Part 11

All were written in simple language, with the earnestness of one, who, as he said, grieved more over the backsliding of one of his converts "than if one of my own children were going to the grave."

With the restoration of Charles II. the rule of Puritanism was over. Dissenters' chapels were shut up. The worshippers were commanded to attend the Established Church. Bunyan had preached for five years; and he could not give up his work, even now that his pulpit was closed by law. He continued to preach in barns and private houses.

On Nov. 12, 1600, he went to the little hamlet of Lower Samsell, near Harlington, to preach. Some one communicated this fact to a magistrate, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. This was told him, and he had time to escape; but he said if he were to flee, "the weak and newly converted brethren would be afraid to stand." He would never play the coward.

He opened the meeting with prayer, and began to speak from the words, "Dost thou believe on the Son of God?"

When the officers arrived, he was ordered to cease speaking. He replied "that he was about his Master's business, and must rather obey his Lord's voice than that of man." However, knowing that resistance was useless, as he was arrested in the king's name, he was led away to prison "with God's comfort," he says, "in my poor soul." He would not promise to discontinue preaching, saying rather, "If I were out of prison to-day, I would preach the gospel again to-morrow." He was sentenced to remain in prison for three months; if at the end of that time he refused to give up preaching, he would be sent away from his country, and if he came back without license, he would be hanged. Those were times of dreadful intolerance, and yet in this age we have not ceased to be intolerant of those whose beliefs are not like our own!

Bunyan had recently married a second time, and his wife was dangerously ill. He was a man of deep affections and loved his home. He said, "What a man is at home, that he is indeed. My house and my closet show most what I am, to my family and to the angels, though not to the world."

He wrote in prison, "The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of my flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am too, too fond of those great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the hardships, miseries, and wants my poor family was like to meet with should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had beside. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee.

"But yet, thought I, I must venture all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you. I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and children."

As the coronation of Charles II. took place in the spring of 1661, and it was customary to pardon prisoners under sentence for any offence short of felony, it was hoped by the followers of Bunyan that he would be released. As the local authorities did not put his name on the list of those who might properly be pardoned, his young wife, Elizabeth, scarcely recovered from her illness, travelled to London, and with great courage made her way to the House of Lords, and presented her petition to one of the peers. He received her kindly, but told her that her husband's case must be left with the judges at the next assizes.

Three times Elizabeth Bunyan, "with abashed face and trembling heart," stood before the judges, pleading for her husband. One of the judges, Sir Matthew Hale, was very kind to her, though he feared he could not help her, as the law was against her husband. The other judge, Twisden, was brutal in his manner, so that she feared he would strike her.

Unsuccessful, the poor woman went back to her home, and John Bunyan remained for twelve long years in prison.

For the first six months Bunyan was allowed considerable liberty by his sympathetic jailer. He went to some of the meetings of the Baptists, and to his home. Some of the bishops heard of it, and sent a messenger from London to ascertain if this were really so. The officer was told to call at night at the prison. It happened that Bunyan had been allowed to remain at his home that night, but he became so uneasy that he told his wife he must go back to prison. It was so late when he returned that the jailer chided him for coming at all.

Soon afterward the messenger arrived. "Are the prisoners all safe?" he asked.

"Yes," was the reply.

"Is John Bunyan safe?"

"Yes."

"Let me see him."

Bunyan was called, and fortunately was able to appear. When the messenger was gone, the jailer said, "Well, you may go out again just when you think proper, for you know when to return better than I can tell you." Soon, however, the jailer was censured, and came near losing his position, while Bunyan himself was not permitted "to look out at the door." His name does not appear again at a church meeting for seven years.

Bunyan's prison life was a very busy one. He did not, says his friend and biographer, the Rev. Charles Doe, "spend his time in a supine and careless manner, or eat the bread of idleness. For there I have been witness, that his own hands have ministered to his and to his family's necessities, by making many hundred gross of long, tagged, thread laces, to fill up the vacancies of his time, which he had learned for that purpose since he had been in prison. There also I surveyed his library, the least and yet the best that ever I saw, consisting only of two books, a Bible and the 'Book of Martyrs.'"

Bunyan's Bible and his Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" came into the possession of Mr. Bohn, the London publisher, and were purchased from him for the Bedford library, where they have been seen by thousands of visitors.

"With those two books," says Froude, "Bunyan had no cause to complain of intellectual destitution. Foxe's Martyrs, if he had a complete edition of it, would have given him a very adequate knowledge of history.... The Bible, thoroughly known, is a literature of itself--the rarest and richest in all departments of thought or imagination which exists."

Besides these books, he seems to have had a rosebush, about which he wrote a poem:--

"This homely Bush doth to mine eyes expose, A very fair, yea, comely, ruddy rose. This rose doth always bow its head to me, Saying, 'Come pluck me; I thy rose will be.'"

He also wrote verses about a spider whose habits he closely watched.

Bunyan's prison, if it had much of discomfort, gave him leisure to read and write--the one thing for which most persons of brain are struggling. "Prisons in those days," says Canon Venables, "and indeed long afterwards, were, at their best, foul, dark, miserable places. A century later John Howard found Bedford jail, though better than some, in what would now be justly deemed a disgraceful condition. One who visited Bunyan during his confinement speaks of it 'as an uncomfortable and close prison.'"

Once or twice his friends tried to regain his liberty for him, but he always left the matter with his Lord. When they failed to obtain his freedom, he said, "Verily, I did meet my God sweetly again, comforting of me and satisfying of me, that it was his will and mind that I should be there."

In prison Bunyan's pen was a source of great joy to himself, and a blessing to all the world. His earliest prison work was "Profitable Meditations" in verse. He put portions of the Old and New Testament into poetry. Froude calls the "Book of Ruth" and the "History of Joseph" "beautiful idylls."

He wrote in prose a treatise on prayer, entitled, "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian Behavior;" the "Holy City," an exposition of the closing chapters of Revelation; a work on the "Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal Judgment;" and "Grace Abounding," the story of his own conversion. The latter book, "if he had written no other," says Canon Venables, "would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest masters of the English language of his own or any other age."

This book was published by George Larkin, in London, in 1666, in the sixth year of Bunyan's imprisonment.

Besides these, he wrote his "Confession of Faith," and his "Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith."

Bunyan's imprisonment came to an end May 8, 1672. Through the Declaration of Indulgence, granted by Charles II., Nonconformists were once more allowed to worship God as they chose.

It seems probable, from Bunyan's later biographers, that "Pilgrim's Progress" was written during a subsequent imprisonment of six months in 1675, when the Nonconformists were again suffering the rigors of law.

The first edition appeared in 1678, when Bunyan was fifty years old. A second edition was issued the same year, and a third, with additions, the year following, 1679.

After it was written in prison, Bunyan, always distrusting his own abilities, consulted with his friends about the wisdom of publishing it, as will be seen from the metrical preface:--

"When at first I took my pen in hand, Thus for to write, I did not understand That I at all should make a little book In such a mode; nay, I had undertook To make another; which, when almost done, Before I was aware I this begun.

* * * * * *

Well, when I had thus put my ends together, I showed them others, that I might see whether They would condemn them, or them justify: And some said, 'Let them live;' some, 'Let them die.' Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so;' Some said, 'It might do good;' others said, 'No.' Now was I in a strait, and did not see Which was the best thing to be done of me; At last I thought, since you are thus divided, I print it will, and so the case decided."

Bunyan was already famous. The day after he was released from prison, he began to preach in a barn standing in an orchard in Bedford, which one of the congregation, Josias Ruffhead, acting for the members of the church, had purchased, "to be a place for the use of such as doe not conforme to the Church of England, who are of the Persuasion commonly called Congregationall." The barn was so thronged that many were obliged to stay outside. Here he preached till his death, sixteen years afterward.

He had a general oversight of the churches far and near, and was often called Bishop Bunyan.

He was urged to reside in London, but he would not leave Bedford. Here he lived in a cottage which had three small rooms on the ground floor--such a house as laborers now use. Behind the cottage stood a small building which served as his workshop. A person visiting him found in his "study" the Bible, "Pilgrim's Progress," and a few other books, chiefly his own productions, "all lying on a shelf or shelves."

His beloved blind daughter, Mary, had died while he was in prison. The other children, Thomas, John, Joseph, Sarah, and Elizabeth, four by the first mother, and two by the second, brightened the plain Bedford cottage. His son Thomas became a minister in 1673, the year after his father regained his liberty.

Whenever Bunyan went to London to preach, says Charles Doe, "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 up-stairs to his pulpit." To what honor had the poor tinker already come!

It is said that Charles II. 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," was the reply, "I would gladly give up all my learning if I could preach like that tinker."

The wonderful success attending the "Pilgrim's Progress" must have been a surprise to modest John Bunyan. Macaulay says, "He had no suspicion that he was producing a masterpiece." It spread his fame over Europe and the American settlements. It was translated into many foreign languages during his life.

Dr. Brown says: "It is found in _Northern Europe_--in Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Lettish, Esthonian, and Russ; in _Eastern Europe_--in Servian, Bulgarian, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish; and in _Southern Europe_--in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romaic, or modern Greek. In _Asia_, it may be met with in Hebrew, Arabic, Modern Syriac, Armeno-Turkish, Græco-Turkish, and Armenian. Farther to the south, also, it is seen in Pashtu, or Afghani, and in the great Empire of India it is found in various forms.

"It has been translated into Hindustani or Urdu, Bengali, Uriya or Orissa, Hindi, Sindhi, Panjabi or Sikh, Telugu, Canarese, Tamil, Malayaline, Marathi-Balbodh, Gujarati, and Singhalese.

"In Indo-Chinese countries there are versions of it in Assamese, Khasi, Burmese, and Sgau-Karen. It has been given to the Dyaks of Borneo, to the Malays, to the Malagasy, to the Japanese, and to the many-millioned people of China, in various dialects, both classical and colloquial."

It has also been translated into the languages of Western Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Mexicans, and various tribes of Indians.

The greatest minds of the world have been unanimous in its praise. Everybody agrees with Toplady, who wrote "Rock of Ages," that "it is the finest allegorical work extant."

Macaulay said, "Bunyan is the first of allegorists, as Shakespeare is the first of dramatists," and recommended the study of his simple style to any who wished to gain command over his mother tongue.

Coleridge said, "I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend, as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth, according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as 'The Pilgrim's Progress.'"

Fronde well says it has made Bunyan's "name a household word in every English-speaking family on the globe." Hallam calls his style "powerful and picturesque from concise simplicity." Green, the historian, thinks "Bunyan's English the simplest and homeliest English that has ever been used by any great English writer.... It is the English of the Bible."

The second part of "Pilgrim's Progress" was published seven years after the first, in 1685. In 1680 appeared the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," a contrast to the good Pilgrim; in 1681, "Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ," which went through several editions; and in 1682, the "Holy War," which, Macaulay says, would have been our greatest allegory if "Pilgrim's Progress" had never been written. It represents the fall and recovery of man.

Several small books from Bunyan's pen appeared from year to year. In 1688, the year of his death, five of his works were published, "Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or a Help to Despairing Souls;" "The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate;" a poetical composition entitled, "The Building, Nature, and Excellency of the House of God;" the "Water of Life;" and "Solomon's Temple Spiritualized." "The Acceptable Sacrifice" was going through the press at the time of his death.

Besides these, Bunyan had prepared the manuscript of fourteen or more works. Ten were published soon after his death, by his devoted friend, Charles Doe, who said he thought the best work he could do for God was to get Bunyan's books printed and sold.

In the summer of 1688, a young man, in whom Bunyan was deeply interested, told him that his father was about to disinherit him, and begged the preacher to see him. Though scarcely recovered from an illness, he at once rode on horseback to Reading, met the father, obtained a promise of forgiveness, and returned homeward through London, where he was to preach near Whitechapel.

His forty miles to London were made through a pouring rain. Drenched and weary, he reached the home of his friend, Deacon John Strudwick, Holborn Bridge, Snow Hill. With his usual determination to do what he thought to be his duty, he preached Sunday, Aug. 19, 1688. Twelve days later, Aug. 31, he was dead. In two months he would have been sixty years old. He was buried in Mr. Strudwick's vault, in the Dissenters' burying-ground at Bunhill Field. The mother of John Wesley sleeps close by. This place was called Bunhill or Bonehill, from a vast quantity of human remains removed to it from the charnel house of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1549.

Bunyan died as he had lived, in complete trust and faith. He asked those who stood around his bedside to pray, and he joined fervently with them. "Weep not for me," he said, "but for yourselves. I go to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will, no doubt, through the mediation of his blessed Son, receive me, though a sinner, where I hope we ere long shall meet to sing the new song, and remain everlastingly happy, world without end, Amen."

His blind Mary had gone before him; and Elizabeth, his noble wife, died four years after him, in 1692.

Bunyan's preaching was natural, simple, and earnest, with now and then an appropriate comparison and anecdote. He said, "I have observed that a word cast in by-the-by hath done more execution in a sermon than all that was spoken besides. Sometimes, also, when I have thought I did no good, then I did the most of all; and at other times, when I thought I should catch them, I have fished for nothing."

The Rev. Charles Doe describes Bunyan "as tall of stature, strong-boned, though not corpulent; somewhat of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes, ... hair reddish, but in his later days time had sprinkled it with gray, ... forehead something high, and his habit always plain and modest.... In his conversation he was mild and affable, not given to loquacity or much discourse in company.... He had a sharp, quick eye, with an excellent discerning of persons, being of good judgment and quick wit."

He was careful in preparing his sermons, usually committing them to writing after he had preached them. In composing his books his habit was, "first with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again."

Froude says if Bunyan's "importance may be measured by the influence which he has exerted over succeeding generations, he must be counted among the most extraordinary persons whom England has produced.... To understand, and to make others understand, what Christ had done, and what Christ required men to do, was the occupation of his whole mind, and no object ever held his attention except in connection with it." Is it any wonder that the ministry of the poor, uneducated tinker was a marvellous success?

Visitors from all parts of the world go to Bedford yearly to look upon the scenes associated with Bunyan's life. In the Manor are seen his will, his cabinet, the Church Book, and various editions and foreign versions of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

Bunyan's chair is also shown, and the oak door with iron crossbars, once a part of Bedford jail, the home of the great preacher for twelve long years.

[Illustration: THOMAS ARNOLD.]

THOMAS ARNOLD.

Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, "England's greatest schoolmaster," was born at West Cowes, Isle of Wight, June 13, 1795. He was the youngest son and seventh child of William and Martha Arnold. His father died before he was six years old. His early education was intrusted to his mother's sister, Mrs. Delafield; and later, at the age of twelve, he was sent to Winchester.

This aunt he never forgot. When she was seventy-seven he wrote to her, "This is your birthday, on which I have thought of you, and loved you, for as many years past as I can remember. No tenth of September will ever pass without my thinking of you and loving you."

The shy, retiring boy was early fond of books. When he was three, he received a present from his father of Smollett's "History of England," "as a reward," says Dean Stanley, in his life of Arnold, "for the accuracy with which he had gone through the stories connected with the portraits and pictures of the successive reigns; and at the same age he used to sit at his aunt's table arranging his geographical cards, and recognizing by their shape at a glance the different counties of the dissected map of England."

His first childish literary work was at the age of seven,--a play, on "Piercy, Earl of Northumberland." Between eight and twelve, when at school at Warminster, he rejoiced in Homer. A schoolmate writes: "Arnold's delight was in preparing for some part of the Siege of Troy; with a stick in his right hand, and the cover of a tin box, or any flat piece of wood, tied upon his left arm, he would come forth to the battle, and from Pope's Homer would pour forth fluently the challenge or the reproach.... Every book he had was easily recognized as his property by helmet and shields, and Hectors and Achilleses, on all the blank leaves; many of mine had some token of his graphic love of those heroes."

The home life seems to have been full of affection. Rose E. Selfe, in the _World's Worker_ series, gives these letters. His brother Matthew writes him from school, in 1800, before he is five years old, asking him for a letter, "with all the news you can think of. What new books you have, whether you like the great Bible as well as you did, how your garden and the flowers come on."

"My _darling little_ Tom...." his sister Susannah writes, "I shall expect to find you _very much_ improved, particularly in your _reading_. As you know you are _fond_ of kissing, give our DEAREST, DEAREST, DEAREST Mamma and Aunt ten each from Fan and myself. Oh, how I wish I could see and kiss them _myself_, and _you, too_, my _sweet dear_ Tom! I should like to know _very much_ if you are as fond of geography as you were last Christmas; tell _me_ when _you honour_ us with a letter. Adieu now, my _lovely_ Boy. With _sincerely_ wishing you _health_ and _happiness_,

I remain, your truly affectionate and loving sister,

SUE ARNOLD."

This sister, an invalid for twenty years, was most unselfish and lovable in character. She died at Laleham in 1832.

At the Winchester school he was called the poet Arnold to distinguish him from another boy of the same name. He used to recite ballad poetry for the pleasure of his schoolmates, and wrote a long poem, "Simon de Montfort," in imitation of Scott's "Marmion."