The women in Bedford, to whom Bunyan
had opened his mind, had been naturally interested
in him. Young and rough as he was, he could not
have failed to impress anyone who conversed with him
with a sense that he was a remarkable person.
They mentioned him to Mr. Gifford, the minister of
the Baptist Church at Bedford. John Gifford had,
at the beginning of the Civil War, been a loose young
officer in the king’s army. He had been
taken prisoner when engaged in some exploit which
was contrary to the usages of war. A court-martial
had sentenced him to death, and he was to have been
shot in a few hours, when he broke out of his prison
with his sister’s help, and, after various adventures,
settled at Bedford as a doctor. The near escape
had not sobered him. He led a disorderly life,
drinking and gambling, till the loss of a large sum
of money startled him into seriousness. In the
language of the time he became convinced of sin, and
joined the Baptists, the most thorough-going and consistent
of all the Protestant sects. If the Sacrament
of Baptism is not a magical form, but is a personal
act, in which the baptised person devotes himself to
Christ’s service, to baptise children at an
age when they cannot understand what they are doing
may well seem irrational and even impious.
Gifford, who was now the head of the
Baptist community in the town, invited Bunyan to his
house, and explained the causes of his distress to
him. He was a lost sinner. It was true that
he had parted with his old faults, and was leading
a new life. But his heart was unchanged; his
past offences stood in record against him. He
was still under the wrath of God, miserable in his
position, and therefore miserable in mind. He
must become sensible of his lost state, and lay hold
of the only remedy, or there was no hope for him.
There was no difficulty in convincing
Bunyan that he was in a bad way. He was too well
aware of it already. In a work of fiction, the
conviction would be followed immediately by consoling
grace. In the actual experience of a living human
soul, the medicine operates less pleasantly.
‘I began,’ he says, ’to
see something of the vanity and inward wretchedness
of my wicked heart, for as yet I knew no great matter
therein. But now it began to be discovered unto
me, and to work for wickedness as it never did before.
Lusts and corruptions would strongly put themselves
forth within me in wicked thoughts and desires which
I did not regard before. Whereas, before, my soul
was full of longing after God; now my heart began
to hanker after every foolish vanity.’
Constitutions differ. Mr. Gifford’s
treatment, if it was ever good for any man, was too
sharp for Bunyan. The fierce acid which had been
poured into his wounds set them all festering again.
He frankly admits that he was now farther from conversion
than before. His heart, do what he would, refused
to leave off desiring forbidden pleasures, and while
this continued, he supposed that he was still under
the law, and must perish by it. He compared himself
to the child who, as he was being brought to Christ,
was thrown down by the devil and wallowed foaming.
A less healthy nature might have been destroyed by
these artificially created and exaggerated miseries.
He supposed he was given over to unbelief and wickedness,
and yet he relates with touching simplicity:
’As to the act of sinning I
was never more tender than now. I durst not take
up a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw,
for my conscience now was sore and would smart at
every touch. I could not tell how to speak my
words for fear I should misplace them.’
But the care with which he watched
his conduct availed him nothing. He was on a
morass ‘that shook if he did but stir,’
and he was ’there left both of God and Christ
and the Spirit, and of all good things.’
’Behind him lay the faults of his childhood and
youth, every one of which he believed to be recorded
against him. Within were his disobedient inclinations,
which he conceived to be the presence of the Devil
in his heart. If he was to be presented clean
of stain before God he must have a perfect righteousness
which was to be found only in Christ, and Christ had
rejected him. ’My original and inward pollution,’
he writes, ’was my plague and my affliction.
I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad,
and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too.
I thought every one had a better heart than I had.
I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought
none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward
wickedness and pollution. Sure, thought I, I
am given up to the Devil and to a reprobate mind; and
thus I continued for a long while, even for some years
together.’
And all the while the world went on
so quietly; these things over which Bunyan was so
miserable not seeming to trouble anyone except himself;
and, as if they had no existence except on Sundays
and in pious talk. Old people were hunting after
the treasures of this life, as if they were never
to leave the earth. Professors of religion complained
when they lost fortune or health; what were fortune
and health to the awful possibilities which lay beyond
the grave? To Bunyan the future life of Christianity
was a reality as certain as the next day’s sunrise;
and he could have been happy on bread and water if
he could have felt himself prepared to enter it.
Every created being seemed better off than he was.
He was sorry that God had made him a man. He
’blessed the condition of the birds, beasts,
and fishes, for they had not a sinful nature.
They were not obnoxious to the wrath of God.
They were not to go to hell-fire after death.’
He recalled the texts which spoke of Christ and forgiveness.
He tried to persuade himself that Christ cared for
him. He could have talked of Christ’s love
and mercy ’even to the very crows which sate
on the ploughed land before him.’ But he
was too sincere to satisfy himself with formulas and
phrases. He could not, he would not, profess to
be convinced that things would go well with him when
he was not convinced. Cold spasms of doubt laid
hold of him doubts, not so much of his own
salvation, as of the truth of all that he had been
taught to believe; and the problem had to be fought
and grappled with, which lies in the intellectual
nature of every genuine man, whether he be an Aeschylus
or a Shakespeare, or a poor working Bedfordshire mechanic.
No honest soul can look out upon the world and see
it as it really is, without the question rising in
him whether there be any God that governs it at all.
No one can accept the popular notion of heaven and
hell as actually true, without being as terrified
as Bunyan was. We go on as we do, and attend
to our business and enjoy ourselves, because the words
have no real meaning to us. Providence in its
kindness leaves most of us unblessed or uncursed with
natures of too fine a fibre.
Bunyan was hardly dealt with.
‘Whole floods of blasphemies,’ he says,
’against God, Christ, and the Scriptures were
poured upon my spirit; questions against the very
being of God and of his only beloved Son, as whether
there was in truth a God or Christ, or no, and whether
the Holy Scriptures were not rather a fable and cunning
story than the holy and pure Word of God.’
‘How can you tell,’ the
tempter whispered, ’but that the Turks have as
good a Scripture to prove their Mahomet the Saviour,
as we have to prove our Jesus is? Could I think
that so many tens of thousands in so many countries
and kingdoms should be without the knowledge of the
right way to heaven, if there were indeed a heaven,
and that we who lie in a corner of the earth, should
alone be blessed therewith. Every one doth think
his own religion the rightest, both Jews, Moors, and
Pagans; and how if all our faith, and Christ, and Scripture
should be but “a think so” too.’
St. Paul spoke positively. Bunyan saw shrewdly
that on St. Paul the weight of the whole Christian
theory really rested. But ’how could he
tell but that St. Paul, being a subtle and cunning
man, might give himself up to deceive with strong delusions?’
‘He was carried away by such thoughts as by a
whirlwind.’
His belief in the active agency of
the Devil in human affairs, of which he supposed that
he had witnessed instances, was no doubt a great help
to him. If he could have imagined that his doubts
or misgivings had been suggested by a desire for truth,
they would have been harder to bear. More than
ever he was convinced that he was possessed by the
devil. He ’compared himself to a child carried
off by a gipsy.’ ‘Kick sometimes
I did,’ he says, ’and scream, and cry,
but yet I was as bound in the wings of temptation,
and the wind would bear me away.’ ’I
blessed the dog and toad, and counted the condition
of everything that God had made far better than this
dreadful state of mine. The dog or horse had
no soul to perish under the everlasting weight of
hell for sin, as mine was like to do.’
Doubts about revelation and the truth
of Scripture were more easy to encounter then than
they are at present. Bunyan was protected by want
of learning, and by a powerful predisposition to find
the objections against the credibility of the Gospel
history to be groundless. Critical investigation
had not as yet analysed the historical construction
of the sacred books, and scepticism, as he saw it in
people round him, did actually come from the devil,
that is from a desire to escape the moral restraints
of religion. The wisest, noblest, best instructed
men in England, at that time regarded the Bible as
an authentic communication from God, and as the only
foundation for law and civil society. The masculine
sense and strong modest intellect of Bunyan ensured
his acquiescence in an opinion so powerfully supported.
Fits of uncertainty recurred even to the end of his
life; it must be so with men who are honestly in earnest;
but his doubts were of course only intermittent, and
his judgment was in the main satisfied that the Bible
was, as he had been taught, the Word of God.
This, however, helped him little; for in the Bible
he read his own condemnation. The weight which
pressed him down was the sense of his unworthiness.
What was he that God should care for him? He fancied
that he heard God saying to the angels, ’This
poor, simple wretch doth hanker after me, as if I
had nothing to do with my mercy but to bestow it on
such as he. Poor fool, how art thou deceived!
It is not for such as thee to have favour with the
Highest.’
Miserable as he was, he clung to his
misery as the one link which connected him with the
object of his longings. If he had no hope of
heaven, he was at least distracted that he must lose
it. He was afraid of dying, yet he was still
more afraid of continuing to live; lest the impression
should wear away through time, and occupation and other
interests should turn his heart away to the world,
and thus his wounds might cease to pain him.
Readers of the ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’ sometimes ask with wonder, why, after
Christian had been received into the narrow gate, and
had been set forward upon his way, so many trials
and dangers still lay before him. The answer
is simply that Christian was a pilgrim, that the journey
of life still lay before him, and at every step temptations
would meet him in new, unexpected shapes. St.
Anthony in his hermitage was beset by as many fiends
as had ever troubled him when in the world. Man’s
spiritual existence is like the flight of a bird in
the air; he is sustained only by effort, and when
he ceases to exert himself he falls. There are
intervals, however, of comparative calm, and to one
of these the storm-tossed Bunyan was now approaching.
He had passed through the Slough of Despond.
He had gone astray after Mr. Legality, and the rocks
had almost overwhelmed him. Evangelist now found
him and put him right again, and he was to be allowed
a breathing space at the Interpréter’s
house. As he was at his ordinary daily work his
mind was restlessly busy. Verses of Scripture
came into his head, sweet while present, but like
Peter’s sheet caught up again into heaven.
We may have heard all our lives of Christ. Words
and ideas with which we have been familiar from childhood
are trodden into paths as barren as sand. Suddenly,
we know not how, the meaning flashes upon us.
The seed has found its way into some corner of our
minds where it can germinate. The shell breaks,
the cotyledons open, and the plant of faith is alive.
So it was now to be with Bunyan.
‘One day,’ he says, ’as
I was travelling into the country, musing on the wickedness
of my heart, and considering the enmity that was in
me to God, the Scripture came into my mind, “He
hath made peace through the blood of His cross.”
I saw that the justice of God and my sinful soul could
embrace and kiss each other. I was ready to swoon,
not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and
peace.’ Everything became clear: the
Gospel history, the birth, the life, the death of the
Saviour; how gently he gave himself to be nailed on
the cross for his (Bunyan’s) sins. ‘I
saw Him in the spirit,’ he goes on, ’a
Man on the right hand of the Father, pleading for
me, and have seen the manner of His coming from Heaven
to judge the world with glory.’
The sense of guilt which had so oppressed
him was now a key to the mystery. ‘God,’
he says, ’suffered me to be afflicted with temptations
concerning these things, and then revealed them to
me.’ He was crushed to the ground by the
thought of his wickedness; ’the Lord showed him
the death of Christ, and lifted the weight away.’
Now he thought he had a personal evidence
from Heaven that he was really saved. Before
this, he had lain trembling at the mouth of hell;
now he was so far away from it that he could scarce
tell where it was. He fell in at this time with
a copy of Luther’s commentary on the Epistle
to the Galatians, ‘so old that it was like to
fall to pieces.’ Bunyan found in it the
exact counterpart of his own experience: ’of
all the books that he had ever met with, it seemed
to him the most fit for a wounded conscience.’
Everything was supernatural with him:
when a bad thought came into his mind, it was the
devil that put it there. These breathings of peace
he regarded as the immediate voice of his Saviour.
Alas! the respite was but short. He had hoped
that his troubles were over, when the tempter came
back upon him in the most extraordinary form which
he had yet assumed, Bunyan had himself left the door
open; the evil spirits could only enter ‘Mansoul’
through the owner’s negligence, but once in,
they could work their own wicked will. How it
happened will be told afterwards. The temptation
itself must be described first. Never was a nature
more perversely ingenious in torturing itself.
He had gained Christ, as he called
it. He was now tempted ’to sell and part
with this most blessed Christ, to exchange Him for
the things of this life for anything.’
If there had been any real prospect of worldly advantage
before Bunyan, which he could have gained by abandoning
his religious profession, the words would have had
a meaning; but there is no hint or trace of any prospect
of the kind; nor in Bunyan’s position could
there have been. The temptation, as he called
it, was a freak of fancy: fancy resenting the
minuteness with which he watched his own emotions.
And yet he says, ’It lay upon me for a year,
and did follow me so continually that I was not rid
of it one day in a month, sometimes not an hour in
many days together, unless when I was asleep.
I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop
a stick, or cast my eye to look on this or that, but
still the temptation would come, “Sell Christ
for this, sell Him for that! Sell Him! Sell
Him!"’
He had been haunted before with a
notion that he was under a spell; that he had been
fated to commit the unpardonable sin; and he was now
thinking of Judas, who had been admitted to Christ’s
intimacy, and had then betrayed him. Here it
was before him the very thing which he had
so long dreaded. If his heart did but consent
for a moment, the deed was done. His doom had
overtaken him. He wrestled with the thought as
it rose, thrust it from him ‘with his hands and
elbows,’ body and mind convulsed together in
a common agony. As fast as the destroyer said,
‘Sell Him,’ Bunyan said, ’I will
not; I will not; I will not, not for thousands, thousands,
thousands of worlds!’ One morning as he lay in
his bed, the voice came again, and would not be driven
away. Bunyan fought against it, till he was out
of breath. He fell back exhausted, and without
conscious action of his will, the fatal sentence passed
through his brain, ‘Let Him go if He will.’
That the ‘selling Christ’
was a bargain in which he was to lose all and receive
nothing is evident from the form in which he was overcome.
Yet if he had gained a fortune by fraud or forgery,
he could not have been more certain that he had destroyed
himself.
Satan had won the battle, and he,
’as a bird shot from a tree, had fallen into
guilt and despair.’ He got out of bed, ’and
went moping into the fields,’ where he wandered
for two hours, ’as a man bereft of life, and
now past recovering,’ ‘bound over to eternal
punishment.’ He shrank under the hedges,
’in guilt and sorrow, bemoaning the hardness
of his fate.’ In vain the words now came
back that had so comforted him, ‘The blood of
Christ cleanseth from all sin.’ They had
no application to him. He had acquired his birthright,
but, like Esau, he had sold it, and could not any
more find place for repentance. True it was said
that ’all manner of sins and blasphemies should
be forgiven unto men,’ but only such sins and
blasphemies as had been committed in the natural state.
Bunyan had received grace, and after receiving it,
had sinned against the Holy Ghost.
It was done, and nothing could undo
it. David had received grace, and had committed
murder and adultery after it. But murder and adultery,
bad as they might be, were only transgressions of the
law of Moses. Bunyan had sinned against the Mediator
himself, ’he had sold his Saviour.’
One sin, and only one there was which could not be
pardoned, and he had been guilty of it. Peter
had sinned against grace, and even after he had been
warned. Peter, however, had but denied his Master.
Bunyan had sold him. He was no David or Peter,
he was Judas. It was, very hard. Others
naturally as bad as he had been saved. Why had
he been picked out to be made a Son of Perdition?
A Judas! Was there any point in which he was
better than Judas? Judas had sinned with deliberate
purpose: he ‘in a fearful hurry,’
and ’against prayer and striving.’
But there might be more ways than one of committing
the unpardonable sin, and there might be degrees of
it. It was a dreadful condition. The old
doubts came back.
‘I was now ashamed,’ he
says, ’that I should be like such an ugly man
as Judas. I thought how loathsome I should be
to all the saints at the Day of Judgment. I was
tempted to content myself by receiving some false
opinion, as that there should be no such thing as the
Day of Judgment, that we should not rise again, that
sin was no such grievous thing, the tempter suggesting
that if these things should be indeed true, yet to
believe otherwise would yield me ease for the present.
If I must perish, I need not torment myself beforehand.’
Judas! Judas! was now for ever
before his eyes. So identified he was with Judas
that he felt at times as if his breastbone was bursting.
A mark like Cain’s was on him. In vain
he searched again through the catalogue of pardoned
sinners. Manasseh had consulted wizards and familiar
spirits. Manasseh had burnt his children in the
fire to devils. He had found mercy; but, alas!
Manasseh’s sins had nothing of the nature of
selling the Saviour. To have sold the Saviour
’was a sin bigger than the sins of a country,
of a kingdom, or of the whole world not
all of them together could equal it.’
His brain was overstrained, it will
be said. Very likely. It is to be remembered,
however, who and what he was, and that he had overstrained
it in his eagerness to learn what he conceived his
Maker to wish him to be a form of anxiety
not common in this world. The cure was as remarkable
as the disorder. One day he was ‘in a good
man’s shop,’ still ‘afflicting himself
with self-abhorrence,’ when something seemed
to rush in through an open window, and he heard a voice
saying, ’Didst ever refuse to be justified by
the blood of Christ?’ Bunyan shared the belief
of his time. He took the system of things as the
Bible represented it; but his strong common sense
put him on his guard against being easily credulous.
He thought at the time that the voice was supernatural.
After twenty years he said modestly that he ’could
not make a judgment of it.’ The effect,
any way, was as if an angel had come to him and had
told him that there was still hope. Hapless as
his condition was, he might still pray for mercy, and
might possibly find it. He tried to pray, and
found it very hard. The devil whispered again
that God was tired of him; God wanted to be rid of
him and his importunities, and had, therefore, allowed
him to commit this particular sin that he might hear
no more of him. He remembered Esau, and thought
that this might be too true: ’the saying
about Esau was a flaming sword barring the way of
the tree of life to him.’ Still he would
not give in. ‘I can but die,’ he said
to himself, ’and if it must be so, it shall
be said that such an one died at the feet of Christ
in prayer.’
He was torturing himself with illusions.
Most of the saints in the Catholic Calendar have done
the same. The most remorseless philosopher can
hardly refuse a certain admiration for this poor uneducated
village lad struggling so bravely in the theological
spider’s web. The ‘Professors’
could not comfort him, having never experienced similar
distresses in their own persons. He consulted
‘an Antient Christian,’ telling him that
he feared that he had sinned against the Holy Ghost,
The Antient Christian answered gravely that he thought
so too. The devil having him at advantage, began
to be witty with him. The devil suggested that
as he had offended the second or third Person of the
Trinity, he had better pray the Father to mediate for
him with Christ and the Holy Spirit. Then the
devil took another turn. Christ, he said, was
really sorry for Bunyan, but his case was beyond remedy.
Bunyan’s sin was so peculiar, that it was not
of the nature of those for which He had bled and died,
and had not, therefore, been laid to His charge.
To justify Bunyan he must come down and die again,
and that was not to be thought of. ‘Oh!’
exclaimed the unfortunate victim, ’the unthought-of
imaginations, frights, fears, and terrors, that are
effected by a thorough application of guilt (to a spirit)
that is yielded to desperation. This is the man
that hath his dwelling among the tombs.’
Sitting in this humour on a settle
in the street at Bedford, he was pondering over his
fearful state. The sun in heaven seemed to grudge
its light to him. ’The stones in the street
and the tiles on the houses did bend themselves against
him.’ Each crisis in Bunyan’s mind
is always framed in the picture of some spot where
it occurred. He was crying ’in the bitterness
of his soul, How can God comfort such a wretch as
I am?’ As before, in the shop, a voice came in
answer, ’This sin is not unto death.’
The first voice had brought him hope which was almost
extinguished; the second was a message of life.
The night was gone, and it was daylight. He had
come to the end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
and the spectres and the hobgoblins which had jibbered
at him suddenly all vanished. A moment before
he had supposed that he was out of reach of pardon,
that he had no right to pray, no right to repent,
or, at least, that neither prayer nor repentance could
profit him. If his sin was not to death, then
he was on the same ground as other sinners. If
they might pray, he might pray, and might look to
be forgiven on the same terms. He still saw that
his ’selling Christ’ had been ‘most
barbarous,’ but despair was followed by an extravagance,
no less unbounded, of gratitude, when he felt that
Christ would pardon even this.
‘Love and affection for Christ,’
he says, ’did work at this time such a strong
and hot desire of revengement upon myself for the abuse
I had done to Him, that, to speak as then I thought,
had I had a thousand gallons of blood in my veins,
I could freely have spilt it all at the command of
my Lord and Saviour. The tempter told me it was
vain to pray. Yet, thought I, I will pray.
But, said the tempter, your sin is unpardonable.
Well, said I, I will pray. It is no boot, said
he. Yet, said I, I will pray: so I went
to prayer, and I uttered words to this effect:
Lord, Satan tells me that neither Thy mercy nor Christ’s
blood is sufficient to save my soul. Lord, shall
I honour Thee most by believing that Thou wilt and
canst, or him, by believing that Thou neither wilt
nor canst? Lord, I would fain honour Thee by believing
that Thou wilt and canst. As I was there before
the Lord, the Scripture came, Oh! man, great is thy
faith, even as if one had clapped me on the back.’
The waves had not wholly subsided;
but we need not follow the undulations any farther.
It is enough that after a ’conviction of sin,’
considerably deeper than most people find necessary
for themselves, Bunyan had come to realise what was
meant by salvation in Christ, according to the received
creed of the contemporary Protestant world. The
intensity of his emotions arose only from the completeness
with which he believed it. Man had sinned, and
by sin was made a servant of the devil. His redemption
was a personal act of the Saviour towards each individual
sinner. In the Atonement Christ had before him
each separate person whom he designed to save, blotting
out his offences, however heinous they might be, and
recording in place of them his own perfect obedience.
Each reconciled sinner in return regarded Christ’s
sufferings as undergone immediately for himself, and
gratitude for that great deliverance enabled and obliged
him to devote his strength and soul thenceforward
to God’s service. In the seventeenth century,
all earnest English Protestants held this belief.
In the nineteenth century, most of us repeat the phrases
of this belief, and pretend to hold it. We think
we hold it. We are growing more cautious, perhaps,
with our definitions. We suspect that there may
be mysteries in God’s nature and methods which
we cannot fully explain. The outlines of ‘the
scheme of salvation’ are growing indistinct;
and we see it through a gathering mist. Yet the
essence of it will remain true whether we recognise
it or not. While man remains man he will do things
which he ought not to do. He will leave undone
things which he ought to do. To will, may be present
with him; but how to perform what he wills, he will
never fully know, and he will still hate ‘the
body of death’ which he feels clinging to him.
He will try to do better. When he falls he will
struggle to his feet again. He will climb and
climb on the hill side, though he never reaches the
top, and knows that he can never reach it. His
life will be a failure, which he will not dare to
offer as a fit account of himself, or as worth a serious
regard. Yet he will still hope that he will not
be wholly cast away, when after his sleep in death
he wakes again.
Now, says Bunyan, there remained only
the hinder part of the tempest. Heavenly voices
continued to encourage him. ’As I was passing
in the field,’ he goes on, ’I heard the
sentence, thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought
I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s
right hand, there I say, as my righteousness, so that
wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could
not say of me He wants my righteousness, for that
was just before Him. Now did my chains fall off
my legs indeed. I was loosed from my affliction
and irons; my temptations also fled away, so that
from that time those dreadful Scriptures of God left
off to trouble me. Now went I home rejoicing
for the grace and love of God. Christ of God is
made unto us wisdom and righteousness, and sanctification,
and redemption. I now lived very sweetly at peace
with God through Christ. Oh! methought, Christ,
Christ! There was nothing but Christ before my
eyes. I was not now only looking upon this and
the other benefits of Christ apart, as of His blood,
burial, and resurrection, but considered Him as a whole
Christ. All those graces that were now green in
me were yet but like those cracked groats and fourpence
half-pennies which rich men carry in their purses,
while their gold is in their trunks at home. Oh!
I saw my gold was in my trunk at home in Christ my
Lord and Saviour. The Lord led me into the mystery
of union with the Son of God, that I was joined to
Him, that I was flesh of His flesh. If He and
I were one, His righteousness was mine, His merits
mine, His victory mine. Now I could see myself
in heaven and earth at once; in heaven by my Christ,
though on earth by my body and person. Christ
was that common and public person in whom the whole
body of His elect are always to be considered and
reckoned. We fulfilled the law by Him, died by
Him, rose from the dead by Him, got the victory over
sin and death, the devil and hell by Him. I had
cause to say, Praise ye the Lord. Praise God
in His sanctuary.’