The Pilgrim falls into the hands of
Giant Despair because he has himself first strayed
into Byepath Meadow. Bunyan found an explanation
of his last convulsion in an act of unbelief, of which,
on looking back, he perceived that he had been guilty.
He had been delivered out of his first temptation.
He had not been sufficiently on his guard against
temptations that might come in the future. Nay,
he had himself tempted God. His wife had been
overtaken by a premature confinement, and was suffering
acutely. It was at the time when Bunyan was exercised
with questions about the truth of religion altogether.
As the poor woman lay crying at his side, he had said
mentally, ’Lord, if Thou wilt now remove this
sad affliction from my wife, and cause that she be
troubled no more therewith this night, then I shall
know that Thou canst discern the more secret thoughts
of the heart.’ In a moment the pain ceased
and she fell into a sleep which lasted till morning.
Bunyan, though surprised at the time, forgot what had
happened, till it rushed back upon his memory, when
he had committed himself by a similar mental assent
to selling Christ. He remembered the proof which
had been given to him that God could and did discern
his thoughts. God had discerned this second thought
also, and in punishing him for it had punished him
at the same time for the doubt which he had allowed
himself to feel. ‘I should have believed
His word,’ he said, ’and not have put
an “if” upon the all-seeingness of God.’
The suffering was over now, and he
felt that it had been infinitely beneficial to him.
He understood better the glory of God and of his Son.
The Scriptures had opened their secrets to him, and
he had seen them to be in very truth the keys of the
kingdom of Heaven. Never so clearly as after
this ‘temptation’ had he perceived ’the
heights of grace, and love, and mercy.’
Two or three times ’he had such strange apprehensions
of the grace of God as had amazed him.’
The impression was so overpowering that if it had
continued long ’it would have rendered him incapable
for business.’ He joined his friend Mr.
Gifford’s church. He was baptised in the
Ouse, and became a professed member of the Baptist
congregation. Soon after, his mental conflict
was entirely over, and he had two quiet years of peace.
Before a man can use his powers to any purpose, he
must arrive at some conviction in which his intellect
can acquiesce. ‘Calm yourself,’ says
Jean Paul; ‘it is your first necessity.
Be a stoic if nothing else will serve.’
Bunyan had not been driven into stoicism. He was
now restored to the possession of his faculties, and
his remarkable ability was not long in showing itself.
The first consequence of his mental
troubles was an illness. He had a cough which
threatened to turn into consumption. He thought
it was all over with him, and he was fixing his eyes
’on the heavenly Jerusalem and the innumerable
company of angels;’ but the danger passed off,
and he became well and strong in mind and body.
Notwithstanding his various miseries, he had not neglected
his business, and had indeed been specially successful.
By the time that he was twenty-five years old he was
in a position considerably superior to that in which
he was born. ‘God,’ says a contemporary
biographer, ’had increased his stores so that
he lived in great credit among his neighbours.’
On May 13, 1653, Bedfordshire sent an address to Cromwell
approving the dismissal of the Long Parliament, recognising
Oliver himself as the Lord’s instrument, and
recommending the county magistrates as fit persons
to serve in the Assembly which was to take its place.
Among thirty-six names attached to this document,
appear those of Gifford and Bunyan. This speaks
for itself: he must have been at least a householder
and a person of consideration. It was not, however,
as a prosperous brazier that Bunyan was to make his
way. He had a gift of speech, which, in the democratic
congregation to which he belonged, could not long
remain hid. Young as he was, he had sounded the
depths of spiritual experience. Like Dante he
had been in hell the popular hell of English
Puritanism and in 1655 he was called upon
to take part in the ‘ministry.’ He
was modest, humble, shrinking. The minister when
he preached was, according to the theory, an instrument
uttering the words not of himself but of the Holy
Spirit. A man like Bunyan, who really believed
this, might well be alarmed. After earnest entreaty,
however, ‘he made experiment of his powers’
in private, and it was at once evident that, with
the thing which these people meant by inspiration,
he was abundantly supplied. No such preacher to
the uneducated English masses was to be found within
the four seas. He says that he had no desire
of vain glory; no one who has studied his character
can suppose that he had. He was a man of natural
genius, who believed the Protestant form of Christianity
to be completely true. He knew nothing of philosophy,
nothing of history, nothing of literature. The
doubts to which he acknowledged being without their
natural food, had never presented themselves in a form
which would have compelled him to submit to remain
uncertain. Doubt, as he had felt it, was a direct
enemy of morality and purity, and as such he had fought
with it and conquered it. Protestant Christianity
was true. All mankind were perishing unless they
saw it to be true. This was his message; a message supposing
him to have been right of an importance
so immeasurable that all else was nothing. He
was still ’afflicted with the fiery darts of
the devil,’ but he saw that he must not bury
his abilities. ‘In fear and trembling,’
therefore, he set himself to the work, and ’did
according to his power preach the Gospel that God
had shewn him.’
’The Lord led him to begin where
his Word began with sinners. This
part of my work,’ he says, ’I fulfilled
with a great sense, for the terrors of the law and
guilt for my transgressions lay heavy on my conscience.
I preached what I felt. I had been sent to my
hearers as from the dead. I went myself in chains
to preach to them in chains, and carried that fire
in my own conscience that I persuaded them to beware
of. I have gone full of guilt and terror to the
pulpit door; God carried me on with a strong hand,
for neither guilt nor hell could take me off.’
Many of Bunyan’s addresses remain
in the form of theological treatises, and that I may
not have to return to the subject, I shall give some
account of them. His doctrine was the doctrine
of the best and strongest minds in Europe. It
had been believed by Luther, it had been believed
by Knox. It was believed at that moment by Oliver
Cromwell as completely as by Bunyan himself. It
was believed, so far as such a person could be said
to believe anything, by the all accomplished Leibnitz
himself. Few educated people use the language
of it now. In them it was a fire from heaven
shining like a sun in a dark world. With us the
fire has gone out; in the place of it we have but
smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical mind in search
of ’something deeper and truer than satisfied
the last century,’ is turning back to Catholic
verities. What Bunyan had to say may be less than
the whole truth: we shall scarcely find the still
missing part of it in lines of thought which we have
outgrown.
Bunyan preached wherever opportunity
served in woods, in barns, on village greens,
or in town chapels. The substance of his sermons
he revised and published. He began, as he said,
with sinners, explaining the condition of men in the
world. They were under the law, or they were
under grace. Every person that came into the world
was born under the law, and as such was bound, under
pain of eternal damnation, to fulfil completely and
continually every one of the Ten Commandments.
The Bible said plainly, ’Cursed is every one
that continueth not in all things which are written
in the book of the law to do them.’ ’The
soul that sinneth it shall die.’ The Ten
Commandments extended into many more, and to fail
in a single one was as fatal as to break them all.
A man might go on for a long time, for sixty years
perhaps, without falling. Bunyan does not mean
that anyone really could do all this, but he assumes
the possibility; yet he says if the man slipped once
before he died, he would eternally perish. The
law does not refer to words and actions only, but
to thoughts and feelings. It followed a man in
his prayers, and detected a wandering thought.
It allowed no repentance to those who lived and died
under it. If it was asked whether God could not
pardon, as earthly judges pardon criminals, the answer
was, that it is not the law which is merciful to the
earthly offender but the magistrate. The law
is an eternal principle. The magistrate may forgive
a man without exacting satisfaction. The law
knows no forgiveness. It can be as little changed
as an axiom of mathematics. Repentance cannot
undo the past. Let a man leave his sins and live
as purely as an angel all the rest of his life, his
old faults remain in the account against him, and
his state is as bad as ever it was. God’s
justice once offended knows not pity or compassion,
but runs on the offender like a lion and throws him
into prison, there to lie to all eternity unless infinite
satisfaction be given to it. And that satisfaction
no son of Adam could possibly make.
This conception of Divine justice,
not as a sentence of a judge, but as the action of
an eternal law, is identical with Spinoza’s.
That every act involves consequences which cannot
be separated from it, and may continue operative to
eternity, is a philosophical position which is now
generally admitted. Combined with the traditionary
notions of a future judgment and punishment in hell,
the recognition that there was a law in the case and
that the law could not be broken, led to the frightful
inference that each individual was liable to be kept
alive and tortured through all eternity. And
this, in fact, was the fate really in store for every
human creature unless some extraordinary remedy could
be found. Bunyan would allow no merit to anyone.
He would not have it supposed that only the profane
or grossly wicked were in danger from the law.
‘A man,’ he says, ’may be turned
from a vain, loose, open, profane conversation and
sinning against the law, to a holy, righteous, religious
life, and yet be under the same state and as sure
to be damned as the others that are more profane and
loose.’ The natural man might think it
strange, but the language of the curse was not to
be mistaken. Cursed is every one who has failed
to fulfil the whole law. There was not a person
in the whole world who had not himself sinned in early
life. All had sinned in Adam also, and St. Paul
had said in consequence, ’There is none that
doeth good, no, not one! The law was given not
that we might be saved by obeying it, but that we
might know the holiness of God and our own vileness,
and that we might understand that we should not be
damned for nothing. God would have no quarrelling
at His just condemning of us at that day.’
This is Bunyan’s notion of the
position in which we all naturally stand in this world,
and from which the substitution of Christ’s
perfect fulfilment of the law alone rescues us.
It is calculated, no doubt, to impress on us a profound
horror of moral evil when the penalty attached to
it is so fearful. But it is dangerous to introduce
into religion metaphysical conceptions of ‘law.’
The cord cracks that is strained too tightly; and
it is only for brief periods of high spiritual tension
that a theology so merciless can sustain itself.
No one with a conscience in him will think of claiming
any merit for himself. But we know also that
there are degrees of demerit, and, theory or no theory,
we fall back on the first verse of the English Liturgy,
as containing a more endurable account of things.
For this reason, among others, Bunyan
disliked the Liturgy. He thought the doctrine
of it false, and he objected to a Liturgy on principle.
He has a sermon on Prayer, in which he insists that
to be worth anything prayer must be the expression
of an inward feeling; and that people cannot feel
in lines laid down for them. Forms of prayer he
thought especially mischievous to children, as accustoming
them to use words to which they attached no meaning.
‘My judgment,’ he says,
’is that men go the wrong way to learn their
children to pray. It seems to me a better way
for people to tell their children betimes what cursed
creatures they are, how they are under the wrath of
God by reason of original and actual sin; also to tell
them the nature of God’s wrath and the duration
of misery, which if they would conscientiously do,
they would sooner learn their children to pray than
they do. The way that men learn to pray is by
conviction of sin, and this is the way to make our
“sweet babes” do so too.’
‘Sweet babes’ is unworthy
of Bunyan. There is little sweetness in a state
of things so stern as he conceives. He might have
considered, too, that there was a danger of making
children unreal in another and worse sense by teaching
them doctrines which neither child nor man can comprehend.
It may be true that a single sin may consign me to
everlasting hell, but I cannot be made to acknowledge
the justice of it. ‘Wrath of God’
and such expressions are out of place when we are
brought into the presence of metaphysical laws.
Wrath corresponds to free-will misused. It is
senseless and extravagant when pronounced against
actions which men cannot help, when the faulty action
is the necessary consequence of their nature, and
the penalty the necessary consequence of the action.
The same confusion of thought lies
in the treatment of the kindred subjects of Free-will,
Election, and Reprobation. The logic must be
maintained, and God’s moral attributes simultaneously
vindicated. Bunyan argues about it as ingeniously
as Leibnitz himself. Those who suppose that specific
guilt attaches to particular acts, that all men are
put into the world, free to keep the Commandments or
to break them, that they are equally able to do one
as to do the other, and are, therefore, proper objects
of punishment, hold an opinion which is consistent
in itself, but is in entire contradiction with facts.
Children are not as able to control their inclinations
as grown men, and one man is not as able to control
himself as another. Some have no difficulty from
the first, and are constitutionally good; some are
constitutionally weak, or have incurable propensities
for evil. Some are brought up with care and insight;
others seem never to have any chance at all.
So evident is this, that impartial thinkers have questioned
the reality of human guilt in the sense in which it
is generally understood. Even Butler allows that
if we look too curiously we may have a difficulty
in finding where it lies. And here, if anywhere,
there is a real natural truth in the doctrine of Election,
independent of the merit of those who are so happy
as to find favour. Bunyan, however, reverses
the inference. He will have all guilty together,
those who do well and those who do ill. Even the
elect are in themselves as badly off as the reprobate,
and are equally included under sin. Those who
are saved are saved for Christ’s merits and not
for their own.
Men of calmer temperament accept facts
as they find them. They are too conscious of
their ignorance to insist on explaining problems which
are beyond their teach. Bunyan lived in an age
of intense religious excitement, when the strongest
minds were exercising themselves on those questions.
It is noticeable that the most effective intellects
inclined to necessitarian conclusions: some in
the shape of Calvinism, some in the corresponding
philosophic form of Spinozism. From both alike
there came an absolute submission to the decrees of
God, and a passionate devotion to his service; while
the morality of Free-will is cold and calculating.
Appeals to a sense of duty do not reach beyond the
understanding. The enthusiasm which will stir
men’s hearts and give them a real power of resisting
temptation must be nourished on more invigorating
food.
But I need dwell no more on a subject
which is unsuited for these pages.
The object of Bunyan, like that of
Luther, like that of all great spiritual teachers,
was to bring his wandering fellow-mortals into obedience
to the commandments, even while he insisted on the
worthlessness of it. He sounded the strings to
others which had sounded loudest in himself.
When he passed from mysticism into matters of ordinary
life, he showed the same practical good sense which
distinguishes the chief of all this order of thinkers St.
Paul. There is a sermon of Bunyan’s on
Christian behaviour, on the duties of parents to children,
and masters to servants, which might be studied with
as much advantage in English households as the ’Pilgrim’s
Progress’ itself. To fathers he says, ’Take
heed that the misdeeds for which thou correctest thy
children be not learned them by thee. Many children
learn that wickedness of their parents, for which they
beat and chastise them. Take heed that thou smile
not upon them to encourage them in small faults, lest
that thy carriage to them be an encouragement to them
to commit greater faults. Take heed that thou
use not unsavoury and unseemly words in thy chastising
of them, as railing, miscalling, and the like this
is devilish. Take heed that thou do not use them
to many chiding words and threatenings, mixed with
lightness and laughter. This will harden.’
And again: ’I tell you
that if parents carry it lovingly towards their children,
mixing their mercies with loving rebukes, and their
loving rebukes with fatherly and motherly compassions,
they are more likely to save their children than by
being churlish and severe to them. Even if these
things do not save them, if their mercy do them no
good, yet it will greatly ease them at the day of
death to consider, I have done by love as much as
I could to save and deliver my child from hell.’
Whole volumes on education have said
less, or less to the purpose, than these simple words.
Unfortunately, parents do not read Bunyan. He
is left to children.
Similarly, he says to masters:
’It is thy duty so to behave
thyself to thy servant that thy service may not only
be for thy good, but for the good of thy servant, and
that in body and soul. Deal with him as to admonition
as with thy children. Take heed thou do not turn
thy servants into slaves by overcharging them in thy
work with thy greediness. Take heed thou carry
not thyself to thy servant as he of whom it is said,
“He is such a man of Belial that his servants
cannot speak to him.” The Apostle bids
you forbear to threaten them, because you also have
a Master in Heaven. Masters, give your servants
that which is just, just labour and just wages.
Servants that are truly godly care not how cheap they
serve their masters, provided they may get into godly
families, or where they may be convenient for the
Word. But if a master or mistress takes this
opportunity to make a prey of their servants, it is
abominable. I have heard poor servants say that
in some carnal families they have had more liberty
to God’s things and more fairness of dealing
than among many professors. Such masters make
religion to stink before the inhabitants of the land.’
Bunyan was generally charitable in
his judgment upon others. If there was any exception,
it was of Professors who discredited their calling
by conceit and worldliness.
‘No sin,’ he says, ’reigneth
more in the world than pride among Professors.
The thing is too apparent for any man to deny.
We may and do see pride display itself in the apparel
and carriage of Professors almost as much as among
any in the land. I have seen church members so
decked and bedaubed with their fangles and toys that
when they have been at worship I have wondered with
what faces such painted persons could sit in the place
where they were without swooning. I once talked
with a maid, by way of reproof for her fond and gaudy
garment; she told me the tailor would make it so.
Poor proud girl, she gave orders to the tailor to
make it so.’
I will give one more extract from
Bunyan’s pastoral addresses. It belongs
to a later period in his ministry, when the law had,
for a time, remade Dissent into a crime; but it will
throw light on the part of his story which we are
now approaching, and it is in every way very characteristic
of him. He is speaking to sufferers under persecution.
He says to them:
’Take heed of being offended
with magistrates, because by their statutes they may
cross thy inclinations. It is given to them to
bear the sword, and a command is to thee, if thy heart
cannot acquiesce with all things, with meekness and
patience to suffer. Discontent in the mind sometimes
puts discontent into the mouth; and discontent in
the mouth doth sometimes also put a halter about thy
neck. For as a man speaking a word in jest may
for that be hanged in earnest, so he that speaks in
discontent may die for it in sober sadness. Above
all, get thy conscience possessed more and more with
this, that the magistrate is God’s ordinance,
and is ordered of God as such; that he is the minister
of God to thee for good, and that it is thy duty to
fear him and to pray for him; to give thanks to God
for him and be subject to him; as both Paul and Peter
admonish us; and that not only for wrath, but for
conscience sake. For all other arguments come
short of binding the soul when this argument is wanting,
until we believe that of God we are bound thereto.
’I speak not these things as
knowing any that are disaffected to the government,
for I love to be alone, if not with godly men, in things
that are convenient. I speak to show my loyalty
to the king, and my love to my fellow-subjects, and
my desire that all Christians shall walk in ways of
peace and truth.’