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The Pilgrim's progress
by John Bunyan
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Excerpt:
These feelings when he approached towards manhood, recurred as might be expected less frequently and with less force; but though he represents himself as having been what he calls a town-sinner, he was never so given over to a reprobate mind, as to be wholly free from them. For though he became so far hardened in profligacy that he could " take pleasure in the vileness of his companions," yet the sense of right and wrong was not extinguished in him, and it shocked him if at any time he saw those who pretended to be religious act in a manner unworthy of their profession. Some providential escapes during this part of his life, he looked back upon afterwards, as so many judgements mixed with mercy. Once he fell into a creek of the sea, once out of a boat into the river Ouse near Bedford, and each time was narrowly saved from drowning. One day an adder crost his path; he stunned it with a stick, then forced open its mouth with the stick, and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers, " by which act," he says, " had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness have brought myself to my end." If this indeed were an adder, and not a harmless snake, his escape from the fangs was more remarkable than he was himself aware of. A circumstance which was likely to impress him more deeply occurred in the eighteenth year of his age, when being a soldier in the Parliament's army he was drawn out to go to the siege of Leicester: one of the same company wished to go in his stead; Bunyan consented to exchange with him, and this volunteer substitute standing centinel one day at the siege was shot through the head with a musket ball.
Some serious thoughts this would have awakened in a harder heart than Bunyan's; but his heart never was hardened. The self accusations of such a man are to be received with some distrust, not of his sincerity, but of his sober judgement. It should seem that he ran headlong into the boisterous vices which prove fatal to so many of the ignorant and the brutal, for want of that necessary and wholesome restrictive discipline which it is the duty of a government to provide; but he was not led into those habitual sins which infix a deeper stain. "Had not a miracle of precious grace prevented, I had laid myself open," he says, " even to the stroke of those laws, which bring some to disgrace and open shame before the face of the world." That grace he had;— he was no drunkard, for if he had been he would loudly have proclaimed it: and on another point we have his own solemn declaration, in one of the most characteristic passages in his whole works, where he replies to those who slandered him as leading a licentious life with women. "I call on them," he says, " when they have used to the utmost of their endeavours, and made the fullest enquiry that they can, to prove against me truly, that there is any woman in Heaven or Earth or Hell, that can say I have at any time, in any place, by day or night, so much as attempted to be naught with them. And speak I thus to beg mine enemies into a good esteem of me? No, not I! I will in this beg belief of no man. Believe, or disbelieve me in this, 'tis all a-case to me. My foes have missed their mark in this their shooting at me. I am not the man. I wish that they themselves be guiltless. If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy would be still alive and well. I know not whether there be such a thing as a woman breathing under the copes of Heaven, but by their apparel, their children, or by common fame, except my wife." And " for a wind-up in this matter" calling again not only upon men, but Angels to prove him guilty if he be, and upon God for a record upon his soul that in these things he was innocent, he says " not that I have been thus kept because of any goodness in me more than any other, but God has been merciful to me, and has kept me."
Bunyan married presently after his substitute had been killed at the siege of Leicester, probably therefore before he was nineteen. This he might have counted among his mercies, as he has counted it that he was led " to light upon a wife" whose father as she often told him, was a godly man who had been used to reprove vice both in his own house and among his neighbours, and had lived a strict and holy life both in word and deed. There was no imprudence in this early marriage, though they "came together as poor as poor might be, not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt them both;" for Bunyan had a trade to which he could trust, and the young woman had been trained up in the way she should go. She brought him for her portion two books which her father had left her at his death: " the Plain man's pathway to Heaven" was one: the other was Bayly, Bishop of Bangor's " Practice of Piety," which has been translated into Welsh (the author's native tongue) into Hungarian and into Polish and of which more than fifty editions were published in the course of a hundred years. These books he sometimes read with her; and though they did not, he says, reach his
heart to awaken it, yet they did beget within him some desires to reform his vicious life, and made him fall in eagerly with the religion of the times, go to church twice a day with the foremost, and there very devoutly say and sing as others did;— yet according to his own account, retaining his wicked life.
At this time Bunyan describes himself as having a most superstitious veneration for " the high place, Priest, Clerk, vestment, service, and what else, belonging to the Church," counting the Priest and Clerk most happy and without doubt blessed because they were as he then thought the servants of God, yea, he could "have laid down at the feet.of a Priest, and have been trampled upon by them, their name, their garb and work, did so intoxicate and bewitch" him. The service it must be remembered, of which he speaks, was not the Liturgy of the Church of England, (which might not then be used even in any private family without subjecting them to the penalty of five pounds for the first offence, ten for the second, and a year's imprisonment for the third,) but what the meagre Directory of the victorious Puritans had substituted for it, in which only the order of the service was prescribed, and all else left to the discretion of the minister. The first doubt which he felt in this stage of his progress, concerning his own prospect of salvation, was of a curious kind: hearing the Israelites called the peculiar people of God, it occurred to him that if he were one of that race, his soul must needs be safe; having a great longing to be resolved about this question he asked his father at last, and the old tinker assuring him that he was not, put an end to his hopes on that score.
One day the minister preached against sabbath breaking, and Bunyan who used especially to follow his sports on Sundays, fell in conscience under that sermon, verily believing it was intended for him, and feeling what guilt was, which he could not remember that he had ever felt before. Home he went with a great burthen upon his spirit; but dinner removed that burthen; his animal spirits recovered from their depression; he shook the sermon out of his mind, and away he went with great delight to his old sports. The Puritans notwithstanding the outcry which they had raised against what is called the Book of Sports, found it necessary to tolerate such recreations on the Sabbath, but it is more remarkable to find a married man engaged in games which are now only practised by boys. Dinner had for a time prevailed over that morning's sermon; but it was only for a time; the dinner sat easy upon him, the sermon did not; and in the midst of a game of cat, as he was about to strike the cat from the hole, it seemed to him as if a voice from Heaven suddenly darted into his soul and said, Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven? Or have thy sins, and go to Hell? "At this," he continues, " I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven, and was as if I had with the eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, and as if he did severely threaten me with some grievous punishment for these and other ungodly practices."
The voice he believed was from Heaven, and it may be inferred from his relation that though he was sensible the vision was only seen with the mind's eye he deemed it not the less real. The effect was to fasten upon his spirit a sudden and dreadful conclusion that it was too late for him to turn away from his wickedness, for Christ would not forgive him; he felt his heart sink in despair, and this insane reasoning past in his mind, "my state is surely miserable; miserable if I leave my sins, and but miserable if I follow them. I can but be damned; and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins, as be damned for few." Thus he says "I stood in the midst of my play, before all that were present, but yet I told them nothing; but having made this conclusion, I returned desperately to my sport again. And I well remember that presently this kind of despair did so possess my soul, that I was persuaded I could never attain to other comfort than what I should get in sin: for Heaven was gone already, so that on that I must not think. Wherefore I found within me great desire to take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed, that I might taste the sweetness of it,—lest I should die before I had my desires. In these things I protest before God I lie not; neither do I frame this sort of speech: these were really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires. The good Lord whose mercy is unsearchable, forgive me my transgressions!"
