Edmund Venables

“ This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan’s religious history through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fierce temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated scraps of Bible language—texts torn from their context—the harassing doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic power. It is a picture of fearful fascination that he draws. ”

“ ABBEY (Lat. abbatia; from Syr. abba, father) , a monastery, or conventual establishment, under the government of an abbot or an abbess. A priory only differed from an abbey in that the superior bore the name of prior instead of abbot. This was the case in all the English conventual cathedrals, e.g. Canterbury, Ely, Norwich, &c., where the archbishop or bishop occupied the abbot’s place, the superior of the monastery being termed prior. ”

“ I am not the man. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would be still alive. I know not whether there is such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of the whole heaven but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife. ”

“ Dost thou see a soul that has the image of God in him? Love him, love him. Say, ‘This man and I must go to heaven one day.’ Serve one another. Do good for one another. If any wrong you pray to God to right you, and love the brotherhood.” The closing words of this his final testimony are such as deserve to be written in letters of gold as the sum of all true Christian teaching: “Be ye holy in all manner of conversation: Consider that the holy God is your Father, and let this oblige you to live like the children of God, that you may look your Father in the face with comfort another day.” ”

“ A terrible accusation is brought against Alexander, together with his brother bishops of Winchester and Coventry, by the author of the ‘Gesta Stephani,’ of having helped to aggravate the miseries of those days of anarchy, not only by conniving at the acts of cruelty and rapacity of the barons and their retainers which were turning the land into a hell, ‘fearing to strike with the word of God those children of Belial,’ but even by openly imitating their evil deeds, extorting money by torture and imprisonment. ”

“ The most important group of buildings is naturally that devoted to monastic life. This includes two cloisters, the great cloister surrounded by the buildings essentially connected with the daily life of the monks,—the church to the south, the refectory or frater-house here as always on the side opposite to the church, and farthest removed from it, that no sound or smell of eating might penetrate its sacred precincts, to the east the dormitory, raised on a vaulted undercroft, and the chapter-house adjacent, and the lodgings of the cellarer to the west. ”

“ Chrysostom was still the idol of the common people. The news spread that Severian had insulted their bishop, and Severian's life would have been in danger had he not speedily fled to Chalcedon, and put the Bosphorus between himself and the enraged mob. All the authority of the emperor and the passionate entreaties of the empress, who even placed her infant son on Chrysostom's knees in the church of the Apostles as an irresistible plea for yielding to her petition, were needed to extort forgiveness for Severian. ”

“ Thus ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ is a book which when once read can never be forgotten. We too, every one of us, are pilgrims on the same road; and images and illustrations come back to us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them. Time cannot impair its interest, or intellectual progress make it cease to be true to experience. ”

“ It extends beneath the choir transepts and chapter-house; in consequence of the steep declivity on which the cathedral stands it is of unusual height and lightsomeness. It belongs to the 13th century, its style corresponding to Early English, and is simply constructional, the building being adapted to the locality. In architectural beauty it is quite unequalled by any crypt in the United Kingdom, and can hardly anywhere be surpassed. It is an unusually rich example of the style, the clustered piers and groining being exquisite in design and admirable in execution. ”

“ Everywhere we find strokes of his peculiar genius, and though in a smaller measure than the first, it has added not a few portraits to Bunyan’s spiritual picture gallery we should be sorry to miss, and supplied us with racy sayings which stick to the memory. The sweet maid Mercy affords a lovely picture of gentle feminine piety, well contrasted with the more vigorous but still thoroughly womanly character of Christiana. Great-Heart is too much of an abstraction: a preacher in the uncongenial disguise of a knightly champion of distressed females and the slayer of giants. ”

“ The infirmary for sick monks, with the physician’s house and physic garden, lies to the east. In the same group with the infirmary is the school for the novices. The outer school, with its headmaster’s house against the opposite wall of the church, stands outside the convent enclosure, in close proximity to the abbot’s house, that he might have a constant eye over them. The buildings devoted to hospitality are divided into three groups,—one for the reception of distinguished guests, another for monks visiting the monastery, a third for poor travellers and pilgrims. ”

“ Bunyan’s prison life when the first bitterness of it was past, and habit had done away with its strangeness, was a quiet and it would seem, not an unhappy one. A manly self-respect bore him up and forbade his dwelling on the darker features of his position, or thinking or speaking harshly of the authors of his durance. ”

“ He has damned himself to eternal infamy by the bitter zeal he showed in hunting down Dissenters, inflicting exorbitant fines, and breaking into their houses and distraining their goods for a full discharge, maltreating their wives and daughters, and haling the offenders to prison. Having been chiefly instrumental in Bunyan’s first committal to gaol, he doubtless viewed his release with indignation as the leader of the Bedfordshire sectaries who was doing more mischief to the cause of conformity, which it was his province at all hazards to maintain, than any other twenty men. ”

“ Vanity Fair is evidently drawn from the life. The great yearly fair of Stourbridge, close to Cambridge, which Bunyan had probably often visited in his tinker days, with its streets of booths filled with “wares of all kinds from all countries,” its “shows, jugglings, cheats games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind,” its “great one of the fair,” its court of justice and power of judgment, furnished him with the materials for his picture. ”

“ But a highly-strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when suddenly called into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very different estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in general. It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others, as sins against infinite love—a love unto death—and in the light of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The sinfulness of sin—more especially their own sin—is the intensest of all possible realities to them. ”

“ It is true they turn chicken-hearted after the other leaders of their party have been taken and executed, and keep themselves quiet and close, lurking in dens and holes lest they should be snapped up by Emmanuel’s men. If Unbelief or any of his crew venture to show themselves in the streets, the whole town is up in arms against them; the very children raise a hue and cry against them and seek to stone them. But all in vain. Mansoul, it is true, enjoys some good degree of peace and quiet. ”

“ Badman is successful; is powerful; he enjoys all the pleasures which money can bring; his bad wife helps him to ruin, but otherwise he is not unhappy, and he dies in peace. Bunyan has made him a brute, because such men do become brutes. It is the real punishment of brutal and selfish habits. There the figure stands—a picture of a man in the rank of English life with which Bunyan was most familiar; travelling along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire, as the way to Emmanuel’s Land was through the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. ”

“ With deepest pathos it enters into the stern battle so real to all of us, into those heart-experiences which make up, for all, the discipline of life. It is this especially which has given to it the mighty hold which it has always had upon the toiling poor, and made it the one book above all books well-thumbed and torn to tatters among them. ”

“ This book, if he had written no other, would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest masters of the English language of his own or any other age. In graphic delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a hardly won freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of hope and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid self-torturing questionings of motive and action, this work of the travelling tinker, as a spiritual history, has never been surpassed. ”

“ The great charm which pervades all Bunyan’s writings is their naturalness. You never feel that he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work. He writes because he had something to say which was worth saying, a message to deliver on which the highest interests of others were at stake, which demanded nothing more than a straightforward earnestness and plainness of speech, such as coming from the heart might best reach the hearts of others. ”

“ Froude remarks, “Persons often choose to forget that judges are sworn to administer the law which they find, and rail at them as if the sentences which they are obliged by their oath to pass were their own personal acts.” It is not surprising that Elizabeth Bunyan was unable to draw this distinction, and that she left the Swan chamber in tears, not, however, so much at what she thought the judges’ “hardheartedness to her and her husband,” as at the thought of “the sad account such poor creatures would have to give” hereafter, for what she deemed their “opposition to Christ and His gospel.” ”

“ Superior to “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as a literary composition, this last work must be pronounced decidedly inferior to it in attractive power. For one who reads the “Holy War,” five hundred read the “Pilgrim.” And those who read it once return to it again and again, with ever fresh delight. It is a book that never tires. One or two perusals of the “Holy War” satisfy: and even these are not without weariness. As Mr. Froude has said, “The ‘Holy War’ would have entitled Bunyan to a place among the masters of English literature. ”

“ If untrue to art, Bunyan is true to fact. Whether we regard Mansoul as the soul of a single individual or as the whole human race, no final victory can be looked for so long as it abides in “the country of Universe.” The flesh will lust against the spirit, the regenerated man will be in danger of being brought into captivity to the law of sin and death unless he keeps up his watchfulness and maintains the struggle to the end. ”