Part 1 (1/2)

The Life of John Bunyan

by Edmund Venables

CHAPTER I

John Bunyan, the author of the book which has probably passed through reater nues than any other book in the English tongue, was born in the parish of Elstow, in Bedfordshi+re, in the latter part of the year 1628, and was baptized in the parish church of the village on the last day of November of that year

The year of John Bunyan's birth was a land Charles I, by the extorted assent to the Petition of Right, had begun reluctantly to strip himself of the irresponsible authority he had clai and Parlia itself in the place of the Sovereign Wentworth (better known as Lord Strafford) had finally left the Commons, baffled in his nobly-conceived but vain hope of reconciling the e and the promise of the Presidency of the Council of the North, was foreshadowing his policy of ”Thorough,” which was destined to bring both his own head and that of his weak ainst the toleration of Rorowth of Ar, ilfully blinded, had replied to it by the proh and lucrative posts in the Church of the very eous upholders of the royal prerogative and the irresponsible power of the sovereign, Montagu and Mainwaring, had been presented, the one to the see of Chichester, the other--the i Montagu's consecration had vacated Montaigne, the licenser of Mainwaring's incriminated sermon, was raised to the Archbishopric of York, while Neile and Laud, ere openly nalish Israel,” were rewarded respectively with the rich see of Durham and the important and deeply-dyed Puritan diocese of London Charles was steadily sowing the wind, and destined to reap the hich was to sweep him from his throne, and involve the monarchy and the Church in the sahauered and fa to conclude a peace with the French king beneath its walls, had been struck down by the knife of a fanatic, to the undisguised joy of the acy of failure and disgrace in the fall of the Protestant stronghold on which the eyes of Europe had been so long anxiously fixed

The year was closing gloo hurricane, when the babe as destined to leave so iht in an hue His father, Thonified title of ”brazier,” was more properly what is known as a ”tinker”; ”ato Bunyan's conterapher, Charles Doe He was not, however, atinkers were and usually are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's Christopher Sly, but aa settled hoe co there, but had for sorandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a ”petty chape, which he bequeathed, ”with its appurtenances,” to his second wife, Ann, to descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thoe, which was probably John Bunyan's birthplace, persistent tradition, confir near the hae of Elstow, at a place long called ”Bunyan's End,” where two fields are still called by the name of ”Bunyans” and ”Further Bunyans” This small freehold appears to have been all that rerandfather, of a property once considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the whole locality

The fanon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan (the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of which the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent) is one that had established itself in Bedfordshi+re from very early times The first place in connection hich the name appears is Pulloxhill, about nineJohn's accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish One William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off In 1327, the first year of Edward III, one of the same name, probably his descendant, Willia at Harrowden, close to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan's birthplace, and was the owner of property there We have no further notices of the Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century We then find thereatly fallen Their ancestral property seems little by little to have passed into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but ”a htell {1} with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land” This small residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still further diminished by sale The field already referred to, known as ”Bonyon's End,” was sold by ”Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow, labourer,” son of Willia the keepers of a ses for their ho them into trouble with the petty local courts of the day Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603, exactly a reat queen passed away The aret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a native of Elstow and only a few months his junior The details of her mother's will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow, prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's latest and rapher, the Rev Dr Brown, ”coh humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways” John Bunyan's iven toearly, and speedily consoled themselves on the loss of one ith the corandmother cannot have died before February 24, 1603, the date of his father's baptisain His father, too, had not completed his twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10, 1623 She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May, he was aret Bentley At the end of seventeen years Thoain left a er, and within two rossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a third wife Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when he married We have no particulars of the death of his first wife But he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the ties of his children by his first ould indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a er and his second e

Elstohich, as the birthplace of the author of ”The Pilgriained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village, which, though not much more than aaside from the main stream of ree Its nainal form of ”Helen-stow,” or ”Ellen-stow,” the _stow_ or stockaded place of St Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in 1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of the judicially don, in honour of the mother of the Emperor Constantine The parish church, so intiment of the church of the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or ”steeple-house,” built to contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of the conventual church Few villages are so little es with overhanging storeys, peaked dorabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, e street, with detached cottages standing in gardens gay with the hoe green, fringed with churchyard elms, in the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at the upper end of the old ”Moot Hall,” a quaint brick and tiood example of the doinally, perhaps, the Guesten- Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor when lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses--”the scene,” writes Dr Brown ”of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of village life” The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little altered froleader of the youth of the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it so hard to give up, and in ”tip-cat,” and the other innocent gaarded as ”unGodly practices” Oneto strike his ”cat” that memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward voice which rebuked hiain”

On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the church, a fine though soment of the chapel of the nunnery curtailed at both ends, of Norlish date, which, with its detached bell toas the scene of some of the fierce spiritual conflicts so vividly depicted by Bunyan in his ”Grace Abounding” On entering every object speaks of Bunyan The pulpit--if it has survived the recent restoration--is the same from which Christopher Hall, the then ”Parson”

of Elstow, preached the ser conscience

The font is that in which he was baptized, as were also his father and enitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly- loved blind child, on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, on April 14, 1654 An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of thousands of visitors attracted to the village church by the fame of the tinker of Elstow, is traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy when he ”went to church twice a day, and that, too, with the fores holy that were therein contained” The five bells which hang in the belfry are the sahted, the fourth bell, tradition says, being that he was used to ring The rough flagged floor, ”all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of generations of ringers,” remains undisturbed One cannot see the door, set in its solidin it, after conscience, ”beginning to be tender,” told him that ”such practice was but vain,” but yet unable to deny hi that, ”if a bell should fall,” he could ”slip out” safely ”behind the thick walls,” and so ”be preserved notwithstanding” Behind the church, on the south side, stand some picturesque ivy-clad remains of the once stately mansion of the Hillersdons, erected on the site of the nunnery buildings in the early part of the seventeenth century, with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones, which iven Bunyan the first idea of ”the very stately Palace, the nae where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the fields at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the knowledge of its site has passed away That in which he lived for six years (1649-1655) after his firstin the village street, but modern reparations have robbed it of all interest

Fro which Bunyan passed the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the subject of our biography hiipsy descent, which was not entirely rejected by Sir Walter Scott, and which has more recently received elaborate support from writers on the other side of the Atlantic, may be pronounced absolutely baseless Even if Bunyan's inquiry of his father ”whether the family was of Israelitish descent or no,” which has been so strangely pressed into the service of the theory, could be supposed to have anything to do with the ative hich his question was met--”he told ht, have settled the point But some fictions die hard However low the family had sunk, so that in his oords, ”his father's house was of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the faeneration,” the na in Bunyan's native county, and had once taken far higher rank in it And his parents, though poor, were evidently worthy people, of good repute a his own father and his wandering life when he speaks of ”an honest poor labouring et his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his faher care that their children should be properly educated ”Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents,” writes Bunyan, ”it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write” If we accept the evidence of the ”Scriptural Poems,” published for the first tienuineness of which, though questioned by Dr

Brown, there seems no sufficient reason to doubt, the little education he had was ”gained in a grammar school” This would have been that founded by Sir Willia town of Bedford Thither wethe e by the brookside, often, no doubt, wet and o to school to Aristotle or Plato,” but to be taught ”according to the rate of other poor men's children” The Bedford schoolent sot, charged with ”night-walking”

and haunting ”taverns and alehouses,” and other evil practices, as well as with treating the poor boys ”when present” with a cruelty whichas they were, had been more protracted Whether this man was his master or no, it was little that Bunyan learnt at school, and that little he confesses with sha called hoe, where he says he was ”brought up in a verya company of poor countrymen” Here, with but little to elevate or refine his character, the boy contracted e souard”

According to his own rehteousness,” having ”from a child” in his ”tender years,” ”but few equals both for cursing, swearing, lying and blasphe the holy name of God” Sins of this kind he declares becaression against the law of God,” and as he advanced in his teens he becaleader,” he says, of the village lads ”in allcondemnation passed by Bunyan, after his conversion, on his for him ever, either as boy or man, to have lived a vicious life ”The wickedness of the tinker,” writes Southey, ”has been greatly overrated, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved” The justice of this verdict of acquittal is fully accepted by Coleridge ”Bunyan,”

he says, ”was never in our received sense of the word 'wicked' He was chaste, sober, and honest” He hints at youthful escapades, such, perhaps, as orchard-robbing, or when a little older, poaching, and the like, which ht him under ”the stroke of the laws,” and put him to ”open shame before the face of the world” But he confesses to no criate habit We have no reason to suppose that he was ever drunk, and we have his own uilty of an act of unchastity ”In our days,” to quote Mr

Froude, ”a rough tinker who could say as arded as a hbourhood there was no young lish town in the seventeenth century ress will be pleased to allow” How then, it e in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which would hardly seeate and licentious? We are confident that Bunyan meant what he said So intensely honest a nature could not allow his words to go beyond his convictions When he speaks of ”letting loose the reins to his lusts,” and sinning ”with the greatest delight and ease,” we know that however exaggerated they may appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him overstrained Dr

Johnson marvelled that St Paul could call himself ”the chief of sinners,” and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly But a highly- strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different estimate of sin froeneral It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others, as sins against infinite love--a love unto death--and in the light of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned The sinfulness of sin--more especially their own sin--is the intensest of all possible realities to the to describe it We erated it ers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether a mistaken one?

The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan While still a child ”but nine or ten years old,” he tells us he was racked with convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears He was scared with ”fearful dreams,” and ”dreadful visions,” and haunted in his sleep with ”apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits” co to carry hiht of the Day of Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over his mind in the h these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted, they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased ”as if they had never been,” and he gave himself up without restraint to the youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature ion” becarievous to him He could not endure even to see others read pious books; ”it would be as a prison to me” The awful realities of eternity which had once been so crushi+ng to his spirit were ”both out of sight andto the later matized as sinful ere littlefellow, full of aniination, he ”could sin with the greatest delight and ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his coion was not wholly dead in hi its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for Godliness dishonoured their profession ”Once,” he says, ”when I was at the height of ious reat a stroke upon my spirit that it ious feeling was deepened by providential escapes froments mixed with mercy” he terms them,--which made him feel that he was not utterly forsaken of God Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in ”Bedford river”--the Ouse; once in ”a creek of the sea,” his tinkering rounds having, perhaps, carried hihbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east At another tier, he tore out, while his companions looked on with ad

These providential deliverances bring us to that incident in his brief career as a soldier which his anonyrapher tells us ”made so deep an impression upon him that he would neverto God” But for this occurrence, indeed, we should have probably never known that he had ever served in the arly brief words--”When I was a soldier I with others were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it But when I was just ready to go, one of the coo in my roo to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket bullet and died” Here, as is so often the case in Bunyan's autobiography, we have reason to lament the complete absence of details

This is characteristic of the ious import of the occurrences he records constituted their only value in his eyes; their te, which imparts their chief interest to us, was of no account to hihtest clue to the naed place, or even to the side on which he was engaged The date of the event is left equally vague The last point however we are able to deter like accuracy November, 1644, was the earliest period at which Bunyan could have entered the are of sixteen Domestic circumstances had then recently occurred which e hihts to a military life In the previous June hisfolloithin a aret Before another month was out, his father, as we have already said, had ain, and whether the neife had proved the proverbial _injusta noverca_ or not, his home must have been sufficiently altered by the double, if wethe dullcareer of a soldier Which of the two causes then distracting the nation claimed his adherence, Royalist or Parliamentarian, can never be determined As Mr Froude writes, ”He does not tell us himself His friends in after life did not care to ask hiht thewith exactness” The only evidence is internal, and the deductions fro probabilities taken by Bunyan's various biographers

Lord Macaulay, whose conclusion is ably, and, we think, convincingly supported by Dr Brown, decides in favour of the side of the Parliaether with the painstaking Mr Offor, holds that ”probability is on the side of his having been with the Royalists” Bedfordshi+re, however, was one of the ”associated Counties”

froth, and it was shut in by a strong line of defence from any combination with the Royalist ar it to furnish ”able and arnel, which was then the base of operations against the King in that part of England All probability therefore points to John Bunyan, the lusty young tinker of Elstow, the leader in allhis ht, having been drafted to Newport to serve under Sir Samuel Luke, of Cople, and other Parliae he refers to is equally undeterminable A tradition current within a few years of Bunyan's death, which Lord Macaulay rather rashly invests with the certainty of fact, names Leicester The only direct evidence for this is the staterapher, who professes to have been a personal friend of Bunyan's, that he was present at the siege of Leicester, in 1645, as a soldier in the Parliamentary army This statement, however, is in direct defiance of Bunyan's oords For the one thing certain in the e may have been, Bunyan was not at it He tells us plainly that he was ”drawn to go,” and that when he was just starting, he gave up his place to a coh the head Bunyan's presence at the siege of Leicester, which has been so often reported that it has alarded as an historical truth,the baseless creations of a fertile fancy

Bunyan's military career, wherever passed and under whatever standard, was very short The civil as drawing near the end of its first stage when he enlisted He had only been a soldier a few months when the battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, was fought, June 14, 1645

Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert, Sept 10th Three days later Montrose was totally defeated at Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to relieve Chester, Charles shut hiarrisons yielded in quick succession; in 1646 the arreat national tragedy having come to a close, Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resue His father, old Thoh his fa celebrity as a preacher and a writer, and died in the early part of 1676, just when John Bunyan was passing through his last brief period of durance, which was to give birth to the hich has made him immortal

CHAPTER II