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After being at several minor schools, he went at Christmas 1791 to that of Thomas Broadhurst. At this school Jabez made friends with Edward Cropper, son of Thomas Percival, M.D., an Arian dissenter, chief founder of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1781. Percival took notice of Bunting, received him for four years into his family without fee as medical pupil and amanuensis, made arrangements for his graduation abroad free of expense, and promised to introduce him to good practice in Manchester. But Bunting's own wishes coincided with those of his now widowed mother, and he entered the methodist ministry. He began to preach on 12 Aug. 1798, in his twentieth year, and was received into the ministry on trial in 1799. In 1803 he was received into full connexion as a minister at Oldham Street chapel, Manchester. He was first stationed at Oldham, then at Macclesfield (1801), London (1803), Manchester (1805), Sheffield (1807), Liverpool (1809), Halifax (1811), Leeds (1813), London (1815), Manchester (1824), Liverpool (1830), and finally, from 1833, at the headquarters of the denomination in London, where he filled the chief posts of influence and authority. As a preacher he soon acquired considerable reputation. He was elected assistant secretary in 1806, secretary to the conference and a member of the legal hundred in 1814, and filled the president's chair in 1820, 1828, 1836, and 1844. In 1833 he was made senior secretary of the Missionary Society, and in 1835 president of the Theological Institute. The university of Aberdeen made him M.A. in 1818; the Middleton University, U.S.A., made him D.D. in 1835. Bunting was a born disciplinarian, and with some justice has been called the second founder of methodism. In ecclesiastical polity he regarded himself as giving effect to the views of William Thompson, first president of conference after Wesley's death. He completed the detachment of methodism from its Anglican base; he found it a society and consolidated it into a church. Under Bunting's legislation the methodist organisation tended more and more to place laymen in equal number with ministers upon every connexional committee (ARTHUR). His policy had opponents from both sides. Bunting gave to methodism the machinery of selfgovernment, thus permanently securing a great constitutional advance upon the simple autocracy of Wesley; but while he lived he guided the machine with a hand which never relaxed its firmness. In spite of secessions to old splits, Bunting held on his way, undisturbed in his singleness of aim. On the death of Richard Watson, Bunting was

placed at the head of the Wesleyan missions. Here his practical sagacity and his genius for administration had full scope. He greatly enlarged the operations, enriched the resources, and deepened the success of methodism in the mission field. The work was peculiarly to his taste. He had early offered his own services as a missionary to India, but the conference kept him at home. Nor was he at all insensible to the political opportunities of his body. He was always friendly to the establishment. His attachment was to principles rather than to parties, but there was no more strenuous advocate of political freedom and religious liberty as he understood them. In many respects his position resembled that of a general of one of the great religious orders, directing the action of a religious corporation whose ramifications extend to all parts of the globe. He controlled the spiritual interests of half a million of people and received the emoluments of a curate. 'From the great connexion for which he has lived his sole revenue is a furnished house, coals, candles, and one hundred and fifty pounds. a year' (ARTHUR). He died on 16 June 1858 at his residence, 30 Myddelton Square, and was buried at City Road, where there is a monument in the chapel to his memory. He was twice married: first, on 24 Jan. 1804, to Sarah Maclardie of Macclesfield (born 26 Feb. 1782, died 29 Sept. 1835); secondly, in 1837, to Mrs. Martin (née Green) of Holcombe, Somersetshire, who survived him. His family consisted of four sons and three daughters; his eldest son was William Maclardie Bunting [q. v.]

From 1821 to 1824 he superintended the connexional literature, but his only publications were: 1. Two sermons. One preached before the Sunday School Union in 1805; the second upon Justification by faith' at Leeds in 1812 (the seventh edition of the last in 1847). 2. The Memorials of the late Rev. Richard Watson,' 1833, 8vo. 3. 'Speech of the Rev. Dr. Bunting. in reference to the Government Scheme of National Education, &c.,' Manchester, 1839, 8vo. 4. 'Mormonism,' 1853, 8vo (the introduction is by Bunting). Nos. 1 and 2 are included in two volumes of posthumous sermons, edited by his eldest son, 1861-2, 8vo (portrait). He edited the seventh edition, Liverpool, n. d. (preface dated Leeds, 15 Feb. 1815), of Cruden's Concordance,' with brief memoir; also 'Memoirs of the early Life of William Cowper, written by himself, and never before published,' &c., 1816, 8vo.

[Life by T. P. Bunting, 1859, vol. i. (two portraits); Annual Register for 1858, p. 418; Sketch by W. Arthur, 1849 (from the Watch

man newspaper); Evans's Sketch (Bransby), 1842, pp. 201 sq.; Binns's Methodism since Wesley (Theol. Rev. January 1876, pp. 48 sq.); Angus Smith's Centenary of Science in Manchester, 1883, pp. 15 sq.; Memorials of the late Rev. W. M. Bunting, edited by G. S. Rowe, biography by T. P. Bunting, 1870; tombstone at St. James's, George Street, Manchester; information from T. Percival Bunting, esq.] A. G.

BUNTING, WILLIAM MACLARDIE (1805-1866), Wesleyan minister, the eldest son of the Rev. Dr. Jabez Bunting [q.v.] by his first wife, Sarah Maclardie, was born at Manchester on 23 Nov. 1805. He was educated at the Wesleyan schools at Woodhouse Grove, near Leeds, and Kingswood, and at the grammarschool of St. Saviour's, Southwark, under Dr. William Fancourt, and at the early age of eighteen began his course as a preacher. In 1824 he was admitted a probationer, and in 1828 was 'received in full connexion with the conference.' He continued his itinerancy until his forty-fourth year, when his health broke down, and he became a supernumerary minister. For many years he took an active part in the proceedings of the Evangelical Alliance, and was for some time one of its honorary secretaries. He held a similar post in the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews. He died at his residence, Highgate Rise, 13 Nov. 1866. He was a contributor to the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine,' and in 1842 edited the Select Letters of Mrs. Agnes Bulmer, author of Messiah's Kingdom, &c.' After his death a selection of his sermons, letters, hymns, and miscellaneous poetical writings was published, with a portrait, and a biographical introduction by his younger brother, in which his character as a preacher, full of thought and tenderness, and a man of strong personal conviction, yet of liberality of mind and action, is sketched.

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[Memorials of the late Rev. William M. Bunting, being selections from his sermons, letters, and poems, edited by the Rev. G. Stringer Rowe, with a Biographical Introduction by Thomas Percival Bunting, 1870.] C. W. S.

BUNYAN, JOHN (1628-1688), author of the Pilgrim's Progress,' 'Holy War,' 'Grace abounding,' &c., was born at the village of Elstow, Bedfordshire, a little more than a mile south of the town of Bedford, in November 1628. His baptism is recorded in the parish register of Elstow on the 30th of that month. The family of Buignon, Buniun, Bonyon, or Binyan (the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways), had been settled in the county of Bedford from very early times. Their first place of settle

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ment appears to have been the parish of Pulloxhill, about nine miles from John Bunyan's native village. In 1199 one William Buniun held land at Wilstead, a mile from Elstow. In 1327 one of the same name, probably his descendant, William Boynon, the south-eastern boundary of the parish, was living at the hamlet of Harrowden, at close to the very spot which tradition marks out as John Bunyan's birthplace, and which the local names of Bunyan's End,' 'Bunyan's Walk,' and 'Farther Bunyan's' (as old, certainly, as the middle of the sixteenth century) connect beyond all question with the Bunyan family. A field known as 'Bonyon's End' was sold in 1548 by Thomas Bonyon of Elstow, labourer,' son of William Bonyon, to Robert Curtis, and other portions of his ancestral property gradually passed to other purchasers, little being left to descend to John Bunyan's grandfather, Thomas Bunyan (d. 1641), save the 'cottage or tenement' in which he carried on the occupation of petty chapman,' or small retail trader. This, in his still extant will, he bequeathed to his second wife, Ann, and after her death to her stepson Thomas and her son Edward in equal shares. Thomas, the elder son, the father of the subject of this biography, was married three times, the first time (10 Jan. 1623) when only in his twentieth year, his second and third marriages occurring within a few months of his being left a widower. John Bunyan was the first child by his second marriage, which took place on 23 May 1627. The maiden name of his second wife was Margaret Bentley. She, like her husband, was a native of Elstow, and was born in the same year with him, 1603. A year after her marriage, her sister Rose became the wife of her husband's younger half-brother, Edward. The will of John Bunyan's maternal grandmother, Mary Bentley (d. 1632), with its interior two hundred and fifty years ago, 'Dutch-like picture of an Elstow cottage proves (J. BROWN, Biography of John Bunyan, to which we are indebted for all these family details) that his mother 'came not of the very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet decent and worthy in their ways.' John Bunyan's father, Thomas Bunyan, was what we should now call a whitesmith, a maker and mender of pots and kettles. In his will he designates himself a 'brasier;' his son, who carried on the same trade and adopted the same designation when describing himself, is more usually styled a 'tinker.' Neither of them, however, belonged to the vagrant tribe, but had a settled home at Elstow, where their forge and workshop were, though they

doubtless travelled the country round in search of jobs. Contemporary literature depicts the tinker's craft as disreputable; but we must distinguish between the vagrant and the steady handicraftsmen, dwelling in their own freehold tenements, such as the Bunyans evidently were. Bunyan, in his intense self-depreciation, writes: My descent was of a low and inconsiderable generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land.' This is certainly not language that we should be disposed to apply to a family which had from time immemorial occupied the same freehold, and made testamentary dispositions of their small belongings. The antiquity of the family in Bunyan's native county effectually disposes of the strange hallucination which even Sir Walter Scott was disposed to favour, that the Bunyans, "though reclaimed and settled,' may have sprung from the gipsy tribe. Bunyan's parents sent their son to school, either to the recently founded Bedford grammar school, or, which is more probable, to some humbler school at Elstow. He learned reading and writing 'according to the rate of other poor men's children.' 'I never went to school,' he writes, 'to Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father's house in a very mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen.' And what little he learned, he confesses with shame, when he was called from his primer and copy-book to help his father at his trade, was soon lost, even almost utterly.' In his sixteenth year (June 1644) Bunyan suffered the irreparable misfortune of the loss of his mother, which was aggravated by his father marrying a second wife within two months of her decease. The arrival of a stepmother seems to have estranged Bunyan from his home, and to have led to his enlisting as a soldier. The civil war was then drawing near the end of its first stage. Bedfordshire was distinctly parliamentarian in its sympathies. In the west it was cut off from any communication with the royalists by a strong line of parliamentary posts. These circumstances lead to the conclusion that a Bedfordshire lad was more likely to be found in the parliamentarian than in the royalist forces. This is Lord Macaulay's conclusion, and is supported by Bunyan's latest and most painstaking biographer, the Rev. J. Brown. Mr. Froude, on the other hand, together with Mr. Offor and Mr. Copner, holds that 'probability is on the side of his having been with the royalists.' As there is not a tittle of evidence either way, the question can never be absolutely settled. But we hold, against Mr. Froude, that all probability points to the parliamen

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tary force as that in which Bunyan served. In all likelihood, on his attaining the regulation age of sixteen, which he did in November 1644, he was one of the 'able and armed men' whom the parliament commanded his native county to send 'for soldiers' to the central garrison of Newport Pagnel, and included in one of the levies. The army was disbanded in 1646. Before this occurred Bunyan's providential preservation from death, which, according to his anonymous biographer, 'was a frequent subject of thankful reference by him in later years.' 'When I was a soldier,' he says, 'I, with others, was drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it. But when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place, and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel he was shot in the head with a musket bullet and died.' Bunyan gives no hint as to the locality of the siege; but, on the faith of a manifestly incorrect account of the circumstance in an anonymous life, published after his death, it has been currently identified with Leicester, which we know to have been taken by the royalist forces in 1645; and in direct contradiction to Bunyan's own words-for he says plainly that he stayed behind, and a comrade went in his room-he is described, and that even by Macaulay, as having taken part in the siege, either as a royalist assailant or as a parliamentary defender. Wherever the siege may have been, it is certain that Bunyan was not there. When the forces were disbanded, Bunyan must have returned to his native village and resumed his paternal trade. He 'presently afterwards changed his condition into a married state.' With characteristic reticence Bunyan gives neither the name of his wife nor the date of his marriage; but it seems to have occurred at the end of 1648 or the beginning of 1649, when he was not much more than twenty. He and his wife were 'as poor as poor might be,' without 'so much household stuff as a dish or spoon between them.' But his wife came of godly parents, and brought two pious books of her father's to her new home, the reading of which awakened the slumbering sense of religion in Bunyan's heart, and produced an external change of habits. Up to this time, though by no means what would be called a bad character'-for he was no drunkard, nor licentious-Bunyan was a gay, daring young fellow, whose chief delight was in dancing, bell-ringing, and in all kinds of rural sports and pastimes, the ringleader of the village youth at wake or merrymaking, or in the Sunday sports after service time on the green. As a boy he had acquired the habit of profane swearing, in which he be

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came such an adept as to shock those who were far from scrupulous in their language as the ungodliest fellow for swearing they ever heard. All this the influence of his young wife and her good books gradually changed. One by one he felt himself compelled to give up all his favourite pursuits and pastimes. He left off his habit of swearing at once and entirely. He was diligent in his attendance at services and sermons, and in reading the Bible, at least the narrative portions. The doctrinal and practical part, 'Paul's epistles and such like scriptures,' he could not away with. The reformation was real, though as yet superficial, and called forth the wonder of his neighbours. 'In outward things,' writes Lord Macaulay, he soon became a strict Pharisee; a poor painted hypocrite, he calls himself. For a time he was well content with himself. I thought no man in England could please God better than I. But his self-satisfaction did not last long, The insufficiency of such a merely outward change was borne in upon him by the spiritual conversation of a few poor women whom he overheard one day when pursuing his tinker's craft at Bedford, 'sitting at a door in the sun and talking about the things of God.' Though by this time somewhat of a brisk talker on religion,' he found himself a complete stranger to their inner experience. This conversation was the beginning of the tremendous spiritual conflict described by him with such graphic power in his 'Grace abounding. It lasted some three or four years, at the end of which, in 1653, he joined the nonconformist body, to which these poor godly women belonged. This body met for worship in St. John's Church, Bedford, of which the 'holy Mr. Gifford,' once a loose young officer in the royal army, had been appointed rector in the same year. His temptations ceased, his spiritual conflict was over, and he entered on a peace which was rendered all the more precious by the previous mental agony. The sudden alternations of hope and fear, the fierce temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated texts, the harassing doubts of the truth of christianity, the depths of despair and the elevations of joy through which he passed are fully described as with a pen of fire' in that marvellous piece of religious autobiography, unrivalled save by the 'Confessions' of St. Augustine, his 'Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners.' Bunyan was at this time still resident at Elstow, where his blind child Mary and his second daughter Elizabeth were born. It was probably in 1655 that Bunyan removed to Bedford. Here he soon lost the wife to whose piety he had owed so much,

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and about the same time his pastor and friend, the 'holy Mr. Gifford.' His own health also suffered; he was threatened with consumption, but his naturally robust constitution carried him safely through what at one time he expected would have been a fatal illness. In 1655 Bunyan, who had been chosen one of the deacons, began to exercise his gift of exhortation, at first privately, and as he gained courage and his ministry proved acceptable 'in a more publick way. In 1657 his calling as a preacher was formally recognised, and he was set apart to that office, after solemn prayer and fasting,' another member being appointed deacon in his room, 'brother Bunyan being taken off by preaching the gospel.' His fame as a preacher soon spread. When it was known that the once blaspheming tinker had turned preacher, they flocked by hundreds, and that from all parts,' to hear him, though, as he says, upon sundry and divers accounts 'some to marvel, some to mock, but some with an earnest desire to profit by his words. After his ordination Bunyan continued to pursue his trade as a brasier, combining with it the exercise of his preaching gifts as occasion served in the various villages visited by him,' in woods, in barns, on village greens, or in town chapels.' Opposition was naturally aroused among the settled ministry by such remarkable popularity. All the midland counties,' writes Mr. Froude, 'heard of his fame and demanded to hear him.' In some places, as at Meldreth and Yelden, at the latter of which he had preached on Christmas day by the permission of the rector, Dr. William Dell, master of Gonville and Caius, the pulpits of the churches were opened to him; in other places the incumbents of the parishes were his bitterest enemies. They, in the words of Mr. Henry Deane when defending Bunyan against the attacks of Dr. T. Smith, keeper of the university library at Cambridge, were 'angry with the tinker because he strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans.' When I went first to preach the word abroad,' he writes, the doctors and priests of the country did open wide against me.'

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In 1658 he was indicted at the assizes for preaching at Eaton Socon, but with what result is unrecorded. He was called 'a witch, a jesuit, a highwayman;' he was charged with keeping his misses,' with 'having two wives at once,' and other equally absurd and groundless accusations. His career as an author now began. His earliest work, 'Some Gospel Truths opened,' published at Newport Pagnel in 1656, with a commendatory letter by his pastor, John Burton, was a protest against the mysticism of the teaching

of the quakers. Having been answered by Edward Burrough [q. v.], an ardent and somewhat foul-mouthed member of that sect, Bunyan replied the next year in 'A Vindication of Gospel Truths,' in which he repays his antagonist in his own coin, calling him a gross railing Rabshakeh,' who 'befools himself,' and proves his complete ignorance of the gospel. Like the former work it is written in a very nervous style, showing a great command of plain English, as well as a thorough acquaintance with Holy Scripture. A third book was published by Bunyan in 1658 on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, under the horror-striking title of 'Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul.' It issued from the press a few days before Cromwell's death. In this work, as its title would suggest, Bunyan gives full scope to his vivid imagination in describing the condition of the lost. It contains many touches of racy humour, especially in his similes, and the whole is written in the nervous, forcible English of which he was

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was committed was not, as an obstinate and widespread error has represented, the 'town gaol,' or rather lock-up house, which occupied one of the piers of the many-arched Ouse bridge, for the temporary incarceration of petty offenders against municipal law, but the county gaol, a much less confined and comfortless abode. A few weeks after his committal the quarter sessions for January 1661 were held at Bedford, and Bunyan was indicted for his offence. The proceedings seem to have been irregular. There was no desire on the part of the justices to deal hardly with the prisoner; but he confessed the indictment, and declared his determination to repeat the offence on the first opportunity. The justices had therefore no choice in the matter. They were bound to administer the law as it stood. So he was sentenced to a further three months' term of imprisonment, and if then he persisted in his contumacy he would be 'banished the realm,'. and if he returned without royal license he would stretch by the neck for it.' Towards the end of the three months, with an evident On the Restoration the old acts against desire to avoid proceeding to extremities, the nonconformists were speedily revived. The clerk of the peace was sent to him by the meeting-houses were closed. All persons justices to endeavour to induce him to conwere required under severe penalties to attend form. But, as might have been anticipated, their parish church. The ejected clergy all attempts to bend Bunyan's sturdy nature were reinstated. It became an illegal act to were vain. Every kind of compromise, howconduct divine service except in accordance ever kindly and sensibly urged, was steadily with the ritual of the church, or for one refused. He would not substitute private not in episcopal orders to address a congre- exhortation, which might have been allowed gation. Bunyan continued his ministrations him, for public preaching. The law,' he in barns, in private houses, under the trees, replied, 'had provided two ways of obeying wherever he found brethren ready to pray-one to obey actively, and if he could not and hear. So daring and notorious an offender was not likely to go long unpunished. Within six months of Charles's landing he was arrested, on 12 Nov. 1660, at the little hamlet of Lower Samsell by Harlington, about thirteen miles from Bedford to the south, where he was going to hold a religious service in a private house. The issuing of the warrant had become known, and Bunyan might have escaped if he had been so minded, but he was not the man to play the coward. If he fled, it would make an ill-savour in the county' and dishearten the weaker brethren. If he ran before a warrant, others might run before great words.' While he was conducting the service he was arrested and taken before Mr. Justice Wingate, who, though really desirous to release him, was compelled by his obstinate refusal to forbear preaching to commit him for trial to the county gaol, which, with perhaps a brief interval of enlargement in 1666, was to be his close and uncomfortable' place of abode for the next twelve years. The prison to which Bunyan

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bring his conscience to that, then to suffer whatever penalty the law enacted.'

Three weeks later, 23 April 1661, the coronation of Charles II afforded an opportunity of enlargement. All prisoners for every of fence short of felony were to be released. Those who were waiting their trials might be dismissed at once. Those convicted and under sentence might sue out a pardon under the great seal at any time within the year. Bunyan failed to profit by the royal clemency. Although he had not been legally convicted, for no witnesses had been heard against him, nor had he pleaded to the indictment, his trial having been little more than a conversation between him and the court, the authorities chose to regard it as a legal conviction, rendering it necessary that a pardon should be sued for.

About a year before his apprehension at Samsell, Bunyan had taken a second wife, Elizabeth, to watch over his four little motherless children. This noble-hearted woman showed undaunted courage in seeking her

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