John Bunyan

CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE THE LIFE A ND GRACEA BOUNDING , b . I CHAPTER I1 CHAPTER I11 THE PILGRIMPSR OGRESS v 1x9 CHAPTER IV THE LIFE A ND DEATH O F MR. BADMAN. . 171 CHAPTER V THE HOLY WAR . . . 187 CHAPTER V1 SOMER EFLECTIO O N N S BUNYAN AN D ON PURITANISM . 222 The Life and Grace Abounding A N excuse may be offered for another word or two upon Bunyan. The properties of light are revealed by the object which reflects or absorbs it. We are struck with the peculiar dryness of the criticism on Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. It was dry, not because the eighteenth century was deficient in intellect, but because there was so much in Shakespeare to which it could not respond. It did not ask the questions we ask, or demand what we demand. It is peculiarly true of Bunyan that his great qualities are those of relationship which no one time or temperament can fully unfold. For more 169 1 than two hundred years he has been mainly the beloved interpreter of their religion to common folk, and they would have found it difficult to express any admiration for him which was not partly at least theological. We also in the twentieth century are thankful that Puritanism found such an expositor and preacher as Bunyan. It is an inestimable gain that a religion should obtain presentation by genius such as his. We are now, however, beginning to see that he is not altogether the representative of Puritanism, but the historian of Mansoul, and that the qualification necessary in order to understand and properly value him is not theological learning, nor in fact any kind of learning or literary skill, but the experience of life, with its hopes and fears, bright day and black night. John Runyan was christened on November 30, 1628, in Elstow church, and was probably born therefore on the 28th. It was a strange The Lzye aand Grace Aboun g9 3 year. It was the year of the third Parliament of Charles the First, to which Oliver Cromwell, a young man, twenty-nine years old, had been returned as member for the town of Huntingdon, lying about twenty miles north-east of Bedford, and, like Bedford, on the Ouse. Three years before Bunyans birth the House of Commons had been much disturbed by the Arminianism of Richard Montagu, Rector of Stanford Rivers, and had appointed a Committee to examine his books. The King supported him, and in 1628 made him Bishop of Chichester. Probably he would not have escaped if Parliament had not been dissolved in March, 1629 for, singular as it may now appear to us, the English squire in the first half of the seventeenth century held that it was all important to a man whether he believed in Free Grace or Election. 1628 was the year of the Petition of Right when, after a message from the King forbidding ihe House to lay any I a - p. scandal or aspersion upon the State, Government, or ministers thereof, it was so profoundly excited that sobs and tears burst out on every bench. Old Coke, of all men in the world, wept, and, after trying to speak, was obliged to sit down, unable through emotion to say a word. It was a time in every way inconceivable to us now, and it is farther off from us in reality than the age of Julius Caesar. The place of Bunyans birth, although in Elstow parish, was almost certainly not in the village, but in a cottage close to Harrowden and the old coach road from Bedford to London. Elstow and the town of Bedford have greatly changed since 1628, and the change in Bedford has been more rapid during the last sixty years than at any previous period of its history...