(May 1854.)
John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628.He may be said to have been born a tinker.The tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation.They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled.Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the tribe.He had a fixed residence, and was able to send his son to a village school where reading and writing were taught.
The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire.It is not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors.
Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly away with him.As he grew older, his mental conflicts became still more violent.The strong language in which he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr Southey.It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness.He is called in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand plucked from the burning.He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow.Mr Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the following rhapsody:--"No man of common sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of the earth.Now be astonished, O heavens, to eternity! and wonder, Oearth and hell! while time endures.Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their lives, they ought to have understood better.
There cannot be a greater mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his neighbours.
Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg.It is quite certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity and innocence.Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to have been the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others.He declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in all manner of vice.But, when those who wished him ill accused him of licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his purity.No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any improper advances to her.Not only had he been strictly faithful to his wife; but he had even before his marriage, been perfectly spotless.It does not appear from his own confessions, or from the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life.
One bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended again.The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a great respect.The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat, and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton.Arector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model.But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and his scruples.
