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a single entry.' On August 30, 1668, Bunyan's name appears again in the church records, and is of frequent occurrence till his release in 1672. Before his final deliverance the extreme rigour of his incarceration was relaxed, and he was allowed to steal out and visit his family, and even to preach in the adjoining villages under the cover of night. Many of the Baptist congregations in Bedfordshire are said to owe their origin to these midnight preachings.

But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison so wretched as some word-painters have depicted it, the twelve years spent by Bunyan in gaol must have been a dreary and painful time, and 'sometimes under cruel and oppressive gaolers.' The separation from his wife and children was a continually renewed sorrow to his loving heart. He seemed like a man pulling down his house on the head of his wife and children, and yet he said, 'I must do it, I must do it.' He was also at one time, when but 'a young prisoner,' greatly troubled by the thought that his 'imprisonment might end at the gallows,' not so much that he dreaded death, as that he feared his apparent cowardice, when it came to the point, might do discredit to the cause of religion. Being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his tinker's craft for the support of his family, he betook himself to making long tagged laces, many hundred gross of which he made and sold to the hawkers. While his hands were thus busied,' writes Lord Macaulay, 'he had often employment for his mind and his lips.' He gave religious instruction to his fellow captives; at one time,' writes his anonymous biographer, 'there were threescore dissenters imprisoned with him,' and he formed from among these a little flock of which he was himself the pastor1. He studied indefatigably the few books which he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's Acts and Monuments.

'I surveyed his library,' says his anonymous biographer, 'when making him a visit in prison, the least and yet the best that ever I saw, consisting only of two books.' At length Bunyan began to

1Upon a certain fixed day, being together with my brethren in our prison chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, empty, spiritless, barren.' -The Holy City, or New Jerusalem, 1665.

write the wonderful work which has made him immortal, and which is characterized by Coleridge' as 'incomparably the best Summa Theologiae Evangelicae ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired,' the first part of the 'Pilgrim's Progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a Dream.' This was far from being the earliest product of his pen, in the ceaseless activity of which, as Mr. Green remarks, he found compensation for the narrow bounds of his prison2. In 1656, in his twenty-eighth year, he had given his first work to the world under the title of Some Gospel Truths opened according to the Scriptures, in which, says Mr. Offor, 'he attacked the follies of the time, exposed and condemned heresies without mercy.' This was followed the next year with a l'indication of Gospel Truths, in which he defended himself against the violent onslaught of Edward Burrough the Quaker, who perished afterwards in Newgate, whom among other not very conciliatory epithets Bunyan termed ‘a railing Rabshakeh.' In the September of 1658 he published a tract under the terrible title which prepares us for the nature of its contents, A few sighs from Hell, succeeded in the May of the following year by The doctrine of the Law and Grace unfolded. In both the author calls himself that 'poor and contemptible creature, John Bunyan of Bedford.' During his imprisonment, and after his enlargement, tracts, meditations, controversial treatises, poetry, or what he wished to pass for such, followed one another in quick succession. The one work of real genius of which he was the author was slow to see the light. His own estimation of it was so low, and he was so fearful of its being regarded as a light and trifling work, beneath the dignity of a minister of the Gospel, that after its completion Bunyan kept the Pilgrim locked up in his desk for several years. It was not till 1678, six years after his release from prison, that the first edition of the most popular allegory in the English language 'stole silently into the world.' The same year a second edition appeared with additions, including Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Byends' friends, and other of the most characteristic creations. It at once caught the popular taste. Edition after edition was called for, and the sale became enormous. Of the substantial 1 Literary Remains, vol. iii. p. 391,

2 Short History, p. 614.

originality of this book there can be no reasonable doubt. Every attempt to rob Bunyan of the merit of originality in the conception and execution of his design, and to convict him of secret plagiarism, has utterly broken down, and done little but prove the entire want of critical discernment in its originators. It is perfectly true that the same allegory had often been treated before Bunyan: so frequently indeed, that pages could be filled, as Mr. Offor has done, with notices of such works. But even if there were any probability that an itinerant tinker should have fallen in with such works, some only existing in French or Dutch, the resemblance between them and his immortal allegory is far too general and vague to warrant the hypothesis that Bunyan had borrowed from them. Remarkable as is the similarity between portions of Spenser's Faery Queen, and some of the most striking passages of the Pilgrim's Progress, as has been shown in the notes of the present edition-too remarkable, many have thought, to be quite accidental-so excellent a critic as Lord Macaulay speaks of any deliberate imitation as a notion that may be easily confuted by a detailed examination of the respective passages. The complete originality of the Pilgrim is plainly asserted by the author himself; and if ever there was a man who would have scorned a falsehood, or revolted at the bare idea of passing off the coinage of another man's brains as his own, that man was John Bunyan.

Bunyan had indeed, as Lord Macaulay remarks, 'no suspicion that he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in English literature, for of English literature he knew nothing. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name, and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book. He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him and those who slandered him. He continued to work the goldfield which he had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures; not indeed with quite such ease, and in quite such abundance, as when the precious soil was still virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far behind.' In 1684 appeared the Second Part of the Pilgrim's Progress. It had been preceded in 1682 by the Holy War, which, if the Pilgrim's Progress did not exist, would be

the best allegory that ever was written.' Grace Abounding was first published in 1666. Its immediate popularity caused six impressions to be called for in that year.

After twelve years' imprisonment, Bunyan finally left Bedford gaol in 1672. His pardon under the Great Seal bears date the 13th of September of that year. The documents which rewarded the late Mr. Offor's patient researches in the State Paper Office and elsewhere prove that the Quakers were mainly instrumental in throwing open the prison doors to those who were suffering for the sake of religion in the various gaols of the kingdom, and that Charles' gratitude to John Groves, the quaker mate of Tattersall's fisher-boat, in which he escaped to France after the battle of Worcester, had something, and the determined advocacy of George Whitehead the Quaker still more, to do with this act of royal clemency. But the main cause lies deeper, and is connected, as Macaulay says, 'with one of the worst acts of one of the worst governments that England has ever seen,' that of the Cabal. Charles had just concluded the base Treaty of Dover, by which he bound himself to declare himself a Roman Catholic, and to set up the Popish religion in England. The announcement of his conversion it was found convenient to defer. Nor could the other part of the treaty be safely carried out at once. But as a first step toward it, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative, he suspended all penal statutes against Nonconformists and recusants-the former being introduced the better to cloak his real design. Toleration was thus at last secured. 'Ministers returned,' writes Mr. Green, 'after years of banishment, to their houses and their flocks, chapels were reopened, the gaols were emptied, Bunyan left his prison at Bedford; the "Den” where he had been visited with his marvellous dream.' More than three thousand licences to preach were granted, one of the first of which, dated May 9, 1672, was granted to Bunyan, who on the 21st of the preceding January had been called to the pastorate of the Baptist church at Bedford, and 'giving himself up to serve Christ and His Church in that charge, received of the elders the right hand of fellowship.' The place in which Bunyan was licensed to preach was the house, or more probably a barn on the premises, of Josiah Roughead, a man of substance at Bedford, whose goods had been seized a

few months before to pay a fine inflicted for nonconformity. The story that Bunyan owed his liberation to the kind offices of Dr. Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, in which diocese Bedford then was, though told with much particularity in the Life of Dr. Owen, is contradicted by dates, Barlow not having succeeded to his see until three years later, June 27, 1675, and must be regarded as one of the pleasing fictions of history. This Declaration of Indulgence was short-lived. It was withdrawn, and the Test Act was passed the next year, 1673. 'But though,' says Dr. Stoughton, 'this altered the legal position of Nonconformists much for the worse, the law was not generally pressed, and they were treated with much less severity than before.

Almost Bunyan's first act after his liberation was to apply to the Government for licences for preachers and preaching-places in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring counties under the Declaration of Indulgence. A document discovered by Dr. Brown in the Record Office contains a list of six-and-twenty such applications, the sixth of which is for 'John Bunyon for Josias Roughead's house in his Orchard at Bedford1 While he made Bedford his chief care, Bunyan's pastoral superintendence extended beyond the surrounding district to other parts of England, where he is said to have made stated circuits. He was the means of establishing Baptist congregations at Gamlingay, and in many of the villages round, some of which, we are told, subsist to the present day. When he preached in London, which he seems to have done at stated intervals, an enormous concourse assembled to listen to him, if but one day's notice was given of his coming, in the coldest winter weather, and before daylight in the morning. Two anecdotes are on record with regard to Bunyan's preaching. 'The first, which,' says Southey, 'authenticates itself,' is that one day when he had preached 'with peculiar warmth and enlargement,' one of his friends remarked what 'a sweet sermon ' he had delivered. 'Ay,' said he, 'you have no need to tell me that; for the Devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit.' The other, which has perhaps needlessly been called in question, states that, Charles II having heard that Dr. Owen greatly

1 Book of the Bunyan Festival, p. 17.

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