’I was of a low and inconsiderable
generation, my father’s house being of that
rank that is meanest and most despised of all families
in the land.’ ’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.’ ’Nevertheless, I
bless God that by this door He brought me into the
world to partake of the grace and life that is by
Christ in His Gospel.’ This is the account
given of himself and his origin by a man whose writings
have for two centuries affected the spiritual opinions
of the English race in every part of the world more
powerfully than any book or books, except the Bible.
John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a
village near Bedford, in the year 1628. It was
a memorable epoch in English history, for in that year
the House of Commons extorted the consent of Charles
I. to the Petition of Right. The stir of politics,
however, did not reach the humble household into which
the little boy was introduced. His father was
hardly occupied in earning bread for his wife and children
as a mender of pots and kettles: a tinker, working
in neighbours’ houses or at home, at such business
as might be brought to him. ’The Bunyans,’
says a friend, ’were of the national religion,
as men of that calling commonly were.’
Bunyan himself, in a passage which has been always
understood to refer to his father, describes him ’as
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.’ In those
days there were no village schools in England; the
education of the poor was an apprenticeship to agriculture
or handicraft; their religion they learnt at home
or in church. Young Bunyan was more fortunate.
In Bedford there was a grammar school, which had been
founded in Queen Mary’s time by the Lord Mayor
of London, Sir William Harper. Hither, when he
was old enough to walk to and fro, over the mile of
road between Elstow and Bedford, the child was sent,
if not to learn Aristotle and Plato, to learn at least
’to read and write according to the rate of
other poor men’s children.’
If religion was not taught at school,
it was taught with some care in the cottages and farmhouses
by parents and masters. It was common in many
parts of England, as late as the end of the last century,
for the farmers to gather their apprentices about
them on Sunday afternoons, and to teach them the Catechism.
Rude as was Bunyan’s home, religious notions
of some kind had been early and vividly impressed upon
him. He caught, indeed, the ordinary habits of
the boys among whom he was thrown. He learnt
to use bad language, and he often lied. When a
child’s imagination is exceptionally active,
the temptations to untruth are correspondingly powerful.
The inventive faculty has its dangers, and Bunyan
was eminently gifted in that way. He was a violent,
passionate boy besides, and thus he says of himself
that for lying and swearing he had no equal, and that
his parents did not sufficiently correct him.
Wickedness, he declares in his own remorseful story
of his early years, became a second nature to him.
But the estimate which a man forms of himself in later
life, if he has arrived at any strong abhorrence of
moral evil, is harsher than others at the time would
have been likely to have formed. Even then the
poor child’s conscience must have been curiously
sensitive, and it revenged itself upon him in singular
tortures.
‘My sins,’ he says, ’did
so offend the Lord that even in my childhood He did
scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did
terrify me with dreadful visions. I have been
in my bed greatly afflicted while asleep, with apprehensions
of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then
thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which
I could never be rid. I was afflicted with thoughts
of the Day of Judgment night and day, trembling at
the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire.’
When, at ten years old, he was running about with his
companions in ‘his sports and childish vanities,’
these terrors continually recurred to him, yet ‘he
would not let go his sins.’
Such a boy required rather to be encouraged
than checked in seeking innocent amusements.
Swearing and lying were definite faults which ought
to have been corrected; but his parents, perhaps, saw
that there was something unusual in the child.
To them he probably appeared not worse than other
boys, but considerably better. They may have thought
it more likely that he would conquer his own bad inclinations
by his own efforts, than that they could mend him
by rough rebukes.
When he left school he would naturally
have been bound apprentice, but his father brought
him up at his own trade. Thus he lived at home,
and grew to manhood there, forming his ideas of men
and things out of such opportunities as the Elstow
neighbourhood afforded.
From the time when the Reformation
brought them a translation of it, the Bible was the
book most read it was often the only book
which was read in humble English homes.
Familiarity with the words had not yet trampled the
sacred writings into practical barrenness. No
doubts or questions had yet risen about the Bible’s
nature or origin. It was received as the authentic
word of God Himself. The Old and New Testament
alike represented the world as the scene of a struggle
between good and evil spirits; and thus every ordinary
incident of daily life was an instance or illustration
of God’s Providence. This was the universal
popular belief, not admitted only by the intellect,
but accepted and realised by the imagination.
No one questioned it, save a few speculative philosophers
in their closets. The statesman in the House
of Commons, the judge on the Bench, the peasant in
a midland village, interpreted literally by this rule
the phenomena which they experienced or saw.
They not only believed that God had miraculously governed
the Israelites, but they believed that as directly
and immediately He governed England in the seventeenth
century. They not only believed that there had
been a witch at Endor, but they believed that there
were witches in their own villages, who had made compacts
with the devil himself. They believed that the
devil still literally walked the earth like a roaring
lion: that he and the evil angels were perpetually
labouring to destroy the souls of men; and that God
was equally busy overthrowing the devil’s work,
and bringing sin and crimes to eventual punishment.
In this light the common events of
life were actually looked at and understood, and the
air was filled with anecdotes so told as to illustrate
the belief. These stories and these experiences
were Bunyan’s early mental food. One of
them, which had deeply impressed the imagination of
the Midland counties, was the story of ‘Old Tod.’
This man came one day into court, in the Summer Assizes
at Bedford, ‘all in a dung sweat,’ to
demand justice upon himself as a felon. No one
had accused him, but God’s judgment was not to
be escaped, and he was forced to accuse himself.
‘My Lord,’ said Old Tod to the judge, ’I
have been a thief from my childhood. I have been
a thief ever since. There has not been a robbery
committed these many years, within so many miles of
this town, but I have been privy to it.’
The judge, after a conference, agreed to indict him
of certain félonies which he had acknowledged.
He pleaded guilty, implicating his wife along with
him, and they were both hanged.
An intense belief in the moral government
of the world creates what it insists upon. Horror
at sin forces the sinner to confess it, and makes
others eager to punish it. ‘God’s
revenge against murder and adultery’ becomes
thus an actual fact, and justifies the conviction in
which it rises. Bunyan was specially attentive
to accounts of judgments upon swearing, to which he
was himself addicted. He tells a story of a man
at Wimbledon, who, after uttering some strange blasphemy,
was struck with sickness, and died cursing. Another
such scene he probably witnessed himself, and never
forgot. An alehouse-keeper in the neighbourhood
of Elstow had a son who was half-witted. The favourite
amusement, when a party was collected drinking, was
for the father to provoke the lad’s temper,
and for the lad to curse his father and wish the devil
had him. The devil at last did have the alehouse-keeper,
and rent and tore him till he died. ‘I,’
says Bunyan, ’was eye and ear witness of what
I here say. I have heard Ned in his roguery cursing
his father, and his father laughing thereat most heartily,
still provoking of Ned to curse that his mirth might
be increased. I saw his father also when he was
possessed. I saw him in one of his fits, and
saw his flesh as it was thought gathered up in an heap
about the bigness of half an egg, to the unutterable
torture and affliction of the old man. There
was also one Freeman, who was more than an ordinary
doctor, sent for to cast out the devil, and I was there
when he attempted to do it. The manner whereof
was this. They had the possessed in an outroom,
and laid him upon his belly upon a form, with his
head hanging down over the form’s end. Then
they bound him down thereto; which done, they set
a pan of coals under his mouth, and put something
therein which made a great smoke by this
means, as it was said, to fetch out the devil.
There they kept the man till he was almost smothered
in the smoke, but no devil came out of him, at which
Freeman was somewhat abashed, the man greatly afflicted,
and I made to go away wondering and fearing.
In a little time, therefore, that which possessed
the man carried him out of the world, according to
the cursed wishes of his son.’
The wretched alehouse-keeper’s
life was probably sacrificed in this attempt to dispossess
the devil. But the incident would naturally leave
its mark on the mind of an impressionable boy.
Bunyan ceased to frequent such places after he began
to lead a religious life. The story, therefore,
most likely belongs to the experiences of his first
youth after he left school; and there may have been
many more of a similar kind, for, except that he was
steady at his trade, he grew up a wild lad, the ringleader
of the village apprentices in all manner of mischief.
He had no books, except a life of Sir Bevis of Southampton,
which would not tend to sober him; indeed, he soon
forgot all that he had learnt at school, and took
to amusements and doubtful adventures, orchard-robbing,
perhaps, or poaching, since he hints that he might
have brought himself within reach of the law.
In the most passionate language of self-abhorrence,
he accuses himself of all manner of sins, yet it is
improbable that he appeared to others what in later
life he appeared to himself. He judged his own
conduct as he believed that it was regarded by his
Maker, by whom he supposed eternal torment to have
been assigned as the just retribution for the lightest
offence. Yet he was never drunk. He who
never forgot anything with which he could charge himself,
would not have passed over drunkenness, if he could
remember that he had been guilty of it; and he distinctly
asserts, also, that he was never in a single instance
unchaste. In our days, a rough tinker who could
say as much for himself after he had grown to manhood,
would be regarded as a model of self-restraint.
If, in Bedford and the neighbourhood, there was no
young man more vicious than Bunyan, the moral standard
of an English town in the seventeenth century must
have been higher than believers in Progress will be
pleased to allow.
He declares that he was without God
in the world, and in the sense which he afterwards
attached to the word this was probably true. But
serious thoughts seldom ceased to work in him.
Dreams only reproduce the forms and feelings with
which the waking imagination is most engaged.
Bunyan’s rest continued to be haunted with the
phantoms which had terrified him when a child.
He started in his sleep, and frightened the family
with his cries. He saw evil spirits in monstrous
shapes and fiends blowing flames out of their nostrils.
‘Once,’ says a biographer, who knew him
well, and had heard the story of his visions from
his own lips, ’he dreamed that he saw the face
of heaven as it were on fire, the firmament crackling
and shivering with the noise of mighty thunder, and
an archangel flew in the midst of heaven, sounding
a trumpet, and a glorious throne was seated in the
east, whereon sat One in brightness like the morning
star. Upon which, he thinking it was the end
of the world, fell upon his knees and said, “Oh,
Lord, have mercy on me! What shall I do?
The Day of Judgment is come and I am not prepared."’
At another time ’he dreamed
that he was in a pleasant place jovial and rioting,
when an earthquake rent the earth, out of which came
bloody flames, and the figures of men tossed up in
globes of fire, and falling down again with horrible
cries and shrieks and exécrations, while devils
mingled among them, and laughed aloud at their torments.
As he stood trembling, the earth sank under him, and
a circle of flames embraced him. But when he
fancied he was at the point to perish, One in shining
white raiment descended and plucked him out of that
dreadful place, while the devils cried after him to
take him to the punishment which his sins had deserved.
Yet he escaped the danger, and leapt for joy when
he awoke and found it was a dream.’
Mr. Southey, who thinks wisely that
Bunyan’s biographers have exaggerated his early
faults, considers that at worst he was a sort of ‘blackguard.’
This, too, is a wrong word. Young village blackguards
do not dream of archangels flying through the midst
of heaven, nor were these imaginations invented afterwards,
or rhetorically exaggerated. Bunyan was undoubtedly
given to story-telling as a boy, and the recollection
of it made him peculiarly scrupulous in his statements
in later life. One trait he mentions of himself
which no one would have thought of who had not experienced
the feeling, yet every person can understand it and
sympathise with it. These spectres and hobgoblins
drove him wild. He says, ’I was so overcome
with despair of life and heaven, that I should often
wish either that there had been no hell, or that I
had been a devil; supposing that they were only tormentors,
and that, if it must needs be that I went thither,
I might rather be a tormentor than tormented myself.’
The visions at last ceased. God
left him to himself, as he puts it, and gave him over
to his own wicked inclinations. He fell, he says,
into all kinds of vice and ungodliness without further
check. The expression is very strong, yet when
we look for particulars we can find only that he was
fond of games which Puritan preciseness disapproved.
He had high animal spirits, and engaged in lawless
enterprises. Once or twice he nearly lost his
life. He is sparing of details of his outward
history, for he regarded it as nothing but vanity;
but his escapes from death were providences, and
therefore he mentions them. He must have gone
to the coast somewhere, for he was once almost drowned
in a creek of the sea. He fell out of a boat into
the river at another time, and it seems that he could
not swim. Afterwards he seized hold of an adder,
and was not bitten by it. These mercies were
sent as warnings, but he says that he was too careless
to profit by them. He thought that he had forgotten
God altogether, and yet it is plain that he had not
forgotten. A bad young man, who has shaken off
religion because it is a restraint, observes with
malicious amusement the faults of persons who make
a profession of religion. He infers that they
do not really believe it, and only differ from their
neighbours in being hypocrites. Bunyan notes this
disposition in his own history of Mr. Badman.
Of himself, he says: ’Though I could sin
with delight and ease, and take pleasure in the villanies
of my companions, even then, if I saw wicked things
done by them that professed goodness, it would make
my spirit tremble. Once, when I was in the height
of my vanity, hearing one swear that was reckoned
a religious man, it made my heart to ache.’
He was now seventeen, and we can form
a tolerably accurate picture of him a tall,
active lad, working as his father’s apprentice,
at his pots and kettles, ignorant of books, and with
no notion of the world beyond what he could learn
in his daily drudgery, and the talk of the alehouse
and the village green; inventing lies to amuse his
companions, and swearing that they were true; playing
bowls and tipcat, ready for any reckless action, and
always a leader in it, yet all the while singularly
pure from the more brutal forms of vice, and haunted
with feverish thoughts, which he tried to forget in
amusements. It has been the fashion to take his
account of himself literally, and represent him as
the worst of reprobates, in order to magnify the effects
of his conversion, and perhaps to make intelligible
to his admiring followers the reproaches which he heaps
upon himself. They may have felt that they could
not be wrong in explaining his own language in the
only sense in which they could attach a meaning to
it. Yet, sinner though he may have been, like
all the rest of us, his sins were not the sins of
coarseness and vulgarity. They were the sins
of a youth of sensitive nature and very peculiar gifts:
gifts which brought special temptations with them,
and inclined him to be careless and desperate, yet
from causes singularly unlike those which are usually
operative in dissipated and uneducated boys.
It was now the year 1645. Naseby
Field was near, and the first Civil War was drawing
to its close. At this crisis Bunyan was, as he
says, drawn to be a soldier; and it is extremely characteristic
of him and of the body to which he belonged, that
he leaves us to guess on which side he served.
He does not tell us himself. His friends in after
life did not care to ask him, or he to inform them,
or else they also thought the matter of too small
importance to be worth mentioning with exactness.
There were two traditions, and his biographers chose
between them as we do. Close as the connection
was in that great struggle between civil and religious
liberty flung as Bunyan was flung into
the very centre of the conflict between the English
people and the Crown and Church and aristocracy victim
as he was himself of intolerance and persecution,
he never but once took any political part, and then
only in signing an address to Cromwell. He never
showed any active interest in political questions;
and if he spoke on such questions at all after the
Restoration, it was to advise submission to the Stuart
Government. By the side of the stupendous issues
of human life, such miserable rights as men
might pretend to in this world were not worth contending
for. The only right of man that he thought
much about, was the right to be eternally damned if
he did not lay hold of grace. King and subject
were alike creatures whose sole significance lay in
their individual immortal souls. Their relations
with one another upon earth were nothing in the presence
of the awful judgment which awaited them both.
Thus whether Bunyan’s brief career in the army
was under Charles or under Fairfax must remain doubtful.
Probability is on the side of his having been with
the Royalists. His father was of ‘the national
religion.’ He himself had as yet no special
convictions of his own. John Gifford, the Baptist
minister at Bedford, had been a Royalist. The
only incident which Bunyan speaks of connected with
his military experience points in the same direction.
‘When I was a soldier,’ he says, ’I
was with others drawn out to go to such a place to
besiege it. But when I was just ready to go, one
of the company desired to go in my room. Coming
to the siege as he stood sentinel he was shot in the
heart with a musket bullet and died.’ Tradition
agrees that the place to which these words refer was
Leicester. Leicester was stormed by the King’s
troops a few days before the battle of Naseby.
It was recovered afterwards by the Parliamentarians,
but on the second occasion there was no fighting, as
it capitulated without a shot being fired. Mr.
Carlyle supposes that Bunyan was not with the attacking
party, but was in the town as one of the garrison,
and was taken prisoner there. But this cannot
be, for he says expressly that he was one of the besiegers.
Legend gathers freely about eminent men, about men
especially who are eminent in religion, whether they
are Catholic or Protestant. Lord Macaulay is not
only positive that the hero of the English Dissenters
fought on the side of the Commonwealth, but he says,
without a word of caution on the imperfection of the
evidence, ’His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges,
and his Captain Credence, are evidently portraits of
which the originals were among those martial saints
who fought and expounded in Fairfax’s army.’
If the martial saints had impressed
Bunyan so deeply, it is inconceivable that he should
have made no more allusion to his military service
than in this brief passage. He refers to the siege
and all connected with it merely as another occasion
of his own providential escapes from death.
Let the truth of this be what it may,
the troop to which he belonged was soon disbanded.
He returned at the end of the year to his tinker’s
work at Elstow, much as he had left it. The saints,
if he had met with saints, had not converted him.
‘I sinned still,’ he says, ’and grew
more and more rebellious against God and careless of
my own salvation.’ An important change
of another kind, however, lay before him. Young
as he was he married. His friends advised it,
for they thought that marriage would make him steady.
The step was less imprudent than it would have been
had Bunyan been in a higher rank of life, or had aimed
at rising into it. The girl whom he chose was
a poor orphan, but she had been carefully and piously
brought up, and from her acceptance of him, something
more may be inferred about his character. Had
he been a dissolute idle scamp, it is unlikely that
a respectable woman would have become his wife when
he was a mere boy. His sins, whatever these were,
had not injured his outward circumstances; it is clear
that all along he worked skilfully and industriously
at his tinkering business. He had none of the
habits which bring men to beggary. From the beginning
of his life to the end of it he was a prudent, careful
man, and, considering the station to which he belonged,
a very successful man.
‘I lighted on a wife,’
he says, ’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.’
There was still an Established Church
in England, and the constitution of it had not yet
been altered. The Presbyterian platform threatened
to take the place of Episcopacy, and soon did take
it; but the clergyman was still a priest and was still
regarded with pious veneration in the country districts
as a semi-supernatural being. The altar yet stood
in its place, the minister still appeared in his surplice,
and the Prayers of the Liturgy continued to be read
or intoned. The old familiar bells, Catholic
as they were in all the emotions which they suggested,
called the congregation together with their musical
peal, though in the midst of triumphant Puritanism.
The ‘Book of Sports,’ which, under an
order from Charles I., had been read regularly in
Church, had in 1644 been laid under a ban; but the
gloom of a Presbyterian Sunday was, is, and for ever
will be detestable to the natural man; and the Elstow
population gathered persistently after service on
the village green for their dancing, and their leaping,
and their archery. Long habit cannot be transformed
in a day by an Edict of Council, and amidst army manifestoes
and battles of Marston Moor, and a king dethroned
and imprisoned, old English life in Bedfordshire preserved
its familiar features. These Sunday sports had
been a special delight to Bunyan, and it is to them
which he refers in the following passage, when speaking
of his persistent wickedness. On his marriage
he became regular and respectable in his habits.
He says, ’I fell in with the religion of the
times to go to church twice a day, very devoutly to
say and sing as the others did, yet retaining my wicked
life. Withal I was so overrun with the spirit
of superstition that I adored with great devotion
even all things, both the high place, priest, clerk,
vestment, service, and what else belonging to the
Church, counting all things holy therein contained,
and especially the priest and clerk most happy and
without doubt greatly blessed. This conceit grew
so strong in my spirit, that had I but seen a priest,
though never so sordid and debauched in his life, I
should find my spirit fall under him, reverence, and
be knit to him. Their name, their garb, and work
did so intoxicate and bewitch me.’
Surely if there were no other evidence,
these words would show that the writer of them had
never listened to the expositions of the martial saints.