessed considerations and scriptures, with many others of like nature, were in those days made to spangle in mine eye, so that I have cause to say, ‘Praise ye the Lord God in his sanctuary; praise him in the firmament of his power; praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.’”

Extricated from the Slough of Despond, Bunyan went on his way rejoicing; and though sometimes interrupted by disquieting thoughts and strong temptations, his subsequent career was a path of growing comfort and prevailing peace. At the age of twenty-six he was admitted a member of that Baptist church of which Mr Gifford was the faithful pastor,—a rare man, who, in angry times, and in a small communion, preserved his catholicity. Holding that “union with Christ,” and not agreement concerning any ordinances or things external, is the foundation of Christian fellowship, with his dying hand he addressed a letter to his beloved people, in which the following sentence occurs, the utterance of a heart enlarged by Christian magnanimity, and bent on those objects which alone look important when the believer is waiting on the top of Pisgah:—“Concerning separation from the Church about baptism, laying on of hands, anointing with oil, psalms, or any other externals, I charge every one of you respectively, as you will give an account of it to our Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge both quick and dead at his coming, that none of you be found guilty of this great evil, which some have committed, and that through a zeal for God, yet not according to knowledge. They have erred from the law of the love of Christ, and have made a rent in the true Church, which is but one.” If our Baptist brethren are justly proud that the burning and shining light of Bunyan was set upon their candlestick, they have equal reason to boast of the torch at which his bland and diffussive light was kindled. John Bunyan doubtless owed to John Gifford the peculiar type of his Christianity, its comprehensiveness, and its sect-forgetting zeal for the things of Jesus Christ.

He had not long been a member of the church when he was called to exercise its actual ministry. Gifford was gone to his everlasting rest; and as a substitute for his labours, it was put upon a few of the brethren to speak the word of exhortation to the rest. Of these Bunyan was one. At first he did not venture farther than to address his friends in their more private meetings, or to follow up, with a brief application, the sermons delivered by others in their village-preaching. But these exercises having afforded the utmost satisfaction to his judicious though warm-hearted hearers, he was urged forward to more public services. These he was too humble to covet, and too earnest to refuse. Though his education was sufficiently rude, God had given him from the first a strong athletic mind and a glowing heart,—that downright logic and teeming fancy, whose bold strokes and burning images heat the Saxon temper to the welding point, and make the popular orator of our English multitude. Then his low original and rough wild history, however much they might have subjected him to scorn had he exchanged the leathern apron for a silken one, or scrambled from the hedge-side into the high-places of the church, entailed no suspicion, and awakened much surprise, when the Bedford townsmen saw their blaspheming neighbour a new man, and in a way so disinterested preaching the faith which he once destroyed. The town turned out to hear, and though there was some mockery, many were deeply moved. His own account of it is:—“At first I could not believe that God should speak by me to the heart of any man, still counting myself unworthy; yet those who were thus touched, would love me, and have a particular respect for me; and though I did put it from me, that they should be awakened by me, still they would confess it and affirm it before the saints of God . . . Wherefore, seeing them in both their words and deeds to be so constant, and also in their hearts so earnestly pressing after the knowledge of Jesus Christ, rejoicing that ever God did send me where they were, then I began to conclude it might be so, that God had owned in his work such a foolish one as I; and then came that word of God to my heart with such sweet refreshment: ‘The blessing of them that were ready to perish is come upon me; yea, I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.’ At this, therefore, I rejoiced; yea, the tears of those whom God had awakened by my preaching would be both solace and encouragement to me. I thought on those sayings, ‘Who is he that maketh me glad, but the same that is made sorry by me!’ And again, ‘Though I be not an apostle to others, yet doubtless I am unto you: for the seal of my apostleship are ye in the Lord.’”

There was a solemnizing and subduing power in Bunyan’s ministry, because it was heart-felt. So far as the truths he uttered were capable of becoming subjects of personal consciousness, he had experienced them; and so far as they were subjects of intellectual conviction, he was not only fully persuaded of them, but saw them so clear and evident, that his realizations were continually quickening into sensations. He thus began with a John-Baptist ministry, to which succeeded a Pentecostal evangel; and at last it grew into the Pauline amplitude and completeness, “the whole counsel of God.” “In my preaching of the word, I took special notice of this one thing, namely, that the Lord did lead me to begin where the word begins with sinners; that is, to condemn all flesh, and to open and allege that the curse of God by the law doth belong to and lay hold on all men as they come into the world, because of sin. Now this part of my work I fulfilled with great sense; for the terrors of the law, and guilt for my transgressions, lay heavy on my conscience. I preached what I felt, what I smartingly did feel; even that under which my poor soul did groan and tremble to astonishment. Indeed I have been as one sent to them from the dead; I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to be aware of . . . Thus I went on for the space of two years, crying out against men’s sins, and their fearful state because of them. After which the Lord came in upon my own soul with some sure peace and comfort through Christ; for he did give me many sweet discoveries of his blessed grace through him. Wherefore now I altered in my preaching (for still I preached what I saw and felt). Now, therefore, I did much labour to hold forth Jesus Christ in all his offices, relations, and benefits, unto the world, and did strive also to discover, to condemn, and remove those false supports and props on which the world doth both lean, and by them fall and perish. On these things also I staid as long as on the other. After this, God led me into something of the mystery of union with Christ; wherefore, that I discovered and shewed to them also. And when I had travelled through these three chief points of the word of God, I was caught in my present practice, and cast into prison, where I have lain alone as long again to confirm the truth by way of suffering, as I was before in testifying of it, according to the scriptures, in a way of preaching.”

Bunyan’s preaching was no incoherent rant. Words of truth and soberness formed the staple of each sermon; and his burning words and startling images were only the electric scintillations along the chain of his scriptural eloquence. Though the common people heard him most gladly, he had occasional hearers of a higher class. Once on a week-day he was expected to preach in a parish church near Cambridge, and a concourse of people had already collected in the churchyard. A gay student was riding past, when he noticed the crowd, and asked what had brought them together. He was told that the people had come out to hear one Bunyan, a tinker, preach. He instantly dismounted, and gave a boy twopence to hold his horse, for he declared he was determined to hear the tinker _prate_. So he went into the church, and heard the tinker; but so deep was the impression which that sermon made on the scholar, that he took every subsequent opportunity to attend Bunyan’s ministry, and himself became a renowned preacher of the gospel in Cambridgeshire. Still he felt that his errand was to the multitude, and his great anxiety was to penetrate the darkest places of the land, and preach to the most abandoned people. In these labours of unostentatious heroism, he sometimes excited the jealousy of the regular parish ministers, and even under the tolerant rule of the Protector, was in some danger of imprisonment. However, it was not till the Restoration that he was in serious jeopardy; but thereafter he was among the first victims of the grand combination betwixt priests and rulers to exterminate the gospel in England.

On the 12th of November 1660, he had promised to meet a little congregation in a private house at Samsell in Bedfordshire. Before the hour of meeting he was apprised that a warrant was out to seize him; but he felt that he owed it to the gospel not to run away at such a time. Accordingly when the people were assembled with no weapons but their Bibles, the constable entered and arrested the preacher. He had only time to speak a few words of counsel and encouragement to his hearers, “You see we are prevented of our opportunity to speak and hear the word of God, and are likely to suffer for the same. But be not discouraged. It is a mercy to suffer for so good a cause. We might have been apprehended as thieves or murderers, or for other wickedness; but blessed be God, it is not so. We suffer as Christians for well doing; and better be the persecuted than the persecutors.” After being taken before a justice, he was committed to gaol till the ensuing sessions should be held at Bedford. There an indictment was preferred—“That John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, labourer, being a person of such and such conditions, he hath since such a time devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service; and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the King,” &c. Of course he was convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment, with certification, that if he did not conform within a given period, he would he banished out of the kingdom.

After Bunyan ceases to be his own biographer, our materials become exceeding scanty. This is the less to be lamented when we reflect that the history of his “hidden life” is already told. The processes have now been related which formed and developed the inner man; and the few external events that befel him, and the few important things that he did, during the remaining eight-and-twenty years of his mortal pilgrimage, may be recorded in a single page.

His imprisonment was protracted from sessions to sessions, till he had measured out twelve weary years in Bedford gaol. Perhaps we should not call them _weary_. They had their alleviations. His wife and children were allowed to visit him. His blind and most beloved daughter was permitted to cheer his solitude and her own. He had his Bible, and his “Book of Martyrs.” He had his imagination, and his pen. Above all, he had a good conscience. He felt it a blessed exchange to quit the “iron cage” of despair for a “den” oft visited by a celestial comforter; and which, however cheerless, did not lack a door to heaven.

Whether it was the man’s own humanity, or whether it was that God who assuaged Joseph’s captivity, gave Bunyan special favour in the eyes of the keeper of his prison, the fact is certain, that he met with singular indulgence at the least likely hands. Not only was he allowed many a little indulgence in his cell, but he was suffered to go and come with a freedom which could hardly have been exceeded had the county gaol been his own hired house. For months together he was a constant attender of the church-meetings of his brethren in Bedford, and was actually chosen pastor during the period of his incarceration. On one occasion some of the bishops who had heard a rumour of the unusual liberty conceded to him, sent a messenger from London to Bedford to ascertain the truth. The officer was instructed to call at the prison during the night. It was a night when Bunyan had received permission to stay at home with his family; but so uneasy did he feel, that he told his wife he must go back to his old quarters. So late was it that the gaoler blamed him for coming at such an untimely hour; but a little afterwards the messenger arrived. “Are all the prisoners safe?” “Yes.” “Is John Bunyan safe?” “Yes.” “Let me see him.” Bunyan was called, and the messenger went his way; and when he was gone the gaoler told him, “Well, you may go out again just when you think proper; for you know when to return better than I can tell you.”

But the best alleviations of his captivity were those wonderful works which he there projected or composed. Some of these were controversial; but one of them was his own life, under the title, “Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners,” and another was the “PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.”

In 1672 he obtained his liberty, and his friends immediately built for him a large meeting-house, where he continued to preach with little interruption till his death. Once a year he visited London, and was there so popular, that twelve hundred people would gather together at seven in the morning of a winter’s working-day to hear him. Amongst the admiring listeners, Dr Owen was frequently found; and once when Charles the Second asked how a learned man like him could sit down to hear a tinker prate, the great theologian is said to have answered, “May it please your Majesty, could I possess the tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning.” But popular as he was, he was not fond of praise. One day after he had concluded an impressive discourse, his friends pressed round to thank him for his “sweet sermon.” “Aye,” he bluntly answered, “you need not remind me of that; for the devil told me as much before I left the pulpit.”

He had numbered sixty years, and written as many books, when he was released from his abundant labours. A young gentleman, his neighbour, had fallen under his father’s displeasure, and was much concerned at his father’s estrangement as well as at the prospect of being disinherited. He begged Mr Bunyan’s friendly interposition to propitiate his father, and prepare the way for his return to parental favour and affection. The kind-hearted man undertook the task, and having successfully achieved it, was returning from Reading to London on horseback, when he was thoroughly drenched with excessive rains. He arrived cold and wet at the house of Mr Strudwick, a grocer on Snow Hill. Here he was seized with fits of shivering, which passed off in violent fever, and after ten days’ sickness, on the 31st of August 1688, his pilgrimage ended, and he went in by the gate into the city.

* * * * *

As the most appropriate introduction to the following selections from the practical writings of Bunyan, we would chose this rapid history of the MAN, with a few remarks on the THEOLOGIAN and the AUTHOR.

I. Bunyan’s theological merits we rank very high. No one can turn over his pages without noticing the abundance of his Scriptural quotations; and these quotations no one can examine without perceiving how minutely he had studied, and how deeply he had pondered, the word of God. But it is possible to be very _textual_, and yet by no means very scriptural. A man may heave an exact acquaintance with the literal Bible, and yet entirely miss the great Bible message. He may possess a dexterous command of detached passages and insulated sentences, and yet be entirely ignorant of that peculiar scheme which forms the great gospel revelation. But this was Bunyan’s peculiar excellence. He was even better acquainted with the Gospel as the scheme of God, than he was familiar with the Bible-text; and the consequence is, that though he is sometimes irrelevant in his references, and fanciful in interpreting particular passages, his doctrine is almost always according to the analogy of faith. The doctrine of a free and instant justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ, none even of the Puritans could state with more Luther-like boldness, nor defend with an affection more worthy of Paul. In his last and best days, Coleridge wrote, “I know of no book, the Bible excepted, as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth, according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress. It is in my conviction the best _Summa Theologiæ Evangelicæ_ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.” {30a} Without questioning this verdict, we would include in the encomium some of his other writings, which possibly Coleridge never saw. Such as the Tracts contained in this volume. {30b} They exhibit Gospel-truths in so clear a light, and state them in such a frank and happy tone, that he who runs may read, and he who reads in earnest will rejoice. The Pilgrim is a peerless guide to those who have already passed in at the wicket-gate; but those who are still seeking peace to their troubled souls, will find the best directory in “The Jerusalem Sinner Saved.”

II. Invaluable as a theologian, Bunyan stands alone as a contributor to theological literature. In recent times no man has done so much to draw the world’s delighted attention to the subjects of supreme solicitude. No production of a mortal pen has found so many readers as one work of his; and none has awakened so frequently the sighing behest, “Let me die the death of the righteous.”

None has painted the beauty of holiness in taints more lovely, nor spoken in tones more thrilling to the heart of universal humanity. At first the favourite of the vulgar, he is now the wonder of the learned; and from the obscurity, not inglorious, of smoky cupboards and cottage chimneys, he has been escorted up to the highest places of classical renown, and duly canonized by the pontiffs of taste and literature. The man, whom Cowper praised anonymously,

“Lest so despised a name should move a sneer,”

has at last extorted emulous plaudits from a larger host of writers than ever conspired to praise a man of genius, who was also a man of God. Johnson and Franklin, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey, Byron and Montgomery, Macintosh and Macaulay, have exerted their philosophical acumen and poetic feeling to analyze his various spell, and account for his unequalled fame; and though the round-cornered copies, with their diverting woodcuts, have not disappeared from the poor man’s ingle, illustrated editions blaze from the shelves of every sumptuous library, new pictures, from its exhaustless themes, light up the walls of each annual exhibition; and amidst the graceful litter of the drawing-room table, you are sure to take up designs from the Pilgrim’s Progress. So universal is the ascendancy of the tinker-teacher, so world-wide the diocese of him whom Whitefield created Bishop Bunyan, that probably half the ideas which the outside-world entertains regarding experimental piety, they have, in some form or other, derived from him. One of the most popular preachers in his day, in his little treatises, as well as in his longer allegories, he preaches to countless thousands still. The cause of this unexampled popularity is a question of great practical moment.

And, first of all, Bunyan speaks to the whole of man,—to his imagination, his intellect, his heart. He had in himself all these ingredients of full-formed humanity, and in his books he lets all of them out. French writers and preachers are apt to deal too exclusively in the one article—fancy; and though you are amused for the moment with the rocket-shower of brilliant and many-tinted ideas which fall sparkling around you, when the exhibition is ended, you are disappointed to find that the whole was momentary, and that from all the ruby and emerald rain scarcely one gem of solid thought remains. {32a} Scottish writers and preachers are apt to indulge the argumentative cacoëthes of their country, and cramming into a tract or sermon as much hard-thinking as the Bramah-pressure of hydrostatic intellects can condense into the iron paragraphs, they leave no room for such delicate materials as fancy or feeling, illustration, imagery, or affectionate appeal; {32b} whilst Irish authors and pulpit-orators are so surcharged with their own exuberant enthusiasm, that their main hope of making you think as they think, is to make you feel as they feel. The heart is their Aristotle; and if they cannot win you by a smile or melt you by a tear, they would think it labour lost to try a syllogism. Bunyan was neither French, nor Scotch, nor Irish. He embodied in his person, though greatly magnified, the average mind of England—playful, affectionate, downright. His intellectual power comes chiefly out in that homely self-commending sense—the brief business-like reasoning, which might be termed Saxon logic, and of which Swift in one century, and Cobbett in another, are obvious instances. His premises are not always true, nor his inferences always legitimate; but there is such evident absence of sophistry, and even of that refining and hair-splitting which usually beget the suspicion of sophistry—his statements are so sincere, and his conclusions so direct, the language is so perspicuous, and the appeal is made so honestly to each reader’s understanding, that his popularity as a reasoner is inevitable. We need not say that the author of the Pilgrim possessed imagination; but it is important to note the service it rendered to his preaching, and the charm which it still imparts to his miscellaneous works. The pictorial power he possessed in a rare degree. His mental eye perceived the truth most vividly. Some minds are moving in a constant mystery. They see men like trees walking. The different doctrines of the Bible all wear dim outlines to them, jostling and jumbling; and after a perplexing morrice of bewildering hints and half discoveries, they vanish into the misty back-ground of nonentity. To Bunyan’s bright and broad-waking eye all things were clear. Thee men walked and the trees stood still. Everything was seen in sharp relief and definite outline—a _reality_. And besides the pictorial, he possessed in highest perfection the illustrative faculty. Not only did his own mind perceive the truth most vividly, but he saw the very way to give others a clear perception of it also. This is the great secret of successful teaching. Like a man who has chambered his difficult way to the top of a rocky eminence, but who, once he has reached the summit, perceives an easier path, and directs his companions along its gentler slopes, and gives them a helping-hand to lift them over the final obstacles; it was by giant struggles over the debris of crumbling hopes, and through jungles of despair, and up the cliffs of apparent impossibility, that Bunyan forced his way to the pinnacle of his eventual joy; but no sooner was he standing there, than his eagle-eye detected the easier path, and he made it the business of his benevolent ministry to guide others into it. Though not the truth, an illustration is a stepping-stone towards it; an indentation in the rock which makes it easier to climb. No man had a happier knack in hewing out these notches in the cliff, and no one knew better where to place them, than this pilgrim’s pioneer. Besides, he rightly judged that the value of these suggestive similes—these illustrative stepping-stones—depends very much on their breadth and frequency. But Bunyan appeals not only to the intellect and imagination, but to the hearts of men. There was no bitterness in Bunyan. He was a man of kindness and compassion. How sorry he is for Mr Badman! and how he makes you sympathize with Christian and Mr Ready-to-halt and Mr Feeble-mind, and all the other interesting companions of that eventful journey! And in his sermons how piteously he pleads with sinners for their own souls! and how impressive is the undisguised vehemency of his yearning affections! In the same sentence Bunyan has a word for the man of sense, and another for the man of fancy, and a third for the man of feeling; and by thus blending the intellectual, the imaginative, and the affectionate, he speaks home to the whole of man, and has made his works a lesson-book for all mankind.

Another secret of Bunyan’s popularity is the felicity of his style. His English is vernacular, idiomatic, universal; varying with the subject; homely in the continuous narrative; racy and pungent in his lively and often rapid discourse; and, when occasion requires, “a model of unaffected dignity and rhythmical flow;” but always plain, strong, and natural. However, in speaking of his style, we do not so much intend his words as his entire mode of expression. A thought is like a gem; but like a gem it may be spoiled in the setting. A careless artist may chip it and grievously curtail its dimensions; a clumsy craftsman, in his fear of destroying it, may not sufficiently polish it; or in his solicitude to show off its beauty, may overdo the accompanying ornaments. Bunyan was too skilful a workman so to mismanage the matter. His expression neither curtails nor encumbers the thought, but makes the most of it; that is, presents it to the reader as it is seen by the writer. Though there is a great appearance of amplitude about his compositions, few of his words could be wanted. Some styles are an ill-spun thread, full of inequalities, and shaggy from beginning to end with projecting fibres which spoil its beauty, and add nothing to its strength; but in its easy continuousness and trim compactness, the thread of Bunyan’s discourse flows firm and smooth from first to last. Its fulness regales the ear, and its felicity aids the understanding.

FOOTNOTES

{9} Those who are interested in the historic parallels supplied by Christian biography, will find a similar instructive dream in the Life of General Burn, vol. i. pp. 127–130.

{11} Ivimey’s Life of Bunyan, pp. 51–53.

{30a} Remains, vol. iii. p. 391.

{30b} The other items contained in the book that this text comes from were: Jerusalem Sinner Saved; Pharisee and the Publican; The Trinity and the Christian; The Law and a Christian; Bunyan’s Last Sermon; Bunyan’s Dying Sayings and An Exhortation to Peace and Unity. All of them are available from Project Gutenberg—DP.

{32a} Pascal was an exception. D’Aubigné, so far as writing in French makes a Frenchman, is another. Their works are full of fancy, but it is the fancy which gives to truth its wings. The rocket is charged, not with coloured sparks, but burning jewels.

{32b} Here, again, exceptions occur, and the greatest of our Scottish preachers is a contradiction to the characteristic style of his country.