Fox's Book of Martyrs
Chapter XIX
This great Puritan
was born the same year that the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth. His home
was Elstow, near Bedford, in England. His father was a tinker and he was brought up to the same trade.
He was a lively, likeable boy with a serious and almost morbid side to his
nature. All during his young manhood he was repenting for the vices of his
youth and yet he had never been either a drunkard or immoral. The particular acts that troubled his conscience were dancing,
ringing the church bells, and playing cat. It was while playing the latter game
one day that "a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my soul, which
said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
Hell?'" At about this time he overheard three or four poor women in
Bedford talking, as they sat at the door in the sun. "Their talk was about
the new birth, the work of God in the hearts. They were far above my
reach."
In
his youth he was a member of the parliamentary army for a year. The death of
his comrade close beside him deepened his tendency to serious thoughts, and
there were times when he seemed almost insane in his zeal and penitence. He was
at one time quite assured that he had sinned the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost. While he was still a young man he married
a good woman who bought him a library of pious books which he read with
assiduity, thus confirming his earnestness and increasing his love of religious
controversies.
His
conscience was still further awakened through the
persecution of the religious body of Baptists to whom he had joined himself.
Before he was thirty years old he had become a leading
Baptist preacher.
Then
came his turn for persecution. He was arrested for
preaching without license. "Before I went down to the justice, I begged of
God that His will be done; for I was not without hopes that my imprisonment
might be an awakening to the saints in the country. Only in that matter did I
commit the thing to God. And verily at my return I did meet my God sweetly in
the prison."
His
hardships were genuine, on account of the wretched condition of the prisons of
those days. To this confinement was added the personal
grief of being parted from his young and second wife
and four small children, and particularly, his little blind daughter. While he
was in jail he was solaced by the two books which he
had brought with him, the Bible and Fox's "Book of Martyrs."
Although
he wrote some of his early books during this long
imprisonment, it was not until his second and shorter one, three years after
the first, that he composed his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress," which was published three years later. In an earlier tract he had
thought briefly of the similarity between human life and a pilgrimage, and he
now worked this theme out in fascinating detail, using the rural scenery of
England for his background, the splendid city of London for his Vanity Fair,
and the saints and villains of his own personal acquaintance for the finely
drawn characters of his allegory.
The
"Pilgrim's Progress" is truly the rehearsal of Bunyan's own spiritual
experiences. He himself had been the 'man clothed in Rags, with his Face from
his own House, a Book in his hand, and a great Burden upon his Back.' After he
had realized that Christ was his Righteousness, and that this did not depend on
"the good frame of his Heart"-or, as we should say, on his
feelings-"now did the Chains fall off my legs indeed." His had been
Doubting Castle and Sloughs of Despond, with much of
the Valley of Humiliation and the Shadow of Death. But, above
all, it is a book of Victory. Once when he was
leaving the doors of the courthouse where he himself had been
defeated, he wrote: "As I was going forth of the doors, I had much
ado to bear saying to them, that I carried the peace of God along with
me." In his vision was ever the Celestial City, with all its bells
ringing. He had fought Apollyon constantly, and often wounded, shamed and fallen, yet in the end "more than conqueror
through Him that loved us."
His
book was at first received with much criticism from his Puritan friends, who
saw in it only an addition to the worldly literature of his day, but there was
not much then for Puritans to read, and it was not long before it was devoutly
laid beside their Bibles and perused with gladness and with profit. It was perhaps two centuries later before literary critics began to
realize that this story, so full of human reality and interest and so
marvelously modeled upon the English of the King James translation of the
Bible, is one of the glories of English literature. In his later years he wrote
several other allegories, of which
of one of them, "The Holy War," it has been
said that, "If the 'Pilgrim's Progress'
had never been written it would be regarded as the finest allegory in the
language."
During
the later years of his life, Bunyan remained in Bedford as a venerated local
pastor and preacher. He was also a favorite speaker in the non-conformist
pulpits of London. He became so national a leader and teacher that he was
frequently called "Bishop Bunyan."
In
his helpful and unselfish personal life he was
apostolic.
His
last illness was due to exposure upon a journey in which he was endeavoring to reconcile a father with his
son. His end came on the third of August, 1688. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, a church yard in London.
There
is no doubt but that the "Pilgrim's Progress" has been more helpful
than any other book but the Bible. It was timely, for
they were still burning martyrs in Vanity Fair while he was writing. It is
enduring, for while it tells little of living the Christian life in the family
and community, it does interpret that life so far as
it is an expression of the solitary soul, in homely language. Bunyan indeed
"showed how to build a princely throne on humble truth." He has been
his own Great heart, dauntless guide to pilgrims, to many.
Chapter 20 - Life of John Wesley