Part 4 (1/2)

But thou hast fellows, so Cuckoo

Thy notes do not first welco

Birds less than thee by far like prophets do Tell us 'tis coh not by Cuckoo, Nor dost thou su Cuckoo be

When thou dost cease a us to appear, Then doth our harvest bravely crown our year

But thou hast fellows, so Cuckoo

Since Cuckoos forward not our early spring Nor help with notes to bring our harvest in, And since while here, she only irls and boys, The Fors and sing Cuckoo”

A perusal of this little volu on the ear but full of strong thought and picturesque ies, cannot fail to raise Bunyan's pretensions as a poet His muse, it is true, as Alexander Smith has said, is a hos, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshi+re roads” But if the lines are unpolished, ”they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant,” with the ”strong thought and the knack of the skilled workle blow the nail ho his imprisonment Bunyan's pen was much more fertile in prose than in poetry Besides his world-fa the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on prayer, entitled ”Praying in the Spirit;” a book on ”Christian Behaviour,”

setting forth with unco plainness the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants, by which those who profess a true faith are bound to show forth its reality and power; the ”Holy City,” an exposition of the vision in the closing chapters of the Book of Revelation, brilliant with picturesque description and rich in suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its origin in a sermon preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their prison chamber; and a work on the ”Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal Judger There is not one of theuage, accuracy of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience Nor is there one which does not here and there exhibit speciinative power, and his coe Each will reward perusal His work on ”Prayer” is couched in the most exalted strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the soul to God, and a wrestling with Hiranted It is, however, unhappily defor of the Book of Common Prayer He denounces it as ”taken out of the papistical ments of some popes, some friars, and I know not what;” and ridicules the order of service it propounds to the worshi+ppers ”They have the ers' ends; they set such a prayer for such a day, and that twenty years before it comes: one for Christmas, another for Easter, and six days after that They have also bounded how many syllables must be said in every one of them at their public exercises

For each saint's day also they have theenerations yet unborn to say They can tell you also when you shall kneel, when you shall stand, when you should abide in your seats, when you should go up into the chancel, and what you should do when you co able to compose so profound aof sacred things is unworthy of its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence It has its excuse in the hard measure he had received fro to force the Prayer Book on a generation which had largely forgotten it In his mind, the men and the book were identified, and the unchristian behaviour of its advocates blinded his eyes to itsforot that the same apostle who directs that in our public asse should be done ”to edification,” directs also that everything should be done ”decently and in order”

By far the ress,” belonging, as will be seen, to a later period--is the ”Grace Abounding,” in which with iniives the story of his early life and his religious history This book, if he had written no other, would stauage of his own or any other age In graphic delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a hardly won freedoht and darkness, of hope and despair, which chequered its course, its s oftinker, as a spiritual history, has never been surpassed Its equal can hardly be found, save perhaps in the ”Confessions of St Augustine” These, however, though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a ion than Bunyan was capable of attaining to His level is a lower one, but on that level Bunyan is without a rival Never has the history of a soul convinced of the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most certain of all possible facts, and of its own i itself, to e, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which ht snap any uage And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth

Bunyan was drawing no i in plain unadorned language what he had felt The experience was a very tremendous reality to him Like Dante, if he had not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he had in very deed traversed ”the Valley of the Shadow of Death,” had heard its ”hideous noises,” and seen ”the Hobgoblins of the Pit” He ”spake what he knew and testified what he had seen” Every sentence breathes the most tremendous earnestness His words are the plainest, drawn from his own homely vernacular He says in his preface, which will a, as one of the most characteristic speciher style, and adorned his narrative more plentifully But he dared not ”God did not play in convincing hi him He himself did not play when he sunk as into a bottoht hold on hi the as it was He that liked it ht produce a better” The rereat fears of perishi+ng for ever, recalled the rereat support frorace God extended to such a wretch as he was” Having thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children, for whose use the as originally composed and to whom it is dedicated,--”those whoet to Faith by his ious history, to ”work diligently and leave no corner unsearched” He would have thehed under every hedge for mercy Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa xlii 6) to reotten the close, the milkhouse, the stable, the barn, where God visited their souls? Let them remember the Word on which the Lord had caused theht, if they were tempted to blaspheme, if they were down in despair, let them remember that it had been so with him, their spiritual father, and that out of them all the Lord had delivered him” This dedication ends thus: ”My dear children, the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness God be o in to possess the land”

This ree, ritten by his own hand in prison” It was first published by George Larkin in London, in 1666, the sixth year of his imprisonment, the year of the Fire of London, about the time that he experienced his first brief release As with ”The Pilgriraphic power in the author's hand after its first appearance The later editions supply so personal facts contained in the narrative, which anting when it first issued fro, and fro drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance fro up bell-ringing at Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green--these and other ive a life and colour to the story, which we should be very sorry to lose, are later additions It is i,” both for the facts of Bunyan's earlier life and for the spiritual experience of which these facts were, in his eyes only the outward frae and boyhood, it carries us down to his e at Elstow, his introduction to Mr Gifford's congregation at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and his subsequent call to the work of thethem, and winds up with an account of his apprehension, exaaol The work concludes with a report of the conversation between his noble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes, narrated in a former chapter, ”taken down,” he says, ”from her own mouth” The whole story is of such sustained interest that our chief regret on finishi+ng it is that it stops where it does, and does not go on e of Bunyan as a uished from an author, and of the circumstances of his life, is seen by a comparison of our acquaintance with his earlier and with his later years When he laid down his pen no one took it up, and beyond two or three facts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little or nothing of all that happened between his final release and his death

The value of the ”Grace Abounding,” however, as a work of experiion may be easily over-estimated It is not es of his spiritual life with real profit To so, the book is more likely to prove injurious than beneficial; it is calculated rather to nourish erous habit of introspection, than to foster the quiet growth of the inner life

Bunyan's unhappywith the Bible as a collection of texts, each of Divine authority and declaring a definiteentirely irrespective of its context, by which the words hide the Word, is also utterly destructive of the true purpose of the Holy Scriptures as a revelation of God's loving and holy erness hich, in his intense self-torture, Bunyan tried to evade the force of those ”fearful and terrible Scriptures” which appeared to seal his condemnation, and to lay hold of the promises to the penitent sinner His te violence to the dogma, then universally accepted and not quite extinct even in our own days, that the authority of the Bible--that ”Divine Library”--collectively taken, belongs to each and every sentence of the Bible taken for and by itself, and that, in Coleridge's words, ”detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes at a millenium from each other, under different dispensations and for different objects,” are to be brought together ”into logical dependency” But ”where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty” The divinely given life in the soul of ical systems Only those, however, who have known by experience the force of Bunyan's spiritual combat, can fully appreciate and profit by Bunyan's narrative He tells us on the title-page that it ritten ”for the support of the weak and te to the chief of sinners” will ever prove most valuable Those for whoe--of coth

As has been said, Bunyan's pen was al the last six years of his imprisonment Only two of his works were produced in this period: his ”Confession of Faith,” and his ”Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith” Both ritten very near the end of his prison life, and published in the same year, 1672, only a week or two before his release The object of the former as, as Dr Brown tells us, ”to vindicate his teaching, and if possible, to secure his liberty” Writing as one ”in bonds for the Gospel,” his professed principles, he asserts, are ”faith, and holiness springing therefrom, with an endeavour so far as in him lies to be at peace with all men” He is ready to hold communion with all whose principles are the same; with all whom he can reckon as children of God With these he will not quarrel about ”things that are circuards as so ”neither the better for having it, nor the worse for having it not” ”He will receive them in the Lord as becolect is theirs not his But with the openly profane and unGodly, though, poor people! they have been christened and take the coe community, he says, that consisted ofto their table; they put theards foroverned in its approach to God by the superstitious inventions of this world He is content to stay in prison even till the rows on his eyelids rather than thus hter-shop by putting out his eyes and co himself to the blind to lead hiuain over the foundation of the principles for which he had thus suffered Those principles he had asserted at his trial, and in the tedious tract of time since then he had in cold blood exaood; nor could he dare to revolt from or deny them on pain of eternal damnation”

The second-named work, the ”Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith,” is entirely controversial The Rev Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had published in the early part of 1671, a book entitled ”The Design of Christianity” A copy having found its way into Bunyan's hands, he was so deeply stirred by what he deeion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks co and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, and a confutation of its teaching Fowler's doctrines as Bunyan understood them--or rather misunderstood them--awoke the worst side of his impetuous nature His vituperation of the author and his book is coarse and un ”closely, privily, and devilishly turned the grace of God into a licentious doctrine, bespattering it with giving liberty to lasciviousness;” and he calls him ”a pretended minister of the Word,” who, in ”his cursed blasphemous book vilely exposes to public view the rottenness of his heart, in principle diametrically opposite to the silorious latitudinarian that can, as to religion, turn and twist like an eel on the angle, or rather like the weathercock that stands on the steeple;” and describes hi the wholesoland” He ”knows him not by face much less his personal practise” He norant Sir Johns who had for a long timent of God, been made the mouth to the people--men of debauched lives who for the love of filthy lucre and the pa of their idle carcases had made shi+pwreck of their for been ejected as a Nonconfor side, and he fears that ”such an unstable weathercock spirit as he had e to the adversary to speak vilifyingly of religion” No excuse can be offered for the coarse violence of Bunyan's language in this book; but it was too ical opponent with vituperation, to push his assertions to the furthest extreme, and make the most unwarrantable deductions froed that Bunyan does not treat Fowler and his doctrines with fairness, and that, if the latter ht to depreciate unduly the sacrifice of the Death of Christ as an expiation for reat a stress on thein the soul after the Fall, Bunyan errs stillthe absolute, irredeerace to work upon, but de an absolutely fresh creation, not a revivification of the Divine nature grievously marred but not annihilated by Adam's sin

A reply to Bunyan's severe strictures was not slow to appear The book bears the title, characteristic of the tone and language of its contents, of ”_Dirt wip't off_; or, a norance, Erroneousness, and most Unchristian and Wicked Spirit of one John Bunyan, Lay-preacher in Bedford” It professes to be written by a friend of Fowler's, but Foas generally accredited with it Its violent tirades against one who, he says, had been ”near these twenty years or longer very infamous in the Town and County of Bedford as a very Pestilent Schis in letting out of prison, and had better clap in gaol again as ”an ined to a merciful oblivion, where we may safely leave them

CHAPTER VIII

Bunyan's protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672 The exact date of his actual liberation is uncertain His pardon under the Great Seal bears date September 13th But we find from the church books that he had been appointed pastor of the congregation to which he belonged as early as the 21st of January of that year, and on the 9th of May his nized by the Governranted to hihead,”

for those ”of the Persuasion coational” His release would therefore seem to have anticipated the formal issue of his pardon by four h his forty-fourth year Sixteen years still reable service in the Master's as brought to a close Of these sixteen years, as has already been ree Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known source from which they can be recovered If he kept any diary it has not been preserved If he wrote letters--and one as looked up to by so large a circle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose pen was so ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written es of the church books during his pastorate are also provokingly barren of record, and little that they contain is in Bunyan's handwriting As Dr Brown has said, ”he seems to have been too busy to keep any records of his busy life” Nor can we fill up the blank from external authorities The references to Bunyan in conteht have expected; certainly far fewer than we could have desired But the little that is recorded is eed in the great work to which he felt God had called hirace,” he had suffered twelve years' incarceration In addition to the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own congregation, he took a general oversight of the villages far and near which had been the scene of his earlierwhenever opportunity offered, and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour,journeys into distant parts of the country for the furtherance of the gospel We find hi also isoccasional visits from him, and that not without peril after the revival of persecution; while the congregations in London had the benefit of his exhortations at stated intervals Alaol, was to ,” by applying to the Govern places in Bedfordshi+re and the neighbouring counties, under the Declaration of Indulgence The still existing list sent in to the authorities by hi, contains the nas, besides ”Josias Roughead's House in his orchard at Bedford” Nineteen of these were in his own native county, three in Northaeshi+re, two in Huntingdonshi+re, and one in Hertfordshi+re The places sought to be licensed were very various, barns,to public companies, &c, but ious coether by a co, Bunyan exercised a quasi-episcopal superintendence, which gained for hiular circuits,--”visitations” we may not improperly term them,--we are told that he exerted himself to relieve the temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,--so soon and so cruelly revived,--ently to the sick and afflicted, and used his influence in reconciling differences between ”professors of the gospel,” and thus prevented the scandal of litigation a period of Bunyan's life was laborious but happy, spent ”honourably and innocently” in writing, preaching, visiting his congregations, and planting daughter churches ”Happy,” writes Mr

Froude, ”in his work; happy in the sense that his influence was daily extending--spreading over his own country and to the far-off settlements of America,--he spent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting Castle out of sight, and the towers andnearer and clearer as the days went on”

With his tiely occupied in his spiritual functions, he could have had but s This, however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure not to have neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extent he should work for his living He had a faation were mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contribute much to their pastor's support Had it been otherwise, Bunyan was the last h never hesitating to avail hiospel,” he, like the apostle of the Gentiles, would never be ashaht ”minister to his own necessities,” and those of his faarded his ministerial work as the chief work of his life ”When he came abroad,” says one who knew hione to wreck, and he had as to theain as if he had newly come into the world But yet he was not destitute of friends, who had all along supported hiood to his fas a little about hiain, he resolved as ive himself wholly up to the service of God” The anony his imprison himself with that little God had bestowed upon him, sequestered himself from all secular employments to follow that of his call to the ift”

of all his property to his wife in 1685, he still describes hih his ministerial duties were his chief concern, he prudently kept fast hold of his handicraft as a certain means of support for himself and those dependent on him On the whole, Bunyan's outward circumstances were probably easy His wants were few and easily supplied ”Having food and raiment” for himself, his wife, and his children, he was ”therewith content” The house in the parish of St Cuthbert's which was his home from his release to his death (unhappily demolished fifty years back), shows the hue, such as labourers now occupy, with three sarret with a dih-pitched tiled roof Behind stood an outbuilding which served as his workshop We have a passing glie home in the diary of Thoford, otherwise unknown to us, had once ”walked into the country” on purpose to see ”the study of John Bunyan,” and the student who made it famous On his arrival the interviewer--as we should now call him--met with a civil and courteous reception froer than those of his prison cell They were liress,” and a few other books, chiefly his oorks, ”all lying on a shelf or shelves” Slight as this sketch is, it puts us er and raphs

Bunyan's celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shut up in gaol, was naturally enhanced by the circuhead's orchard, where he was licensed as a preacher, was ”so thronged the first time he appeared there to edify, that many were constrained to stay without; every one that was of his persuasion striving to partake of his instructions” Wherever he ministered, sometimes, when troublous days returned, in woods, and in dells, and other hiding-places, the announcee and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking frorew the more he was known and reached its clirapher Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, ”when Mr Bunyan preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would be -house could hold I have seen, bylecture by seven o'clock on a working day, in the dark winter time I also computed about three thousand that came to hear hi-house, so that half were fain to go back again for want of room, and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled alet upstairs to his pulpit” This ”town's-end gling long building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is an engraving in Wilkinson's ”Londina Illustrata” Doe's account, however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street - house was not opened for worshi+p till about six months before Bunyan's death, and then for Presbyterian service Other places in London connected with his preaching are Pinners' Hall in Old Broad Street, where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon on ”The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss thereof,” first published in 1683; and Dr Owen's athering-place for titled folk, city ree At earlier tiorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his s by stealth in private houses and other places where he ht hope to escape the lynx-eyed infors that his earliest biographer, the honest coe, Charles Doe, first heard him preach His choice of an Old Testament text at first offended Doe, who had lately coh of the ”historical and doing-for-favour of the Old Testament”

But as he went on he preached ”so New Testament like” that his hearer's prejudices vanished, and he could only ”adive the preacher his affections”

Bunyan was ed to leave Bedford and settle in the metropolis But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear Bedford was the home of his deepest affections It was there the holy words of the poor wo ”as if joy did make them speak,” had first ”made his heart shake,” and shown hier to vital Godliness It was there he had been brought out of darkness into light hi the sa imprisonment had identified hie and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the ties of a conized in Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few ”of the baser sort,”

reverenced hiuide No prospect of a wider field of usefulness, still less of a larger income, could tempt him to desert his ”few sheep in the wilderness” Some of them, it is true, ard sheep, ounded the heart of their pastor by breaking fro very un-lamb-like behaviour He had sometimes to realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion, however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy me his wife and beating her often for very light ht, would the beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary Foskett, for ”privately whispering of a horrid scandal, 'without culler of truth,' against Brother Honeylove” Evil-speaking and backbiting set brother against brother Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan's spirit He himself was not always spared A letter had to be written to Sister Hawthorn ”by way of reproof for her unseeainst Brother Scot and the whole Church” John Wild ”an aboainst ”our beloved Brother Bunyan hih Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by ”hu,” the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by ”a frothy letter,” which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion But though Bunyan's flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as he desired, these were the exception The congregation head's barn , spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think with thankfulness and satisfaction as ”his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing” Frohtly Inducements which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his independent spirit He was not ”a ain for money,” and, writes Doe, ”more than once he refused a more plentiful income to keep his station” As Dr Brown says: ”He was too deeply rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings to think of striking his tent till the coher service for which he had been ripening so long” At Bedford, therefore, he ree in St

Cuthbert's, andand beloved, as Mr Froude writes, ”through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of Popery was bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets, and confident that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforward could only bite his nails at the passing pilgriether undisturbed Once it received a shock in a renewal of his ih only for a brief period, in 1675, to which e the world-fah not actually disturbed ten years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconforh in good sooth--to his wife by deed of gift