Edmund Venables

“ 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. ”

“ His level is a lower one, but on that level Bunyan is without a rival. Never has the history of a soul convinced of the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger of hopeless, irreversible doom—seeing itself, to employ his own image, hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might snap any moment—been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring language. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bunyan was no preacher of vague generalities. He knew that sermons miss their mark if they hit no one. Self-application is their object. “Wherefore,” he says, “I laboured so to speak the word, as that the sin and person guilty might be particularized by it.” And what he preached he knew and felt to be true. It was not what he read in books, but what he had himself experienced. Like Dante he had been in hell himself, and could speak as one who knew its terrors, and could tell also of the blessedness of deliverance by the person and work of Christ. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We cannot but feel the want of vraisemblance which brings the whole company of pilgrims to the banks of the dark river at one time, and sends them over in succession, following one another rapidly through the Golden Gate of the City. The four boys with their wives and children, it is true, stay behind awhile, but there is an evident incongruity in their doing so when the allegory has brought them all to what stands for the close of their earthly pilgrimage. Bunyan’s mistake was in gratifying his inventive genius and making his band of pilgrims so large. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was vain for Bunyan to reply that he never summoned people to hear him, but that if they came he could not but use the best of his skill and wisdom to counsel them for their soul’s salvation; that he could preach and the people could come to hear without neglecting their callings, and that men were bound to look out for their souls’ welfare on week-days as well as Sundays. Neither could convince the other. Bunyan’s stubbornness was not a little provoking to Foster, and was equally disappointing to Wingate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But all Cobb’s friendly reasonings and expostulations were ineffectual to bend Bunyan’s sturdy will. He would yield to no-one in his loyalty to his sovereign, and his readiness to obey the law. But, he said, with a hairsplitting casuistry he would have indignantly condemned in others, the law provided two ways of obeying, “one to obey actively, and if his conscience forbad that, then to obey passively; to lie down and suffer whatever they might do to him.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Froude has said, “before toleration is possible, men must have learnt to tolerate toleration,” and this was a lesson the English nation was very far from having learnt; at no time, perhaps, were they further from it. Puritanism had had its day, and had made itself generally detested. Deeply enshrined as it was in many earnest and devout hearts, such as Bunyan’s, it was necessarily the religion not of the many, but of the few; it was the religion not of the common herd, but of a spiritual aristocracy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Bunyan’s second great allegorical work, “The Holy War,” need not detain us long. Being an attempt, and in the nature of things an unsuccessful attempt, to clothe what writers on divinity call “the plan of salvation” in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man, like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In vigorous, nervous language, which does not spare his opponent, he defends himself from Burrough’s charges, and proves that the Quakers are “deceivers.” “As for you thinking that to drink water, and wear no hatbands is not walking after your own lusts, I say that whatsoever man do make a religion out of, having no warrant for it in Scripture, is but walking after their own lusts, and not after the Spirit of God.” Burrough had most unwarrantably stigmatized Bunyan as one of “the false prophets, who love the wages of unrighteousness, and through covetousness make merchandise of souls.” ”

“ He himself pursues his evil way to the end, and “dies like a lamb, or as men call it, like a Chrisom child sweetly and without fear,” but the selfsame Mr. Badman still, not only in name, but in condition; sinning onto the last, and dying with a heart that cannot repent.
Mr. Froude’s summing up of this book is so masterly that we make no apology for presenting it to our readers. “Bunyan conceals nothing, assumes nothing, and exaggerates nothing. He makes his bad man sharp and shrewd. He allows sharpness and shrewdness to bring him the reward which such qualities in fact command. ”

“ Evil must be put down, and good must triumph at last. But the end is not yet, and it seems as far off as ever. The army of Doubters, under their several captains, Election Doubters, Vocation Doubters, Salvation Doubters, Grace Doubters, with their general the great Lord Incredulity at their head, reinforced by many fresh regiments under novel standards, unknown and unthought of in Bunyan’s days, taking the place of those whose power is past, is ever making new attacks upon poor Mansoul, and terrifying feeble souls with their threatenings. ”

“ Many of them we know familiarly; there is hardly one we should be surprised to meet any day. This lifelike power of characterization belongs in the highest degree to “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” It is hardly inferior in “The Holy War,” though with some exceptions the people of “Mansoul” have failed to engrave themselves on the popular memory as the characters of the earlier allegory have done. The secret of this graphic power, which gives “The Pilgrim’s Progress” its universal popularity, is that Bunyan describes men and women of his own day, such as he had known and seen them. ”

“ In fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan—John Milton—to bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that—
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” ”

“ Nor is there one which does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan’s picturesque imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy language. Each will reward perusal. His work on “Prayer” is couched in the most exalted strain, and is evidently the production of one who by long and agonizing experience had learnt the true nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the soul to God, and a wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not denied, is granted. ”