This great Puritan was born the same year
that the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth. His home was Elstow,
near Bedford, in England. His father was a tinker and he was brought
up to the same trade. He was a lively, likeable boy with a serious
and almost morbid side to his nature. All during his young manhood
he was repenting for the vices of his youth and yet he had never
been either a drunkard or immoral. The particular acts that troubled
his conscience were dancing, ringing the church bells, and playing
tip cat. It was while playing the latter game one day that “a
voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my soul, which said,
‘Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins
and go to Hell?”’, At about this time he overheard three
or f our poor women in Bedford talking, as they sat at the door
in the sun. “Their talk was about the new birth, the work
of God in the hearts. They were far above my reach.”
In his youth he was a member of the parliamentary
army for a year. The death of his comrade close beside him deepened
his tendency to serious thoughts, and there were times when he
seemed almost insane in his zeal and penitence. He was at one
time quite assured that he had sinned the unpardonable sin against
the Holy Ghost. While he was still a young man he married a good
woman who bought him a library of pious books which he read with
assiduity, thus confirming his earnestness and increasing his
love of religious controversies.
His conscience was still further awakened
through the persecution of the religious body of Baptists to whom
he had joined himself. Before he was thirty years old he had become
a leading Baptist preacher.
Then came his turn for persecution. He was
arrested for preaching without license. “Before I went down
to the justice, I begged of God that His will be done; for I was
not without hopes that my imprisonment might be an awakening to
the saints in the country. Only in that matter did I commit the
thing to God. And verily at my return I did meet my God sweetly
in the prison.”
His hardships were genuine, on account of
the wretched condition of the prisons of those days. To this confinement
was added the personal grief of being parted from his young and
second wife and four small children, and particularly, his little
blind daughter. While he was in jail he was solaced by the two
books which he had brought with him, the Bible and fox’s
“Book of Martyrs.”
Although he wrote some of his early books
during this long imprisonment, it was not until his second and
shorter one, three years after the first, that he composed his
immortal “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which was published
three years later. In an earlier tract he had thought briefly
of the similarity between human life and a pilgrimage, and he
now worked this theme out in fascinating detail, using the rural
scenery of England for his background, the splendid city of London
for his Vanity Fair, and the saints and villains of his own personal
acquaintance for the finely drawn characters of his allegory.
The “Pilgrim’s Progress”
is truly the rehearsal of Bunyan’s own spiritual experiences.
He himself had been the ‘man cloathed in Rags, with his Face
from his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great Burden upon
his Back.’ After he had realized that Christ was his Righteousness,
and that this did not depend on “the good feelings of his
Heart”- or, as we should say, on his feelings- “now
did the Chains fall off my legs indeed.” His had been Doubting
Castle and Sloughs of Despond, with much of the Valley of Humiliation
and the Shadow of Death. But, above all, it is a book of Victory.
Once when he was leaving the doors of the courthouse where he
himself had been defeated, he wrote: “As I was going forth
of the doors, I had much ado to bear saying to them, that 1 carried
the peace of God along with me.” In his vision was ever the
Celestial City, with all its bells ringing. He had fought Apollyon
constantly, and often wounded, shamed and fallen, yet in the end
“more than conqueror through Him that loved us.”
His book was at first received with much
criticism from his Puritan friends, who saw in it only an addition
to the worldly literature of his day, but there was not much then
for Puritans to read, and it was not long before it was devoutly
laid beside their Bibles and perused with gladness and with profit.
It was perhaps two centuries later before literary critics began
to realize that this story, so full of human reality and interest
and so marvelously modeled upon the English of the King James
translation of the Bible, is one of the glories of English literature.
In his later years he wrote several other allegories, of which
of one of them, “The Holy War,” it has been said that,
“If the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ had never been,
written it would be regarded as the finest allegory in the language.”
During the later years of his life, Bunyan
remained in Bedford as a venerated local pastor and preacher.
He was also a favorite speaker in the non-conformist pulpits of
London. He became so national a leader and teacher that he was
frequently called “Bishop Bunyan.”
In his helpful and unselfish personal life
he was apostolic. His last illness was due to exposure upon a
journey in which he was endeavoring to reconcile a father with
his son. His end came on the third of August, 1688. He was buried
in Bunhill Fields, a church yard in London.
There is no doubt but that the “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been more helpful than any other book but the Bible. It was timely, for they were still burning martyrs in Vanity Fair while he was writing. It is enduring, for while it tells little of living the Christian life in the family and community, it does interpret that life so far as it is an expression of the solitary soul, in homely language. Bunyan indeed “ showed how to build a princely throne on humble truth.” He has been his own Greatheart, dauntless guide to pilgrims, to many.
