Bunyan’s protracted imprisonment came to an end in 1672. The exact date of his actual liberation is uncertain. His pardon under the Great Seal bears date September 13th. But we find from the church books that he had been appointed pastor of the congregation to which he belonged as early as the 21st of January of that year, and on the 9th of May his ministerial position was duly recognized by the Government, and a license was granted to him to act “as preacher in the house of Josias Roughead,” for those “of the Persuasion commonly called Congregational.” His release would therefore seem to have anticipated the formal issue of his pardon by four months. Bunyan was now half way through his forty-fourth year. Sixteen years still remained to him before his career of indefatigable service in the Master’s work was brought to a close. Of these sixteen years, as has already been remarked, we have only a very general knowledge. Details are entirely wanting; nor is there any known source from which they can be recovered. If he kept any diary it has not been preserved. If he wrote letters—and one who was looked up to by so large a circle of disciples as a spiritual father and guide, and whose pen was so ready of exercise, cannot fail to have written many—not one has come down to us. The pages of the church books during his pastorate are also provokingly barren of record, and little that they contain is in Bunyan’s handwriting. As Dr. Brown has said, “he seems to have been too busy to keep any records of his busy life.” Nor can we fill up the blank from external authorities. The references to Bunyan in contemporary biographies are far fewer than we might have expected; certainly far fewer than we could have desired. But the little that is recorded is eminently characteristic. We see him constantly engaged in the great work to which he felt God had called him, and for which, “with much content through grace,” he had suffered twelve years’ incarceration. In addition to the regular discharge of his pastoral duties to his own congregation, he took a general oversight of the villages far and near which had been the scene of his earlier ministry, preaching whenever opportunity offered, and, ever unsparing of his own personal labour, making long journeys into distant parts of the country for the furtherance of the gospel. We find him preaching at Leicester in the year of his release. Reading also is mentioned as receiving occasional visits from him, and that not without peril after the revival of persecution; while the congregations in London had the benefit of his exhortations at stated intervals. Almost the first thing Bunyan did, after his liberation from gaol, was to make others sharers in his hardly won “liberty of prophesying,” by applying to the Government for licenses for preachers and preaching places in Bedfordshire and the neighbouring counties, under the Declaration of Indulgence. The still existing list sent in to the authorities by him, in his own handwriting, contains the names of twenty-five preachers and thirty buildings, besides “Josias Roughead’s House in his orchard at Bedford.” Nineteen of these were in his own native county, three in Northamptonshire, three in Buckinghamshire, two in Cambridgeshire, two in Huntingdonshire, and one in Hertfordshire. The places sought to be licensed were very various, barns, malthouses, halls belonging to public companies, &c., but more usually private houses. Over these religious communities, bound together by a common faith and common suffering, Bunyan exercised a quasi-episcopal superintendence, which gained for him the playful title of “Bishop Bunyan.” In his regular circuits,—“visitations” we may not improperly term them,—we are told that he exerted himself to relieve the temporal wants of the sufferers under the penal laws,—so soon and so cruelly revived,—ministered diligently to the sick and afflicted, and used his influence in reconciling differences between “professors of the gospel,” and thus prevented the scandal of litigation among Christians. The closing period of Bunyan’s life was laborious but happy, spent “honourably and innocently” in writing, preaching, visiting his congregations, and planting daughter churches. “Happy,” writes Mr. Froude, “in his work; happy in the sense that his influence was daily extending—spreading over his own country and to the far-off settlements of America,—he spent his last years in his own land of Beulah, Doubting Castle out of sight, and the towers and minarets of Immanuel’s Land growing nearer and clearer as the days went on.”

With his time so largely occupied in his spiritual functions, he could have had but small leisure to devote to his worldly calling. This, however, one of so honest and independent a spirit is sure not to have neglected, it was indeed necessary that to a certain extent he should work for his living. He had a family to maintain. His congregation were mostly of the poorer sort, unable to contribute much to their pastor’s support. Had it been otherwise, Bunyan was the last man in the world to make a trade of the gospel, and though never hesitating to avail himself of the apostolic privilege to “live of the gospel,” he, like the apostle of the Gentiles, would never be ashamed to “work with his own hands,” that he might “minister to his own necessities,” and those of his family. But from the time of his release he regarded his ministerial work as the chief work of his life. “When he came abroad,” says one who knew him, “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.” The anonymous writer to whom we are indebted for information concerning his imprisonment and his subsequent life, says that Bunyan, “contenting himself with that little God had bestowed upon him, sequestered himself from all secular employments to follow that of his call to the ministry.” The fact, however, that in the “deed of gift” of all his property to his wife in 1685, he still describes himself as a “brazier,” puts it beyond all doubt that though his ministerial duties were his chief concern, he prudently kept fast hold of his handicraft as a certain means of support for himself and those dependent on him. On the whole, Bunyan’s outward circumstances were probably easy. His wants were few and easily supplied. “Having food and raiment” for himself, his wife, and his children, he was “therewith content.” The house in the parish of St. Cuthbert’s which was his home from his release to his death (unhappily demolished fifty years back), shows the humble character of his daily life. It was a small cottage, such as labourers now occupy, with three small rooms on the ground floor, and a garret with a diminutive dormer window under the high-pitched tiled roof. Behind stood an outbuilding which served as his workshop. We have a passing glimpse of this cottage home in the diary of Thomas Hearne, the Oxford antiquary. One Mr. Bagford, otherwise unknown to us, had once “walked into the country” on purpose to see “the study of John Bunyan,” and the student who made it famous. On his arrival the interviewer—as we should now call him—met with a civil and courteous reception from Bunyan; but he found the contents of his study hardly larger than those of his prison cell. They were limited to a Bible, and copies of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and a few other books, chiefly his own works, “all lying on a shelf or shelves.” Slight as this sketch is, it puts us more in touch with the immortal dreamer than many longer and more elaborate paragraphs.

Bunyan’s celebrity as a preacher, great before he was shut up in gaol, was naturally enhanced by the circumstance of his imprisonment. The barn in Josias Roughead’s orchard, where he was licensed as a preacher, was “so thronged the first time he appeared there to edify, that many were constrained to stay without; every one that was of his persuasion striving to partake of his instructions.” Wherever he ministered, sometimes, when troublous days returned, in woods, and in dells, and other hiding-places, the announcement that John Bunyan was to preach gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking from them the word of life. His fame grew the more he was known and reached its climax when his work was nearest its end. His biographer Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, “when Mr. Bunyan preached in London, if there were but one day’s notice given, there would be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold. I have seen, by my computation, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture by seven o’clock on a working day, in the dark winter time. I also computed about three thousand that came to hear him one Lord’s Day in London, 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 his pulpit.” This “town’s-end meeting house” has been identified by some with a quaint straggling long building which once stood in Queen Street, Southwark, of which there is an engraving in Wilkinson’s “Londina Illustrata.” Doe’s account, however, probably points to another building, as the Zoar Street meeting-house was not opened for worship till about six months before Bunyan’s death, and then for Presbyterian service. Other places in London connected with his preaching are Pinners’ Hall in Old Broad Street, where, on one of his occasional visits, he delivered his striking sermon on “The Greatness of the Soul and the Unspeakableness of the Loss thereof,” first published in 1683; and Dr. Owen’s meeting-house in White’s Alley, Moorfields, which was the gathering-place for titled folk, city merchants, and other Nonconformists of position and degree. At earlier times, when the penal laws against Nonconformists were in vigorous exercise, Bunyan had to hold his meetings by stealth in private houses and other places where he might hope to escape the lynx-eyed informer. It was at one of these furtive meetings that his earliest biographer, the honest combmaker at the foot of London Bridge, Charles Doe, first heard him preach. His choice of an Old Testament text at first offended Doe, who had lately come into New Testament light and had had enough of the “historical and doing-for-favour of the Old Testament.” But as he went on he preached “so New Testament like” that his hearer’s prejudices vanished, and he could only “admire, weep for joy, and give the preacher his affections.”

Bunyan was more than once urged to leave Bedford and settle in the metropolis. But to all these solicitations he turned a deaf ear. Bedford was the home of his deepest affections. It was there the holy words of the poor women “sitting in the sun,” speaking “as if joy did make them speak,” had first “made his heart shake,” and shown him that he was still a stranger to vital godliness. It was there he had been brought out of darkness into light himself, and there too he had been the means of imparting the same blessing to others. The very fact of his long imprisonment had identified him with the town and its inhabitants. There he had a large and loving congregation, to whom he was bound by the ties of a common faith and common sufferings. Many of these recognized in Bunyan their spiritual father; all, save a few “of the baser sort,” reverenced him as their teacher and guide. No prospect of a wider field of usefulness, still less of a larger income, could tempt him to desert his “few sheep in the wilderness.” Some of them, it is true, were wayward sheep, who wounded the heart of their pastor by breaking from the fold, and displaying very un-lamb-like behaviour. He had sometimes to realize painfully that no pale is so close but that the enemy will creep in somewhere and seduce the flock; and that no rules of communion, however strict, can effectually exclude unworthy members. Brother John Stanton had to be admonished “for abusing his wife and beating her often for very light matters” (if the matters had been less light, would the beating in these days have been thought justifiable?); and Sister Mary Foskett, for “privately whispering of a horrid scandal, ‘without culler of truth,’ against Brother Honeylove.” Evil-speaking and backbiting set brother against brother. Dissensions and heartburnings grieved Bunyan’s spirit. He himself was not always spared. A letter had to be written to Sister Hawthorn “by way of reproof for her unseemly language against Brother Scot and the whole Church.” John Wildman was had up before the Church and convicted of being “an abominable liar and slanderer,” “extraordinary guilty” against “our beloved Brother Bunyan himself.” And though Sister Hawthorn satisfied the Church by “humble acknowledgment of her miscariag,” the bolder misdoer only made matters worse by “a frothy letter,” which left no alternative but a sentence of expulsion. But though Bunyan’s flock contained some whose fleeces were not as white as he desired, these were the exception. The congregation meeting in Josias Roughead’s barn must have been, take them as a whole, a quiet, God-fearing, spiritually-minded folk, of whom their pastor could think with thankfulness and satisfaction as “his hope and joy and crown of rejoicing.” From such he could not be severed lightly. Inducements which would have been powerful to a meaner nature fell dead on his independent spirit. He was not “a man that preached by way of bargain for money,” and, writes Doe, “more than once he refused a more plentiful income to keep his station.” As Dr. Brown says: “He was too deeply rooted on the scene of his lifelong labours and sufferings to think of striking his tent till the command came from the Master to come up to the higher service for which he had been ripening so long.” At Bedford, therefore, he remained; quietly staying on in his cottage in St. Cuthbert’s, and ministering to his humble flock, loving and beloved, as Mr. Froude writes, “through changes of ministry, Popish plots, and Monmouth rebellions, while the terror of a restoration of Popery was bringing on the Revolution; careless of kings and cabinets, and confident that Giant Pope had lost his power for harm, and thenceforward could only bite his nails at the passing pilgrims.”

Bunyan’s peace was not, however, altogether undisturbed. Once it received a shock in a renewal of his imprisonment, though only for a brief period, in 1675, to which we owe the world-famous “Pilgrim’s Progress”; and it was again threatened, though not actually disturbed ten years later, when the renewal of the persecution of the Nonconformists induced him to make over all his property—little enough in good sooth—to his wife by deed of gift.

The former of these events demands our attention, not so much for itself as for its connection with Bishop Barlow’s interference in Bunyan’s behalf, and, still more, for its results in the production of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Until very recently the bare fact of this later imprisonment, briefly mentioned by Charles Doe and another of his early biographers, was all that was known to us. They even leave the date to be gathered, though both agree in limiting its duration to six months or thereabouts. The recent discovery, among the Chauncey papers, by Mr. W. G. Thorpe, of the original warrant under which Bunyan was at this time sent to gaol, supplies the missing information. It has been already noticed that the Declaration of Indulgence, under which Bunyan was liberated in 1672, was very short-lived. Indeed it barely lasted in force a twelvemonth. Granted on the 15th of March of that year, it was withdrawn on the 9th of March of the following year, at the instance of the House of Commons, who had taken alarm at a suspension of the laws of the realm by the “inherent power” of the sovereign, without the advice or sanction of Parliament. The Declaration was cancelled by Charles II., the monarch, it is said, tearing off the Great Seal with his own hands, a subsidy being promised to the royal spendthrift as a reward for his complaisance. The same year the Test Act became law. Bunyan therefore and his fellow Nonconformists were in a position of greater peril, as far as the letter of the law was concerned, than they had ever been. But, as Dr. Stoughton has remarked, “the letter of the law is not to be taken as an accurate index of the Nonconformists’ condition. The pressure of a bad law depends very much upon the hands employed in its administration.” Unhappily for Bunyan, the parties in whose hands the execution of the penal statutes against Nonconformists rested in Bedfordshire were his bitter personal enemies, who were not likely to let them lie inactive. The prime mover in the matter was doubtless Dr. William Foster, that “right Judas” whom we shall remember holding the candle in Bunyan’s face in the hall of Harlington House at his first apprehension, and showing such feigned affection “as if he would have leaped on his neck and kissed him.” He had some time before this become Chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, and Commissary of the Court of the Archdeacon of Bedford, offices which put in his hands extensive powers which he had used with the most relentless severity. 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. The church would never be safe till he was clapped in prison again. The power to do this was given by the new proclamation. By this act the licenses to preach previously granted to Nonconformists were recalled. Henceforward no conventicle had “any authority, allowance, or encouragement from his Majesty.” We can easily imagine the delight with which Foster would hail the issue of this proclamation. How he would read and read again with ever fresh satisfaction its stringent clauses. That pestilent fellow, Bunyan, was now once more in his clutches. This time there was no chance of his escape. All licences were recalled, and he was absolutely defenceless. It should not be Foster’s fault if he failed to end his days in the prison from which he ought never to have been released. The proclamation is dated the 4th of March, 1674-5, and was published in the Gazette on the 9th. It would reach Bedford on the 11th. It placed Bunyan at the mercy of “his enemies, who struck at him forthwith.” A warrant was issued for his apprehension, undoubtedly written by our old friend, Paul Cobb, the clerk of the peace, who, it will be remembered, had acted in the same capacity on Bunyan’s first committal. It is dated the 4th of March, and bears the signature of no fewer than thirteen magistrates, ten of them affixing their seals.

That so unusually large a number took part in the execution of this warrant, is sufficient indication of the importance attached to Bunyan’s imprisonment by the gentry of the county. The following is the document:—

“To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them

Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that (notwithstanding the Kings Majties late Act of most gracious generall and free pardon to all his subjects for past misdemeanours that by his said clemencie and indulgent grace and favor they might bee mooved and induced for the time to come more carefully to observe his Highenes lawes and Statutes and to continue in theire loyall and due obedience to his Majtie) Yett one John Bunnyon of youre said Towne Tynker hath divers times within one month last past in contempt of his Majtie’s good Lawes preached or teached at a Conventicle Meeting or Assembly under color or ptence of exercise of Religion in other manner than according to the Liturgie or practiss of the Church of England These are therefore in his Majties name to comand you forthwith to apprehend and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion before us or any of us or other his Majties Justice of Peace within the said County to answer the premisses and further to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile. Given under our handes and seales this ffourth day of March in the seven and twentieth yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second A que Dni., juxta &c 1674

J Napier W Beecher G Blundell Hum: Monoux
Will ffranklin John Ventris
Will Spencer
Will Gery St Jo Chernocke Wm Daniels
T Browne W ffoster
Gaius Squire”

There would be little delay in the execution of the warrant.

John Bunyan was a marked man and an old offender, who, on his arrest, would be immediately committed for trial. Once more, then, Bunyan became a prisoner, and that, there can be little doubt, in his old quarters in the Bedford gaol. Errors die hard, and those by whom they have been once accepted find it difficult to give them up. The long-standing tradition of Bunyan’s twelve years’ imprisonment in the little lock-up-house on the Ouse bridge, having been scattered to the winds by the logic of fact and common sense, those to whom the story is dear, including the latest and ablest of his biographers, Dr. Brown, see in this second brief imprisonment a way to rehabilitate it. Probability pointing to this imprisonment as the time of the composition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” they hold that on this occasion Bunyan was committed to the bridge-gaol, and that he there wrote his immortal work, though they fail to bring forward any satisfactory reasons for the change of the place of his confinement. The circumstances, however, being the same, there can be no reasonable ground for questioning that, as before, Bunyan was imprisoned in the county gaol.

This last imprisonment of Bunyan’s lasted only half as many months as his former imprisonment had lasted years. At the end of six months he was again a free man. His release was due to the good officers of Owen, Cromwell’s celebrated chaplain, with Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln. The suspicion which hung over this intervention from its being erroneously attributed to his release in 1672, three years before Barlow became a bishop, has been dispelled by the recently discovered warrant. The dates and circumstances are now found to tally. The warrant for Bunyan’s apprehension bears date March 4, 1675. On the 14th of the following May the supple and time-serving Barlow, after long and eager waiting for a mitre, was elected to the see of Lincoln vacated by the death of Bishop Fuller, and consecrated on the 27th of June. Barlow, a man of very dubious churchmanship, who had succeeded in keeping his university appointments undisturbed all through the Commonwealth, and who was yet among the first with effusive loyalty to welcome the restoration of monarchy, had been Owen’s tutor at Oxford, and continued to maintain friendly relations with him. As bishop of the diocese to which Bedfordshire then, and long after, belonged, Barlow had the power, by the then existing law, of releasing a prisoner for nonconformity on a bond given by two persons that he would conform within half a year. A friend of Bunyan’s, probably Ichabod Chauncey, obtained a letter from Owen to the bishop requesting him to employ this prerogative in Bunyan’s behalf. Barlow with hollow complaisance expressed his particular kindness for Dr. Owen, and his desire to deny him nothing he could legally grant. He would even strain a point to serve him. But he had only just been made a bishop, and what was asked was a new thing to him. He desired a little time to consider of it. If he could do it, Owen might be assured of his readiness to oblige him. A second application at the end of a fortnight found this readiness much cooled. It was true that on inquiry he found he might do it; but the times were critical, and he had many enemies. It would be safer for him not to take the initiative. Let them apply to the Lord Chancellor, and get him to issue an order for him to release Bunyan on the customary bond. Then he would do what Owen asked. It was vain to tell Barlow that the way he suggested was chargeable, and Bunyan poor. Vain also to remind him that there was no point to be strained. He had satisfied himself that he might do the thing legally. It was hoped he would remember his promise. But the bishop would not budge from the position he had taken up. They had his ultimatum; with that they must be content. If Bunyan was to be liberated, his friends must accept Barlow’s terms. “This at last was done, and the poor man was released. But little thanks to the bishop.”

This short six months’ imprisonment assumes additional importance from the probability, first suggested by Dr. Brown, which the recovery of its date renders almost a certainty, that it was during this period that Bunyan began, if he did not complete, the first part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” We know from Bunyan’s own words that the book was begun in gaol, and its composition has been hitherto unhesitatingly assigned to his twelve years’ confinement. Dr. Brown was, we believe, the first to call this in question. Bunyan’s imprisonment, we know, ended in 1672. The first edition of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” did not appear till 1678. If written during his earlier imprisonment, six years must have elapsed between its writing and its publication. But it was not Bunyan’s way to keep his works in manuscript so long after their completion. His books were commonly put in the printers’ hands as soon as they were finished. There are no sufficient reasons—though some have been suggested—for his making an exception to this general habit in the case of “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Besides we should certainly conclude, from the poetical introduction, that there was little delay between the finishing of the book and its being given to the world. After having written the book, he tells us, simply to gratify himself, spending only “vacant seasons” in his “scribble,” to “divert” himself “from worser thoughts,” he showed it to his friends to get their opinion whether it should be published or not. But as they were not all of one mind, but some counselled one thing and some another, after some perplexity, he took the matter into his own hands.

“Now was I in a strait, and did not see
Which was the best thing to be done by me;
At last I thought, Since you are so divided,
I print it will, and so the case decided.”

We must agree with Dr. Brown that “there is a briskness about this which, to say the least, is not suggestive of a six years’ interval before publication.” The break which occurs in the narrative after the visit of the Pilgrims to the Delectable Mountains, which so unnecessarily interrupts the course of the story—“So I awoke from my dream; and I slept and dreamed again”—has been not unreasonably thought by Dr. Brown to indicate the point Bunyan had reached when his six months’ imprisonment ended, and from which he continued the book after his release.

The First Part of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” issued from the press in 1678. A second edition followed in the same year, and a third with large and important additions in 1679. The Second Part, after an interval of seven years, followed early in 1685. Between the two parts appeared two of his most celebrated works—the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” published in 1680, originally intended to supply a contrast and a foil to “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” by depicting a life which was scandalously bad; and, in 1682, that which Macaulay, with perhaps exaggerated eulogy, has said, “would have been our greatest allegory if the earlier allegory had never been written,” the “Holy War made by Shaddai upon Diabolus.” 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. It would never have made his name a household word in every English-speaking family on the globe.”

Leaving the further notice of these and his other chief literary productions to another chapter, there is little more to record in Bunyan’s life. Though never again seriously troubled for his nonconformity, his preaching journeys were not always without risk. There is a tradition that when he visited Reading to preach, he disguised himself as a waggoner carrying a long whip in his hand to escape detection. The name of “Bunyan’s Dell,” in a wood not very far from Hitchin, tells of the time when he and his hearers had to conceal their meetings from their enemies’ quest, with scouts planted on every side to warn them of the approach of the spies and informers, who for reward were actively plying their odious trade. Reference has already been made to Bunyan’s “deed of gift” of all that he possessed in the world—his “goods, chattels, debts, ready money, plate, rings, household stuff, apparel, utensils, brass, pewter, bedding, and all other his substance whatsoever—to his well-beloved wife Elizabeth Bunyan.” Towards the close of the first year of James the Second, 1685, the apprehensions under which Bunyan executed this document were far from groundless. At no time did the persecution of Nonconformists rage with greater fierceness. Never, not even under the tyranny of Laud, as Lord Macaulay records had the condition of the Puritans been so deplorable. Never had spies been so actively employed in detecting congregations. Never had magistrates, grand-jurors, rectors, and churchwardens been so much on the alert. Many Nonconformists were cited before the ecclesiastical courts. Others found it necessary to purchase the connivance of the agents of the Government by bribes. It was impossible for the sectaries to pray together without precautions such as are employed by coiners and receivers of stolen goods. Dissenting ministers, however blameless in life, however eminent in learning, could not venture to walk the streets for fear of outrages which were not only not repressed, but encouraged by those whose duty it was to preserve the peace. Richard Baxter was in prison. Howe was afraid to show himself in London for fear of insult, and had been driven to Utrecht. Not a few who up to that time had borne up boldly lost heart and fled the kingdom. Other weaker spirits were terrified into a show of conformity. Through many subsequent years the autumn of 1685 was remembered as a time of misery and terror. There is, however, no indication of Bunyan having been molested. The “deed of gift” by which he sought to avoid the confiscation of his goods was never called into exercise. Indeed its very existence was forgotten by his wife in whose behalf it had been executed. Hidden away in a recess in his house in St. Cuthbert’s, this interesting document was accidentally discovered at the beginning of the present century, and is preserved among the most valued treasures of the congregation which bears his name.

Quieter times for Nonconformists were however at hand. Active persecution was soon to cease for them, and happily never to be renewed in England. The autumn of 1685 showed the first indications of a great turn of fortune, and before eighteen months had elapsed, the intolerant king and the intolerant Church were eagerly bidding against each other for the support of the party which both had so deeply injured. A new form of trial now awaited the Nonconformists. Peril to their personal liberty was succeeded by a still greater peril to their honesty and consistency of spirit. James the Second, despairing of employing the Tories and the Churchmen as his tools, turned, as his brother had turned before him, to the Dissenters. The snare was craftily baited with a Declaration of Indulgence, by which the king, by his sole authority, annulled a long series of statutes and suspended all penal laws against Nonconformists of every sort. These lately political Pariahs now held the balance of power. The future fortunes of England depended mainly on the course they would adopt. James was resolved to convert the House of Commons from a free deliberative assembly into a body subservient to his wishes, and ready to give parliamentary sanction to any edict he might issue. To obtain this end the electors must be manipulated. Leaving the county constituencies to be dealt with by the lords-lieutenants, half of whom preferred dismissal to carrying out the odious service peremptorily demanded of them, James’s next concern was to “regulate” the Corporations. In those days of narrowly restricted franchise, the municipalities virtually returned the town members. To obtain an obedient parliament, he must secure a roll of electors pledged to return the royal nominees. A committee of seven privy councillors, all Roman Catholics but the infamous Jeffreys, presided over the business, with local sub-committees scattered over the country to carry out the details. Bedford was dealt with in its turn. Under James’s policy of courting the Puritans, the leading Dissenters were the first persons to be approached. Two are specially named, a Mr. Margetts, formerly Judge-Advocate-General of the Army under General Monk, and John Bunyan. It is no matter of surprise that Bunyan, who had been so severe a sufferer under the old penal statutes, should desire their abrogation, and express his readiness to “steer his friends and followers” to support candidates who would pledge themselves to vote for their repeal. But no further would he go. The Bedford Corporation was “regulated,” which means that nearly the whole of its members were removed and others substituted by royal order. Of these new members some six or seven were leading persons of Bunyan’s congregation. But, with all his ardent desire for religious liberty, Bunyan was too keen-witted not to see through James’s policy, and too honest to give it any direct insidious support. “In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.” He clearly saw that it was not for any love of the Dissenters that they were so suddenly delivered from their persecutions, and placed on a kind of equality with the Church. The king’s object was the establishment of Popery. To this the Church was the chief obstacle. That must be undermined and subverted first. That done, all other religious denominations would follow. All that the Nonconformists would gain by yielding, was the favour Polyphemus promised Ulysses, to be devoured last. Zealous as he was for the “liberty of prophesying,” even that might be purchased at too high a price. The boon offered by the king was “good in itself,” but not “so intended.” So, as his biographer describes, when the regulators came, “he expressed his zeal with some weariness as perceiving the bad consequences that would ensue, and laboured with his congregation” to prevent their being imposed on by the fair promises of those who were at heart the bitterest enemies of the cause they professed to advocate. The newly-modelled corporation of Bedford seems like the other corporations through the country, to have proved as unmanageable as the old. As Macaulay says, “The sectaries who had declared in favour of the Indulgence had become generally ashamed of their error, and were desirous to make atonement.” Not knowing the man they had to deal with, the “regulators” are said to have endeavoured to buy Bunyan’s support by the offer of some place under government. The bribe was indignantly rejected. Bunyan even refused to see the government agent who offered it,—“he would, by no means come to him, but sent his excuse.” Behind the treacherous sunshine he saw a black cloud, ready to break. The Ninevites’ remedy he felt was now called for. So he gathered his congregation together and appointed a day of fasting and prayer to avert the danger that, under a specious pretext, again menaced their civil and religious liberties. A true, sturdy Englishman, Bunyan, with Baxter and Howe, “refused an indulgence which could only be purchased by the violent overthrow of the law.”

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. Four months after he had witnessed the delirious joy which hailed the acquittal of the seven bishops, the Pilgrim’s earthly Progress ended, and he was bidden to cross the dark river which has no bridge. The summons came to him in the very midst of his religious activity, both as a preacher and as a writer. His pen had never been more busy than when he was bidden to lay it down finally. Early in 1688, after a two years’ silence, attributable perhaps to the political troubles of the times, his “Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or a Help to Despairing Souls,” one of the best known and most powerfully characteristic of his works, had issued from the press, and had been followed by four others between March and August, the month of his death. These books were, “The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate;” a poetical composition entitled “The Building, Nature, and Excellency of the House of God,” a discourse on the constitution and government of the Christian Church; the “Water of Life,” and “Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized.” At the time of his death he was occupied in seeing through the press a sixth book, “The Acceptable Sacrifice,” which was published after his funeral. In addition to these, Bunyan left behind him no fewer than fourteen works in manuscript, written at this time, as the fruit of his fertile imagination and untiring pen. Ten of these were given to the world soon after Bunyan’s death, by one of Bunyan’s most devoted followers, Charles Doe, the combmaker of London Bridge (who naively tells us how one day between the stairhead and the middle of the stairs, he resolved that the best work he could do for God was to get Bunyan’s books printed and sell them—adding, “I have sold about 3,000”), and others, a few years later, including one of the raciest of his compositions, “The Heavenly Footman,” bought by Doe of Bunyan’s eldest son, and, he says, “put into the World in Print Word for Word as it came from him to Me.”

At the time that death surprised him, Bunyan had gained no small celebrity in London as a popular preacher, and approached the nearest to a position of worldly honour. Though we must probably reject the idea that he ever filled the office of Chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Shorter, the fact that he is styled “his Lordship’s teacher” proves that there was some relation more than that of simple friendship between the chief magistrate and the Bedford minister. But the society of the great was never congenial to him. If they were godly as well as great, he would not shrink from intercourse, with those of a rank above his own, but his heart was with his own humble folk at Bedford. Worldly advancement he rejected for his family as well as for himself. A London merchant, it is said, offered to take his son Joseph into his house of business without the customary premium. But the offer was declined with what we may consider an overstrained independence. “God,” he said, “did not send me to advance my family but to preach the gospel.” “An instance of other-worldliness,” writes Dr. Brown, “perhaps more consistent with the honour of the father than with the prosperity of the son.”

Bunyan’s end was in keeping with his life. He had ever sought to be a peacemaker and to reconcile differences, and thus had “hindered many mishaps and saved many families from ruin.” His last effort of the kind caused his death. The father of a young man in whom he took an interest, had resolved, on some offence, real or supposed, to disinherit his son. The young man sought Bunyan’s mediation. Anxious to heal the breach, Bunyan mounted his horse and took the long journey to the father’s house at Reading—the scene, as we have noticed, of his occasional ministrations—where he pleaded the offender’s cause so effectually as to obtain a promise of forgiveness. Bunyan returned homewards through London, where he was appointed to preach at Mr. Gamman’s meeting-house near Whitechapel. His forty miles’ ride to London was through heavy driving rain. He was weary and drenched to the skin when he reached the house of his “very loving friend,” John Strudwick, grocer and chandler, at the sign of the Star, Holborn Bridge, at the foot of Snow Hill, and deacon of the Nonconformist meeting in Red Cross Street. A few months before Bunyan had suffered from the sweating sickness. The exposure caused a return of the malady, and though well enough to fulfil his pulpit engagement on Sunday, the 19th of August, on the following Tuesday dangerous symptoms declared themselves, and in ten days the disease proved fatal. He died within two months of completing his sixtieth year, on the 31st of August, 1688, just a month before the publication of the Declaration of the Prince of Orange opened a new era of civil and religious liberty, and between two and three months before the Prince’s landing in Torbay. He was buried in Mr. Strudwick’s newly-purchased vault, in what Southey has termed the Campo Santo of Nonconformists, the burial-ground in Finsbury, taking its name of Bunhill or Bonehill Field, from a vast mass of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1549. At a later period it served as a place of interment for those who died in the Great Plague of 1665. The day after Bunyan’s funeral, his powerful friend, Sir John Shorter, the Lord Mayor, had a fatal fall from his horse in Smithfield, and “followed him across the river.”

By his first wife, whose Christian name is nowhere recorded, Bunyan had four children—two sons and two daughters; and by his second wife, the heroic Elizabeth, one son and one daughter. All of these survived him except his eldest daughter Mary, his tenderly-loved blind child, who died before him. His wife only survived him for a brief period, “following her faithful pilgrim from this world to the other whither he was gone before her” either in 1691 or 1692. Forgetful of the “deed of gift,” or ignorant of its bearing, Bunyan’s widow took out letters of administration of her late husband’s estate, which appears from the Register Book to have amounted to no more than, £42 19s. On this, and the proceeds of his books, she supported herself till she rejoined him.

Bunyan’s character and person are thus described by Charles Doe: “He appeared in countenance to be of a stern and rough temper. But in his conversation he was 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 to 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, with an excellent discerning of persons, being of good judgment and quick wit. 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 later days time had sprinkled it with grey. His nose well set, but not declining or bending. His mouth moderately large, his forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest. Not puffed up in prosperity, nor shaken in adversity, always holding the golden mean.”

We may add the portrait drawn by one who had been his companion and fellow-sufferer for many years, John Nelson: “His countenance was grave and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame of his heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and did strike something of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God.”

The same friend speaks thus of Bunyan’s preaching: “As a minister of Christ he was laborious in his work of preaching, diligent in his preparation for it, and faithful in dispensing the Word, not sparing reproof whether in the pulpit or no, yet ready to succour the tempted; a son of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunder to secure and dead sinners. His memory was tenacious, it being customary with him to commit his sermons to writing after he had preached them. A rich anointing of the Spirit was upon him, yet this great saint was always in his own eyes the chiefest of sinners and the least of saints.”

An anecdote is told which, Southey says, “authenticates itself,” that one day when he had preached “with peculiar warmth and enlargement,” one of his hearers remarked “what a sweet sermon he had delivered.” “Ay,” was Bunyan’s reply, “you have no need to tell me that, for the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit.” As an evidence of the estimation in which Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it is recorded that Charles the Second expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen that “a learned man such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker.” “May it please your Majesty,” Owen replied. “I would gladly give up all my learning if I could preach like that tinker.”

Although much of Bunyan’s literary activity was devoted to controversy, he had none of the narrowness or bitter spirit of a controversialist. It is true that his zeal for what he deemed to be truth led him into vehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as its perverters. But this intensity of speech was coupled with the utmost charity of spirit towards those who differed from him. Few ever had less of the sectarian temper which lays greater stress on the infinitely small points on which all true Christians differ than on the infinitely great truths on which they are agreed. Bunyan inherited from his spiritual father, John Gifford, a truly catholic spirit. External differences he regarded as insignificant where he found real Christian faith and love. “I would be,” he writes, “as I hope I am, a Christian. But for those factious titles of Anabaptist, Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I conclude that they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, but from Hell or from Babylon.” “He was,” writes one of his early biographers, “a true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus, and did often bewail the different and distinguishing appellations that are among the godly, saying he did believe a time would come when they should be all buried.” The only persons he scrupled to hold communion with were those whose lives were openly immoral. “Divisions about non-essentials,” he said, “were to churches what wars were to countries. Those who talked most about religion cared least for it; and controversies about doubtful things and things of little moment, ate up all zeal for things which were practical and indisputable.” His last sermon breathed the same catholic spirit, free from the trammels of narrow sectarianism. “If you are the children of God live together lovingly. If the world quarrel with you it is no matter; but it is sad if you quarrel together. If this be among you it is a sign of ill-breeding. 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.” “There is,” writes Dean Stanley, “no compromise in his words, no faltering in his convictions; but his love and admiration are reserved on the whole for that which all good men love, and his detestation on the whole is reserved for that which all good men detest.” By the catholic spirit which breathes through his writings, especially through “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the tinker of Elstow “has become the teacher not of any particular sect, but of the Universal Church.”