The ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’
is the history of the struggle of human nature to
overcome temptation and shake off the bondage of sin,
under the convictions which prevailed among serious
men in England in the seventeenth century. The
allegory is the life of its author cast in an imaginative
form. Every step in Christian’s journey
had been first trodden by Bunyan himself; every pang
of fear and shame, every spasm of despair, every breath
of hope and consolation, which is there described,
is but a reflexion as on a mirror from personal experience.
It has spoken to the hearts of all later generations
of Englishmen because it came from the heart; because
it is the true record of the genuine emotions of a
human soul; and to such a record the emotions of other
men will respond, as one stringed instrument vibrates
responsively to another. The poet’s power
lies in creating sympathy; but he cannot, however
richly gifted, stir feelings which he has not himself
known in all their intensity.
Ut ridentibus arrident
ita flentibus adflent
Humani vultus.
Si vis me flere dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi.
The religious history of man is essentially
the same in all ages. It takes its rise in the
duality of his nature. He is an animal, and as
an animal he desires bodily pleasure and shrinks from
bodily pain. As a being capable of morality,
he is conscious that for him there exists a right
and wrong. Something, whatever that something
may be, binds him to choose one and avoid the other.
This is his religion, his religatio, his obligation,
in the sense in which the Romans, from whom we take
it, used the word; and obligation implies some superior
power to which man owes obedience. The conflict
between his two dispositions agitates his heart, and
perplexes his intellect. To do what the superior
power requires of him, he must thwart his inclinations.
He dreads punishment, if he neglects to do it.
He invents methods by which he can indulge his appetites,
and finds a substitute by which he can propitiate
his invisible ruler or rulers. He offers sacrifices;
he institutes ceremonies and observances. This
is the religion of the body, the religion of fear.
It is what we call superstition. In his nobler
moods he feels that this is but to evade the difficulty.
He perceives that the sacrifice required is the sacrifice
of himself. It is not the penalty for sin which
he must fear, but the sin itself. He must conquer
his own lower nature. He must detach his heart
from his pleasures, and he must love good for its
own sake, and because it is his only real good; and
this is spiritual religion or piety. Between
these two forms of worship of the unseen, the human
race has swayed to and fro from the first moment in
which they learnt to discern between good and evil.
Superstition attracts, because it is indulgent to
immorality by providing means by which God can be pacified.
But it carries its antidote along with it, for it
keeps alive the sense of God’s existence; and
when it has produced its natural effects, when the
believer rests in his observances and lives practically
as if there was no God at all, the conscience again
awakes. Sacrifices and ceremonies become detested
as idolatry, and religion becomes conviction of sin,
a fiery determination to fight with the whole soul
against appetite, vanity, self-seeking, and every mean
propensity which the most sensitive alarm can detect.
The battle unhappily is attended with many vicissitudes.
The victory, though practically it may be won, is
never wholly won. The struggle brings with it
every variety of emotion, alternations of humility
and confidence, despondency and hope. The essence
of it is always the same the effort of
the higher nature to overcome the lower. The form
of it varies from period to period, according to the
conditions of the time, the temperament of different
people, the conception of the character of the Supreme
Power, which the state of knowledge enables men to
form. It will be found even when the puzzled
intellect can see no light in Heaven at all, in the
stern and silent fulfilment of moral duty. It
will appear as enthusiasm; it will appear as asceticism.
It will appear wherever there is courage to sacrifice
personal enjoyment for a cause believed to be holy.
We must all live. We must all, as we suppose,
in one shape or other give account for our actions;
and accounts of the conflict are most individually
interesting when it is an open wrestle with the enemy;
as we find in the penances and austerities of the
Catholic saints, or when the difficulties of belief
are confessed and detailed, as in David’s Psalms,
or in the Epistles of St. Paul. St. Paul, like
the rest of mankind, found a law in his members warring
against the law which was in his heart. The problem
presented to him was how one was to be brought into
subjection to the other, and the solution was by ‘the
putting on of Christ.’ St. Paul’s
mind was charged with the ideas of Oriental and Greek
philosophy then prevalent in the Roman Empire.
His hearers understood him, because he spoke in the
language of the prevailing speculations. We who
have not the clue cannot, perhaps, perfectly understand
him; but his words have been variously interpreted
as human intelligence has expanded, and have formed
the basis of the two great theologies which have been
developed out of Christianity. The Christian religion
taught that evil could not be overcome by natural
human strength. The Son of God had come miraculously
upon earth, had lived a life of stainless purity,
and had been offered as a sacrifice to redeem men conditionally
from the power of sin. The conditions, as English
Protestant theology understands them, are nowhere
more completely represented than in the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress.’ The Catholic theology, rising
as it did in the two centuries immediately following
St. Paul, approached probably nearer to what he really
intended to say.
Catholic theology, as a system, is
a development of Platonism. The Platonists had
discovered that the seat of moral evil was material
substance. In matter, and therefore in the human
body, there was either some inherent imperfection,
or some ingrained perversity and antagonism to good.
The soul so long as it was attached to the body was
necessarily infected by it; and as human life on earth
consisted in the connection of soul and body, every
single man was necessarily subject to infirmity.
Catholic theology accepted the position and formulated
an escape from it. The evil in matter was a fact.
It was explained by Adam’s sin. But there
it was. The taint was inherited by all Adam’s
posterity. The flesh of man was incurably vitiated,
and if he was to be saved a new body must be prepared
for him. This Christ had done. That Christ’s
body was not as other men’s bodies was proved
after his resurrection, when it showed itself independent
of the limitations of extended substance. In
virtue of these mysterious properties it became the
body of the Corporate Church into which believers
were admitted by baptism. The natural body was
not at once destroyed, but a new element was introduced
into it, by the power of which, assisted by penance
and mortification, and the spiritual food of the Eucharist,
the grosser qualities were gradually subdued, and
the corporeal system was changed. Then body and
spirit became alike pure together, and the saint became
capable of obedience, so perfect as not only to suffice
for himself, but to supply the wants of others.
The corruptible put on incorruption. The bodies
of the saints worked miracles, and their flesh was
found unaffected by decay after hundreds of years.
This belief so long as it was sincerely
held issued naturally in characters of extreme beauty;
of beauty so great as almost to demonstrate its truth.
The purpose of it, so far as it affected action, was
self-conquest. Those who try with their whole
souls to conquer themselves find the effort lightened
by a conviction that they are receiving supernatural
assistance; and the form in which the Catholic theory
supposed the assistance to be given was at least perfectly
innocent. But it is in the nature of human speculations,
though they may have been entertained at first in entire
good faith, to break down under trial, if they are
not in conformity with fact. Catholic theology
furnished Europe with a rule of faith and action which
lasted 1500 years. For the last three centuries
of that period it was changing from a religion into
a superstition, till, from being the world’s
guide, it became its scandal. ‘The body
of Christ’ had become a kingdom of this world,
insulting its subjects by the effrontery of its ministers,
the insolence of its pretensions, the mountains of
lies which it was teaching as sacred truths. Luther
spoke; and over half the Western world the Catholic
Church collapsed, and a new theory and Christianity
had to be constructed out of the fragments of it.
There was left behind a fixed belief
in God and in the Bible as His revealed word, in a
future judgment, in the fall of man, in the atonement
made for sin by the death of Christ, and in the new
life which was made possible by His resurrection.
The change was in the conception of the method by
which the atonement was imagined to be efficacious.
The material or sacramental view of it, though it
lingered inconsistently in the mind even of Luther
himself, was substantially gone. New ideas adopted
in enthusiasm are necessarily extreme. The wrath
of God was held to be inseparably and eternally attached
to every act of sin, however infirm the sinner.
That his nature could be changed, and that he could
be mystically strengthened by incorporation with Christ’s
body in the Church was contrary to experience, and
was no longer credible. The conscience of every
man, in the Church or out of it, told him that he
was daily and hourly offending. God’s law
demanded a life of perfect obedience, eternal death
being the penalty of the lightest breach of it.
No human being was capable of such perfect obedience.
He could not do one single act which would endure
so strict a scrutiny. All mankind were thus included
under sin. The Catholic Purgatory was swept away.
It had degenerated into a contrivance for feeding
the priests with money, and it implied that human
nature could in itself be renovated by its own sufferings.
Thus nothing lay before the whole race except everlasting
reprobation. But the door of hope had been opened
on the cross of Christ. Christ had done what
man could never do. He had fulfilled the law
perfectly. God was ready to accept Christ’s
perfect righteousness as a substitute for the righteousness
which man was required to present to him, but could
not. The conditions of acceptance were no longer
sacraments or outward acts, or lame and impotent efforts
after a moral life, but faith in what Christ had done;
a complete self-abnegation, a resigned consciousness
of utter unworthiness, and an unreserved acceptance
of the mercy held out through the Atonement.
It might have been thought that since man was born
so weak that it was impossible for him to do what
the law required, consideration would be had for his
infirmity; that it was even dangerous to attribute
to the Almighty a character so arbitrary as that He
would exact an account from his creatures which the
creature’s necessary inadequacy rendered him
incapable of meeting. But the impetuosity of the
new theology would listen to no such excuses.
God was infinitely pure, and nothing impure could
stand in his sight. Man, so long as he rested
on merit of his own, must be for ever excluded from
his presence. He must accept grace on the terms
on which it was held out to him. Then and then
only God would extend his pity to him. He was
no longer a child of wrath: he was God’s
child. His infirmities remained, but they were
constantly obliterated by the merits of Christ.
And he had strength given to him, partially, at least,
to overcome temptation, under which, but for that
strength, he would have fallen. Though nothing
which he could do could deserve reward, yet he received
grace in proportion to the firmness of his belief;
and his efforts after obedience, imperfect though they
might be, were accepted for Christ’s sake.
A good life, or a constant effort after a good life,
was still the object which a man was bound to labour
after. Though giving no claim to pardon, still
less for reward, it was the necessary fruit of a sense
of what Christ had done, and of love and gratitude
towards him. Good works were the test of saving
faith, and if there were no signs of them, the faith
was barren: it was not real faith at all.
This was the Puritan belief in England
in the seventeenth century. The reason starts
at it, but all religion is paradoxical to reason.
God hates sin, yet sin exists. He is omnipotent,
yet evil is not overcome. The will of man is
free, or there can be no guilt, yet the action of
the will, so far as experience can throw light on its
operation, is as much determined by antecedent causes
as every other natural force. Prayer is addressed
to a Being assumed to be omniscient, who knows better
what is good for us than we can know, who sees our
thought without requiring to hear them in words, whose
will is fixed and cannot be changed. Prayer,
therefore, in the eye of reason is an impertinence.
The Puritan theology is not more open to objection
on the ground of unreasonableness than the Catholic
theology or any other which regards man as answerable
to God for his conduct. We must judge of a creed
by its effects on character, as we judge of the wholesomeness
of food as it conduces to bodily health. And the
creed which swept like a wave through England at that
time, and recommended itself to the noblest and most
powerful intellects, produced also in those who accepted
it a horror of sin, an enthusiasm for justice, purity,
and manliness, which can be paralleled only in the
first age of Christianity. Certainly there never
was such a theory to take man’s conceit out
of him. He was a miserable wretch, so worthless
at his best as to deserve everlasting perdition.
If he was to be saved at all, he could be saved only
by the unmerited grace of God. In himself he
was a child of the devil; and hell, not in metaphor,
but in hard and palpable fact, inevitably waited for
him. This belief, or the affectation of this
belief, continues to be professed, but without a realisation
of its tremendous meaning. The form of words is
repeated by multitudes who do not care to think what
they are saying. Who can measure the effect of
such a conviction upon men who were in earnest about
their souls, who were assured that this account of
their situation was actually true, and on whom, therefore,
it bore with increasing weight in proportion to their
sincerity?
With these few prefatory words, I
now return to Bunyan. He had begun to go regularly
to church, and by Church he meant the Church of England.
The change in the constitution of it, even when it
came, did not much alter its practical character in
the country districts. At Elstow, as we have
seen, there was still a high place; there was still
a liturgy; there was still a surplice. The Church
of England is a compromise between the old theology
and the new. The Bishops have the apostolical
succession, but many of them disbelieve that they derive
any virtue from it. The clergyman is either a
priest who can absolve men from sins, or he is a minister
as in other Protestant communions. The sacraments
are either means of grace, or mere outward signs.
A Christian is either saved by baptism, or saved by
faith, as he pleases to believe. In either case
he may be a member of the Church of England.
The effect of such uncertain utterances is to leave
an impression that in defining such points closely,
theologians are laying down lines of doctrines about
subjects of which they know nothing, that the real
truth of religion lies in what is common to the two
theories, the obligation to lead a moral life; and
to this sensible view of their functions the bishops
and clergy had in fact gradually arrived in the last
century, when the revival of what is called earnestness,
first in the form of Evangelicalism, and then of Anglo-Catholicism,
awoke again the old controversies.
To a man of fervid temperament suddenly
convinced of sin, incapable of being satisfied with
ambiguous answers to questions which mean life or
death to him, the Church of England has little to say.
If he is quiet and reasonable, he finds in it all
that he desires. Enthusiastic ages and enthusiastical
temperaments demand something more complete and consistent.
The clergy under the Long Parliament caught partially
the tone of the prevailing spirit. The reading
of the ‘Book of Sports’ had been interdicted,
and from their pulpits they lectured their congregations
on the ungodliness of the Sabbath amusements.
But the congregations were slow to listen, and the
sports went on.
One Sunday morning, when Bunyan was
at church with his wife, a sermon was delivered on
this subject. It seemed to be especially addressed
to himself, and it much affected him. He shook
off the impression, and after dinner he went as usual
to the green. He was on the point of striking
at a ball when the thought rushed across his mind,
Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have
thy sins and go to hell? He looked up. The
reflection of his own emotion was before him in visible
form. He imagined that he saw Christ himself looking
down at him from the sky. But he concluded that
it was too late for him to repent. He was past
pardon. He was sure to be damned, and he might
as well be damned for many sins as for few. Sin
at all events was pleasant, the only pleasant thing
that he knew, therefore he would take his fill of
it. The sin was the game, and nothing but the
game. He continued to play, but the Puritan sensitiveness
had taken hold of him. An artificial offence
had become a real offence when his conscience was
wounded by it. He was reckless and desperate.
‘This temptation of the devil,’
he says, ’is more usual among poor creatures
than many are aware of. It continued with me about
a month or more; but one day as I was standing at
a neighbour’s shop-window, and there cursing
and swearing after my wonted manner, there sate within
the woman of the house and heard me, who, though she
was a loose and ungodly wretch, protested that I swore
and cursed at such a rate that she trembled to hear
me. I was able to spoil all the youths in a whole
town. At this reproof I was silenced and put to
secret shame, and that too, as I thought, before the
God of Heaven. I stood hanging down my head and
wishing that I might be a little child that my father
might learn me to speak without this wicked sin of
swearing, for, thought I, I am so accustomed to it
that it is vain to think of a reformation.’
These words have been sometimes taken
as a reflection on Bunyan’s own father, as if
he had not sufficiently checked the first symptoms
of a bad habit. If this was so, too much may
be easily made of it. The language in the homes
of ignorant workmen is seldom select. They have
not a large vocabulary, and the words which they use
do not mean what they seem to mean. But so sharp
and sudden remorse speaks remarkably for Bunyan himself.
At this time he could have been barely twenty years
old, and already he was quick to see when he was doing
wrong, to be sorry for it, and to wish that he could
do better. Vain the effort seemed to him, yet
from that moment ’he did leave off swearing
to his own great wonder,’ and he found ’that
he could speak better and more pleasantly than he
did before.’
It lies in the nature of human advance
on the road of improvement, that, whatever be a man’s
occupation, be it handicraft, or art, or knowledge,
or moral conquest of self, at each forward step which
he takes he grows more conscious of his shortcomings.
It is thus with his whole career, and those who rise
highest are least satisfied with themselves.
Very simply Bunyan tells the story of his progress.
On his outward history, on his business and his fortunes
with it, he is totally silent. Worldly interests
were not worth mentioning. He is solely occupied
with his rescue from spiritual perdition. Soon
after he had profited by the woman’s rebuke,
he fell in ’with a poor man that made profession
of religion and talked pleasantly of the Scriptures.’
Earnestness in such matters was growing common among
English labourers. Under his new friend’s
example, Bunyan ’betook him to the Bible, and
began to take great pleasure in reading it,’
but especially, as he admits frankly (and most people’s
experience will have been the same), ’especially
the historical part; for as for St. Paul’s Epistles
and Scriptures of that nature, he could not away with
them, being as yet ignorant of the corruption of his
nature, or of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to
save him.’
Not as yet understanding these mysteries,
he set himself to reform his life. He became
strict with himself in word and deed. ’He
set the Commandments before him for his way to Heaven.’
’He thought if he could but keep them pretty
well he should have comfort.’ If now and
then he broke one of them, he suffered in conscience;
he repented of his fault, he made good resolutions
for the future and struggled to carry them out.
’His neighbours took him to be a new man, and
marvelled at the alteration.’ Pleasure of
any kind, even the most innocent, he considered to
be a snare to him, and he abandoned it; he had been
fond of dancing, but he gave it up. Music and
singing he parted with, though it distressed him to
leave them. Of all amusements, that in which
he had most delighted had been in ringing the bells
in Elstow church tower. With his bells he could
not part all at once. He would no longer ring
himself: but when his friends were enjoying themselves
with the ropes, he could not help going now and then
to the tower door to look on and listen; but he feared
at last that the steeple might fall upon him and kill
him. We call such scruples in these days exaggerated
and fantastic. We are no longer in danger ourselves
of suffering from similar emotions. Whether we
are the better for having got rid of them, will be
seen in the future history of our race.
Notwithstanding his struggles and
his sacrifices, Bunyan found that they did not bring
him the peace which he expected. A man can change
his outward conduct, but if he is in earnest he comes
in sight of other features in himself which he cannot
change so easily; the meannesses, the paltrinesses,
the selfishnesses which haunt him in spite of himself,
which start out upon him at moments the most unlocked
for, which taint the best of his actions and make him
loathe and hate himself. Bunyan’s life
was now for so young a person a model of correctness;
but he had no sooner brought his actions straight than
he discovered that he was admiring and approving of
himself. No situation is more humiliating, none
brings with it a feeling of more entire hopelessness.
‘All this while,’ he says, ’I knew
not Christ, nor grace, nor faith, nor hope, and had
I then died my state had been most fearful. I
was but a poor painted hypocrite, going about to establish
my own righteousness.’
Like his own Pilgrim, he had the burden
on his back of his conscious unworthiness. How
was he to be rid of it?
’One day in a street in Bedford,
as he was at work in his calling, he fell in with
three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun
talking about the things of God.’ He was
himself at that time ’a brisk talker’
about the matters of religion, and he joined these
women. Their expressions were wholly unintelligible
to him. ’They were speaking of the wretchedness
of their own hearts, of their unbelief, of their miserable
state. They did contemn, slight, and abhor their
own righteousness as filthy and insufficient to do
them any good. They spoke of a new birth and
of the work of God in their hearts, which comforted
and strengthened them against the temptations of the
Devil.’
The language of the poor women has
lost its old meaning. They themselves, if they
were alive, would not use it any longer. The
conventional phrases of Evangelical Christianity ring
untrue in a modern ear like a cracked bell. We
have grown so accustomed to them as a cant, that we
can hardly believe that they ever stood for sincere
convictions. Yet these forms were once alive with
the profoundest of all moral truths; a truth not of
a narrow theology, but which lies at the very bottom
of the well, at the fountain-head of human morality;
namely, that a man who would work out his salvation
must cast out self, though he rend his heart-strings
in doing it; not love of self-indulgence only, but
self-applause, self-confidence, self-conceit and vanity,
desire or expectation of reward; self in all the subtle
ingenuities with which it winds about the soul.
In one dialect or another, he must recognise that
he is himself a poor creature not worth thinking of,
or he will not take the first step towards excellence
in any single thing which he undertakes.
Bunyan left the women and went about
his work, but their talk went with him. ‘He
was greatly affected.’ ’He saw that
he wanted the true tokens of a godly man.’
He sought them out and spoke with them again and again.
He could not stay away; and the more he went the more
he questioned his condition.
‘I found two things,’
he says, ’at which I did sometimes marvel, considering
what a blind ungodly wretch but just before I was;
one a great softness and tenderness of heart, which
caused me to fall under the conviction of what, by
Scripture, they asserted; the other a great bending
of my mind to a continual meditating on it. My
mind was now like a horse-leech at the vein, still
crying Give, give; so fixed on eternity and on the
kingdom of heaven (though I knew but little), that
neither pleasure, nor profit, nor persuasion, nor threats
could loosen it or make it let go its hold. It
is in very deed a certain truth; it would have been
then as difficult for me to have taken my mind from
heaven to earth, as I have found it often since to
get it from earth to heaven.’
Ordinary persons who are conscious
of trying to do right, who resist temptations, are
sorry when they slip, and determine to be more on
their guard for the future, are well contented with
the condition which they have reached. They are
respectable, they are right-minded in common things,
they fulfil their every-day duties to their families
and to society with a sufficiency for which the world
speaks well of them, as indeed it ought to speak;
and they themselves acquiesce in the world’s
verdict. Any passionate agitation about the state
of their souls they consider unreal and affected.
Such men may be amiable in private life, good neighbours,
and useful citizens; but be their talents what they
may, they could not write a ’Pilgrim’s
Progress,’ or ever reach the Delectable Mountains,
or even be conscious that such mountains exist.
Bunyan was on the threshold of the
higher life. He knew that he was a very poor
creature. He longed to rise to something better.
He was a mere ignorant, untaught mechanic. He
had not been to school with Aristotle and Plato.
He could not help himself or lose himself in the speculations
of poets and philosophers. He had only the Bible,
and studying the Bible he found that the wonder-working
power in man’s nature was Faith. Faith!
What was it? What did it mean? Had he faith?
He was but ‘a poor sot,’ and yet he thought
that he could not be wholly without it. The Bible
told him that if he had faith as a grain of mustard
seed, he could work miracles. He did not understand
Oriental metaphors; here was a simple test which could
be at once applied.
‘One day,’ he writes,
’as I was between Elstow and Bedford, the temptation
was hot upon me to try if I had faith by doing some
miracle. I must say to the puddles that were in
the horse-pads, “be dry,” and truly at
one time I was agoing to say so indeed. But just
as I was about to speak, the thought came into my
mind: Go under yonder hedge first and pray that
God would make you able. But when I had concluded
to pray, this came hot upon me, that if I prayed and
came again and tried to do it, and yet did nothing
notwithstanding, then be sure I had no faith but was
a castaway and lost. Nay, thought I, if it be
so, I will never try it yet, but will stay a little
longer. Thus was I tossed between the Devil and
my own ignorance, and so perplexed at some times that
I could not tell what to do.’
Common sense will call this disease,
and will think impatiently that the young tinker would
have done better to attend to his business. But
it must be observed that Bunyan was attending to his
business, toiling all the while with grimed hands
over his pots and kettles. No one ever complained
that the pots and kettles were ill-mended. It
was merely that being simple-minded, he found in his
Bible that besides earning his bread he had to save
or lose his soul. Having no other guide he took
its words literally, and the directions puzzled him.
He grew more and more unhappy more
lowly in his own eyes
’Wishing him like to
those more rich in hope’
like the women who were so far beyond
him on the heavenly road. He was a poet without
knowing it, and his gifts only served to perplex him
further. His speculations assumed bodily forms
which he supposed to be actual visions. He saw
his poor friends sitting on the sunny side of a high
mountain refreshing themselves in the warmth, while
he was shivering in frost and snow and mist.
The mountain was surrounded by a wall, through which
he tried to pass, and searched long in vain for an
opening through it. At last he found one, very
straight and narrow, through which he struggled after
desperate efforts. ‘It showed him,’
he said, ’that none could enter into life but
those who were in downright earnest, and unless they
left the wicked world behind them, for here was only
room for body and soul, but not for body and soul
and sin.’ The vision brought him no comfort,
for it passed away and left him still on the wrong
side: a little comfortable self-conceit would
have set him at rest. But, like all real men,
Bunyan had the worst opinion of himself. He looked
at his Bible again. He found that he must be
elected. Was he elected? He could as little
tell as whether he had faith. He knew that he
longed to be elected, but ’the Scripture trampled
on his desire,’ for it said, ’It is not
of him that willeth, or of him that runneth, but of
God that sheweth mercy;’ therefore, unless God
had chosen him his labour was in vain. The Devil
saw his opportunity; the Devil among his other attributes
must have possessed that of omnipresence, for whenever
any human soul was in straits, he was personally at
hand to take advantage of it.
‘It may be that you are not
elected,’ the tempter said to Bunyan. ’It
may be so indeed,’ thought he. ‘Why
then,’ said Satan, ’you had as good leave
off and strive no farther; for if indeed you should
not be elected and chosen of God, there is no talk
of your being saved.’
A comforting text suggested itself.
’Look at the generations of old; did any ever
trust in the Lord and was confounded?’ But these
exact words, unfortunately, were only to be found
in the Apocrypha. And there was a further distressing
possibility, which has occurred to others besides
Bunyan. Perhaps the day of grace was passed.
It came on him one day as he walked in the country
that perhaps those good people in Bedford were all
that the Lord would save in those parts, and that
he came too late for the blessing. True, Christ
had said, ’Compel them to come in, for yet there
is room.’ It might be ’that when Christ
spoke those words,’ He was thinking of him him
among the rest that he had chosen, and had meant to
encourage him. But Bunyan was too simply modest
to gather comfort from such aspiring thoughts.
Be desired to be converted, craved for it, longed
for it with all his heart and soul. ‘Could
it have been gotten for gold,’ he said, ’what
would I not have given for it. Had I had a whole
world it had all gone ten thousand times over for
this, that my soul might have been in a converted
state. But, oh! I was made sick by that saying
of Christ: “He called to Him whom He would,
and they came to Him.” I feared He would
not call me.’
Election, conversion, day of grace,
coming to Christ, have been pawed and fingered by
unctuous hands for now two hundred years. The
bloom is gone from the flower. The plumage, once
shining with hues direct from heaven, is soiled and
bedraggled. The most solemn of all realities
have been degraded into the passwords of technical
theology. In Bunyan’s day, in camp and
council chamber, in High Courts of Parliament, and
among the poor drudges in English villages, they were
still radiant with spiritual meaning. The dialect
may alter; but if man is more than a brief floating
bubble on the eternal river of time; if there be really
an immortal part of him which need not perish; and
if his business on earth is to save it from perishing,
he will still try to pierce the mountain barrier.
He will still find the work as hard as Bunyan found
it. We live in days of progress and enlightenment;
nature on a hundred sides has unlocked her storehouses
of knowledge. But she has furnished no ‘open
sesame’ to bid the mountain gate fly wide which
leads to conquest of self. There is still no
passage there for ‘body and soul and sin.’