The Life of John Bunyan. xxvii friendly assurances from the High Sheriff and the Judge; but he was defeated by means of the private and pertinacious erasure of his name by the Clerk of the Peace. He now bade farewell to liberty; and henceforth he lay in rigorous confinement during the long period of seven years. His thoughts, for some time, were very gloomy,—and dwelt much on the condition of his family, the sad prospects of his blind daughter, and the possibility of his imprisonment terminating in some awful catastrophe; but they soon took on the gladsomeness of Divine consolation, and began to shine luminously and steadily in brilliant premonitions of "the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." He was cut off from all his old means of earning his family's bread; but he learned to make tagged thread-laces, which perhaps brought them not much less money. than his tinkering had done,—and he had entire confidence that the All-Loving One, who feeds the birds and clothes the lilies, would not let him or his come to want in the season of their suffering for the gospel. His cell was small and dreary, in an edifice upon the town-bridge, overhanging the river Ouse; but it let in streams of sunshine, and permitted vista-views along the river's banks; and Bunyan was often allowed by the jailer to range through the whole prison, and sometimes put in charge of all its keys. His privation of the delights of home and the joys of church-fellowship was no doubt a severe affliction; but even this was eminently alleviated by the free access of his wife and children to him in his cell, and by the daily companionship of preachers and Christian brethren, averaging so many as about sixty at a time, who were shut up as fellow-confessors for the truth in the same prison. And his very suspension from the work of preaching,—that deprivation of his liberty which hindered him from running amongst the villages as a messenger of the Divine. mercy, and which he doubtless felt as far the heaviest of his troubles-turned out, like the similar bondage of the apostle Paul at Rome, "rather to the furtherance of the gospel;" for, while in prison, he "helped the faith" of his fellow-confessors,-diffused a mighty, silent, benign influence far and wide among sympathizers with the truth,-acquired ripe experiences and mellow views of religious things, for the increase of his usefulness in the years after he obtained his freedom,-and above all, wrote a large portion of his many precious works for the press, and laid up stores of thought for afterwards producing the rest. It was in Bedford jail that he composed the first part of his Pilgrim's Progress; and that alone made his imprisonment a well-spring of purling rivers that shall refresh the nations till the end of time. How gloriously on this occasion-and how gloriously indeed, on every other in the Church's history, though not always so perceptibly by purblind man-did the Most High bring good out of evil! Bunyan continued a prisoner altogether about twelve years; but during the last four, as during the first one, he was mainly a prisoner at large. He pro Xxviii The Life of John Bunyan. bably owed his enlargement, as before, to the mere good will of his jailer; but he was now famous, and very generally respected; and the men in power, though not just or magnanimous to set him free, were sufficiently prudent to connive at his going at large. In August 1671, while still a prisoner, he was called by the Baptist Church in Bedford to become their pastor; and "he at the same time accepted the invitation, and gave himself up to serve Christ and his Church in that charge, and received of the elders the right hand of fellowship.” Soon after his ordination, and within the short space of forty-five days, he wrote his polemical treatise on justification by faith, in opposition to the heretical work of Fowler, afterwards bishop of Gloucester; and by this means he excited a greater sensation and did more good than in the case of the controversy with the Quakers. In the summer of 1672, Bunyan obtained a formal pardon from the crown. He owed his release mainly to the influence of some leading persons among his old opponents, the Quakers. The legal documents connected with it, directly show that the only offence with which he was charged-the only one for which he suffered so long an imprisonment, and endured such severe privations and hardships-was his attending religious meetings to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. "When he came abroad again," says one of his oldest biographers, "he found his temporal affairs were gone to wreck; and he had, as to them, to begin again, as if he had newly come into the world. But yet he was not destitute of friends, who had all along supported him with necessaries, and had been very good to his family; so that, by their assistance, getting things a little about him again, he resolved, as much as possible, to decline worldly business, and give himself wholly up to the service of God." He sprang right from imprisonment into a career of most brilliant activity. He attended well to his domestic and his pastoral duties, and at the same time undertook enormous labours as an author, a controversialist, a missionary, and a general philanthropist. In the autumn of 1672, he set about building, by voluntary subscription, a new meeting-house in Bedford, of capacity to contain nearly one thousand sittings. In November of next year, he had the comfort to see his son Thomas set apart as an occasional preacher and a rural missionary. In the two years following his liberation he went through a great controversy with his brethren, the Baptists, on the question of Christian catholicity of church-fellowship, and was enabled to inflict many and deep wounds upon bigotry and shibboleth-sectarianism. Before the expiry of four more years, he published six other valuable treatises, and got over a mountain of difficulties which his advisers had thrown in the way of his Pilgrim's Progress, and sent that best of all his works to the press. He laboured statedly in Bedford, always amid large audiences and high general esteem, till the eve of his The Life of John Bunyan. xxix death; and he went on writing and publishing till he produced altogether about sixty pamphlets and volumes. He preached often and earnestly in "all the region round about" Bedford, and exercised a special care over all the villages within his old itinerancies, and made occasional tours and journeys through the counties of Cambridge, Hertford, Huntingdon, Buckingham, and Northampton, and even to the extremities of the kingdom. He introduced the gospel to many benighted districts, set up many preaching stations, founded many permanent congregations, gathered and confirmed many scattered and crushed groups of persecuted Christians, carried large relief to the temporal wants of suffering brethren, reconciled differences and terminated strifes among individuals and families and communities, and, in general, performed on a large scale, in an earnest spirit, under the manifest sunshine of the Divine favour, the same sort of wide, miscellaneous, soul-winning work which was done by the early evangelists and the apostles. He was often styled by both friend and foe, in admiration and in derision, Bishop Bunyan; and well would it be for episcopalian communions if every bishop possessed some of his holy fire or did but a tithe of his holy work. He did all, too, in an age of persecution, and in the face of penal statutes-amid the scorn of the world, and in constant danger of renewed imprisonment; but, though often incommoded and several times hotly chased, he never again fell actually into "the snare of the fowler." "It pleased the Lord," says his old biographer, "to preserve him out of the hands of his enemies, in the severe persecution at the latter end of King Charles II.'s reign, though they often searched and laid wait for him, and sometimes narrowly missed him." Bunyan visited London, and preached in it, almost every year from his liberation till his death. And there, as everywhere, he was exceedingly popular. If but one day's notice were given of his intention to preach, the Meeting-house in Southwark, where he generally officiated, would not hold half the people who went to hear him. "I have seen by my computation," says a credible eye-witness, "about twelve hundred persons to hear him at a morning lecture, on a working day in dark working time. I also computed about three thousand that came to hear him at a town's-end meeting-house; so that half were fain to go back again for want of room; and then himself was fain at a back door to be pulled almost over people to get upstairs to the pulpit." It is said that the great Dr. Owen was sometimes one of his audience, and that, on being once asked by Charles II. how a learned man like him could. sit and listen to an illiterate tinker; the Doctor replied, " May it please your Majesty, could I possess that tinker's abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning." But amidst all his popularity, Bunyan continued humble and modest, and assumed not one air of being superior to XXX The Life of John Bunyan, his brethren, and seemed always all-absorbed in burning desire to win souls to Christ. In 1687, an act of indulgence was passed by James II., giving a wily yet real and most unexpected religious liberty to all classes of dissenters. Bunyan, ever perfectly active under the deepest gloom of persecution, was unconsciously roused to blazing energy under this singular burst of political sunshine. He sent no fewer than six books through the press in the course of a few months, and probably increased or at all events maintained his old brisk rate of preaching labours. He consequently was overworked, overthrown, and brought under what his old biographer calls "a sweating distemper,"-a sure symptom of great exhaustion and debility. But he did not yield to it; and after he had suffered under it several weeks, and was still going about, he received a request to go to Reading and attempt a reconcilement there between a father and son, and complied. He had the happiness of success in his labour of love; but as he was returning to London on horseback, he became drenched with rain; and when he arrived at his lodgings in London, he fell into a violent fever. His host was Mr. Strudwick, grocer, at the sign of the Star, on Snow Hill, an admiring friend, who doubtless rendered and procured every aid which he could devise. But Bunyan's time had come: the pilgrim had passed through Beulah, and was on the banks of the river of death. He found his strength fast sinking; and settled his worldly affairs as promptly as circumstances would permit; and expressed a wish to depart and to be with Christ, considering death as gain, and life as only a tedious delay of expected felicity. "His prayers," says his first biographer, "were fervent and frequent; and he even so little minded himself, as to the concerns of this life, that he comforted those that wept about him, exhorting them to trust in God, and pray to him for mercy and forgiveness of their sins, telling them what a glorious exchange it would be to leave the troubles and cares of a wretched mortality to live with Christ for ever, with peace and joy inexpressible,— expounding to them the comfortable scriptures by which they were to hope and assuredly come into a blessed resurrection in the last day. He desired some to pray with him; and he joined with them in prayer. And the last words, after he had struggled with a languishing disease, were, "Weep not for me, but for yourselves. I go to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will no doubt, through the mediation of his blessed Son, receive me, though a sinner; where I hope we ere long shall meet, to sing the new song, and remain for everlastingly happy, world without end, Amen!" This seems too laboured a sentence to be the "last" saying of any man dying of fever, and is not at all in the curt, sapid, pithy style of Bunyan; and must probably be understood as the summary or substance of many things which he said near his end. A classified collection of his dying sayings is preserved, under the heads of sin, The Life of John Bunyan. xxxi affliction, repentance and coming to Christ, prayer, the Lord's-days, sermons, and week-days, the love of the world, suffering, death and judgment, the joys of heaven, and the torments of hell,-and fills eleven pages of Ivimey's Life of him, and nearly eight of Philip's; and this was probably made up from the jottings and recollections of the Strudwick family throughout all the period, not only of the fever, but of the "sweating distemper." Bunyan manifestly was very happy, full of hope, radiant with the forecastings of the coming glory; and crossed "the river" far more in the manner of his Hopeful than of his Christian. He was ill of his fever ten days; and died on the 31st of August, 1688, aged 60 years. His mortal remains were interred in the burying-ground of Bunhill Fields; and an elegant tomb was erected, with the epitaph; “Mr. John Bunyan, Author of the Pilgrim's Progress, ob. 31 Aug. 1688, æt. 60. "He appeared in countenance," says his first biographer, "to be of a stern and rough temper; but, in his conversation, mild and affable, not given to loquacity, or much discourse in company, unless some urgent occasion required it; observing never to boast of himself, or his parts, but rather seem low in his own eyes, and submit himself to the judgment of others; abhorring lying and swearing; being just in all that lay in his power to his word; not seeming to revenge injuries; loving to reconcile differences and make friendship with all. He had a sharp, quick eye, accomplished with an excellent discerning of persons, being of good judgment and quick wit. As for his person he was tall of stature; strong boned though not corpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes; wearing his hair on his upper lip, after the old British fashion; his hair reddish, but in his latter days time had sprinkled it with grey; his nose well set, but not declining or bending; and his mouth moderate large; his forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest. And thus have we impartially described the internal and external parts of a person, who had tried the smiles and frowns of time, not puffed up in prosperity, nor shaken in adversity, always holding the golden mean." Bunyan's widow survived him four years, and employed herself during part of that time in cares about the publication of a collected edition of his works. His blind daughter, about whom he had felt so much concern, died before him. His other three children survived him, and were members of his church. in Bedford, and followed him in his pilgrimage to the celestial city. Two persons of the name of Bunyan, who seem to have been his grand-children, entered the fellowship of the Bedford church about five years after his death. His great-grand-daughter, Hannah Bunyan, died in 1770, aged 76 years, and |