Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted, were likely to do much good in a case like his.His small library had received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable end of Francis Spira.One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal consequences."I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid that you have."At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer;and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of God.Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone.When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand.After he had been some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect.He was indeed illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men.The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort the half contemptuous admiration of scholars.Yet it was long before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.
Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from without.He had been five years a preacher, when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose history is known to us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated.In November 1660, he was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained, with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years.
His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness; and he was fully determined to obey God rather than man.He was brought before several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain.He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles.He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith.He was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly liberated.He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he would be liable to banishment, and that, if he were found in England after a certain time his neck would be stretched.His answer was, "If you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow."Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worse prison now to be found in the island is a palace.
His fortitude is the more extraordinary, because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent.He had several small children, and among them a daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness.He could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten; "yet,"he added, "I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison he could do nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family.He determined, therefore, to take up a new trade.
He learned to make long tagged thread laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers.While his hands were thus busied, he had other employment for his mind and his lips.He gave religious instruction to his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which he was himself the pastor.He studied indefatigably the few books which he possessed.His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs.His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill spelt lines of doggrel in which he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical Babylon.
At length he began to write; and though it was some time before he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful.They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly-bought spiritual experience.They therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well received by the humbler class of Dissenters.
Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy.He wrote sharply against the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter abhorrence.It is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted one of their peculiar fashions: his practice was to write, not November or December, but eleventh month and twelfth month.