The subscriber has been requested by his friend the Rev. Jeremiah
Chaplin, the worthy son of an honored father, [Footnote: The late
Rev. Dr. Chaplin, the founder and first president of Waterville
college, in the state of Maine.] and the editor of the present
selections from Bunyan, to attach to them some prefatory remarks.
Needless as he feels it himself to be, and presumptuous as, to some,
the attempt even may seem, to say aught in behalf of a work that,
faithfully drawn as it is from Bunyan's overflowing stores, can
require no other recommendation; yet the subscriber could not refuse
all compliance with the wishes of one who has given diligent and
hearty and appreciating study to the rich and varied remains of "the
immortal Dreamer."
Many of the Christians of our time, though conversant with the
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, and HOLY WAR, are apparently little aware of the
glowing genius, and fervent piety, and strong sense, and picturesque
imagery, and racy, vigorous English, that mark the many other
writings of the honored tinker of Elstow. These last, if less known
than the story of the pilgrimage to the Celestial City, and of the
siege and recovery of the good town of Mansoul, yet bear all of them
the traces of the same vivid fancy, the same earnest heart, and the
same robust and sanctified intellect. To save from comparative
disuse and consequent unprofitableness--from being buried in an
undeserved seclusion, if not oblivion, many sparkling truths, and
pithy sayings, and pungent rebukes, likely to do great good if they
could but have, in our busy day, a more general currency over the
wide mart of the world;--and to bespeak a new circle of influence,
and a broader sphere of notoriety and usefulness for these
overlooked legacies of a good and great man of a former age, has
been the editor's object in the prolonged sifting to which he has
subjected all Bunyan's writings. Of that patient and conscientious
study the present selection has been the result. It is not hoped, or
even wished for them, that in the case of any readers able to give
the requisite leisure, these excerpts should supersede the original
writings. But these last, in mass, are beyond the means and the time
which are at the command of many Christians, who would yet greatly
prize the briefer examples of Bunyan's experience and Bunyan's
teachings that are here presented. And even to others of more
affluence and leisure, this manual may serve to commend the author's
works in their entireness. Mr. Chaplin himself would most anxiously
disavow any claim to have exhausted the mines from which he brings
these gatherings. His specimens resemble rather those laces which
the good Bunyan tagged in Bedford jail--not in themselves garments,
but merely adjuncts and ornaments of larger fabrics. He who would
see the entire wardrobe of the Dreamer's mind, and the shape and
proportions of the goodly vestures of truth in which he sought to
array himself and his readers, must, after handling these the LACES,
turn to the ROBES, from whose edge these have been skilfully
detached.
In the character and history of JOHN BUNYAN, the great Head of the
church seems to have provided a lesson of special significance, and
singular adaptedness, for the men and the strifes of our own time.
Born of the people, and in so low a condition, that one of Bunyan's
modern reviewers, by a strange mistake, construed Bunyan's
self-disparaging admissions to mean that he was the offspring of
gypsies--bred to one of the humblest of handicrafts, and having but
the scantiest advantages as to fortune or culture, he yet rose,
under the blessings of God's word and providence and Spirit, to
widest usefulness, and to an eminence that shows no tokens of
decline. Down to our own times, the branches of his expanding
influence seem daily spreading and extending themselves; and the
roots of his earthly renown seem daily shooting themselves deeper,
and taking a firmer hold on the judgment of critics and the hearts
of the churches. When the English houses of Parliament were recently
rebuilt, among the imagery commemorative of the nation's literary
glories, a place was voted for the bust of the Bedford pastor, once
so maligned and persecuted. Once tolerated by dainty Christians for
the sake of his piety, while they apologized for what they deemed
his uncouthness; he is now, at last, even from men of the world, who
do not value that piety, receiving the due acknowledgment of his
rare genius and witching style. It is not many years since Gilpin,
an English clergyman of cultivated taste--himself a ready and
popular writer--issued an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress,
modified, if not rewritten in much of its phraseology, because he
deemed the original too rude for usefulness. In our own day, one of
the highest authorities as to the graces and powers of our language,
the English statesman and scholar, T. B. Macaulay, has pronounced
upon that style, which Gilpin by implication so disparaged, the most
glowing eulogies. Schools and leisure and wealth are useful, but
they are not indispensable either to felicity or to honor. Bunyan
lacked them all; and yet in the absence of them achieved greatness
--and what is far better, wide and enduring usefulness. No man, with
God's exhaustless Scriptures in his hands, and with the rich book of
nature and providence open in its pictured radiance before his eyes,
needs to have either a dwindling or an impoverished soul. Of that
latter volume, the works of God, as of that former, the word of God,
Bunyan was evidently a delighted and unwearied student. His
references to birds and insects, flowers and running brooks and
evening clouds, and forests and mountains, all show a man whose
nature was genially awake to the harmony and beauty of the material
world that lay in order and splendor around him. It was, in Bunyan,
no mere mimicry caught from books and companions--the echo of any
fashion of his times. He writes of what he had seen with his own
eyes; and seems to avoid aiming at aught beyond that. Hence to the
ocean, which probably he never thus saw--and which had he beheld it
in its placid vastness, or in its stormy wrath, he could not well
have forgotten--his writings contain, as far as we remember, no
allusions, in all the varied and exuberant imagery which they
employ. His books, more than those of his more learned
contemporaries, Richard Baxter, and John Owen, that "mighty
armor-bearer of the truth," as Bunyan happily calls him, were
written exclusively from the resources of his own personal
observation. And, in consequence of this, they have the freshness
and odors of the outer world pervading them--scents and sounds of
the highways along which, in the trampings of his trade, he had
plodded, and of the hedges that had shaded him. To use the language
of the patriarch's benediction, they have "THE SMELL OF A FIELD
WHICH THE LORD HATH BLESSED." His books are, like Walton's Angler,
of the open air, and the purling streams. You catch, back of the
good man's Bible, as he reverently ponders and commends it, glimpses
of rural landscapes, and of open skies--God's beautiful world, still
lovely, even though sin has marred it. Like the Sermon on the Mount,
Bunyan's page has the traits of field-preaching. And it was so,
also, in his references to the inner world of his own heart. He
wrote not from the dried specimens of earlier collectors--from the
shrivelled and rustling leaves of some old herbary--from the
philosophy and metaphysical analysis of other men's emotions, so
much as from the glowing records of his own consciousness and
experience, the fruits of grace and plants of righteousness,
blooming and fragrant in the watered garden of his own heart. And
this dipping of the pencil into his own soul, and into the freshness
of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his
perpetual originality and unsating freshness. Now, when men say
repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and
providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its
consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable,
against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and
memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as
carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly
plaints. With God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates
of his heaven brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be
reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by
some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth,
"fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look
upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor
persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a
child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its
eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and elastic temperament
colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from
the precincts of his prison. With a style sinewy as Cobbett's, and
simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant nature showing
itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance, how little
has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like
Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as
little was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a
train-bearer in the retinue of Fashion. Still less was he, like
Swift, the satirist of his times and of his kind, snarling at his
rulers, and turning at last to gnaw, in venomous rage, his own
heart. And yet he who portrayed the character of By-ends, and noted
the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes, lacked neither keenness of vision,
nor niceness of hand, to have made him most formidable in satire and
irony.
His present station in the literature of Britain affords an
illustration, familiar and obvious to every eye, of God's
sovereignty, and of the arrangements of Him "who seeth not as man
seeth." Had Pepys, or any other contemporary courtier that hunted
for place and pension, or fluttered in levity and sin, in the
antechambers of the later Stuarts, been asked, who of all the
writers of the times were likely to go down to posterity among the
lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous would have been his
apportionments of fame. Pepys might, from the Puritan education of
his boyhood, have named Owen, Bates, and Baxter; or from the
Conformist associations of his later years, have selected South, or
Patrick, or Tillotson, as the religious writers who had surpassed
all rivalry, or named a Walton or Castell, as having taken bonds of
fame for the perpetuity of their influence. Had he known of
Clarendon's preparations to become the historian of the Commonwealth
and Restoration, or of Burnet's habits of preserving memoirs of the
incidents and characters around him, he might have conjectured their
probable honors in after-times. But in poetry he would have classed
Dryden the royalist far above Milton the republican apologist of
regicide; and might, aping the fashions of the palace, have
preferred to either the author of Hudibras together with the lewd
playwrights who were the delight of a shameless court--hailing the
last as the most promising candidates for posthumous celebrity. How
little could he have dreamed that among these Puritans and
Non-conformists, whose unpopular cause he had himself deserted, and
whom his royal masters Charles and James had betrayed, amerced,
exiled, and incarcerated; in those conventicles so closely watched
and so sternly visited, which these persecuted confessors yet by
stealth maintained; aye, and in those dungeons, whither the informer
so often from these conventicles dragged them, British freedom had
its truest guardians, and British literature some of its noblest
illustrations. How little thought he that God had there, in his old
and glorious school of trial, his "hidden ones," like Bunyan, whose
serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious over wrong and
neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many contemporary
celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries of every
land inhabited by an English race, one of the names "men will not
willingly let die." How little could gilded and callous favorites of
the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile
Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were
but rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they
had been immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer
withdrew from man to commune with the King of kings. There the
prisoned student was receiving for the churches new lessons of
surpassing beauty and potency; and the confessor, pillaged by
informers and bullied by judges, and lamented in his own stricken
household and desolate home, but only derided by his godless
sovereign and heartless courtiers, yet often found himself
compensated for every loss, when, like an earlier witness for the
gospel of the Cross, enwrapped "IN THE SPIRIT, ON THE LORD'S DAY."
Such were the schools where Non-conformist piety received its
temper, its edge, and its lustre. The story of Bunyan is, we say,
one of the golden threads binding together into harmony and
symmetry, what, seen apart, seem but fragmentary and incoherent
influences--the track of a divine Providence controlling the fates
and reputations of the race. It is a Providence disappointing men's
judgments and purposes, exalting the lowly and depressing the
illustrious, rebuking despondency on the one hand and on the other
curbing presumption, setting up one and putting down another. This
is done even now and even here, as one of the many intimations which
even time and earth present, of that final and universal reparation
which is reserved for the general resurrection and the last
judgment. Then the unforgetting and universal Sovereign will avenge
all the forgotten of his people, nor leave unpunished one among the
tallest and mightiest of his enemies. As the foreshadowing of this,
there is often in this life what Milton has called, "a resurrection
of character." Seen in Bunyan and others on earth, it will be one
day accomplished as to all the families of mankind. We pronounce TOO
SOON upon the apparent inequalities of fame and recompense around
us; while we fail to take in the future as well as the present, and
attempt to solve the mysteries of time without including in the
field of our survey the retributions of that eternity which forms
the selvage and hem of all the webs of earth. And we pronounce not
only too soon but VERY SUPERFICIALLY upon the inequalities of
happiness in the lot of those who fear and those who scorn God;
while we look mainly or merely to the outward circumstances of home
and station and bodily well-being, but take no note of the inner and
more enduring elements of felicity, supplied to the sufferer for
Christ by the blended powers of conscience and of hope--the one of
them purified and pacified by the blood of the great sacrifice on
Calvary; the other of them steadily and cheerfully soaring to the
glories and rest of the mount Zion above. Faithful, in his cage,
bearing the gibes and flouts of the rabble who thirsted for his
blood, was one of the happiest men in all Vanity Fair, even ere the
hour when his spirit mounted the fiery chariot that hurried him to
his celestial home.
The style of Bunyan, it may be further said, is one of the countless
and brilliant testimonials to the merit and power of our excellent
received version of the Bible. Shut out, as Bunyan was, from direct
contact with much other literature, he was most thoroughly
conversant with the remains of prophets and apostles, embalmed in
that venerable work. With those scriptures his mind was imbued,
saturated, and tinged, through its whole texture and substance. Upon
the phraseology and imagery and idioms of that book was formed his
own vernacular style, so racy, glowing, and energetic--long indeed
underrated and decried, but now beginning to receive its due honors,
and winning the praise of critics whose judgment and taste few will
have the hardihood to impeach. No immaculate perfection, indeed, is
claimed for the English version of the Scriptures. No perfect
version has the world ever seen, or is it ever like to see; but the
writings of Bunyan must be admitted to stand among the many crowding
trophies of the power of our common Bible to furnish the mind with
"thoughts that breathe and words that burn"--with holiest
conceptions and mightiest utterances.
And Bunyan himself, as a theologian on whose head no learned academy
had laid its hand of patronage, or let fall its anointing dews, but
who, whether confronting the fanatics of his time or the
distinguished latitudinarian divines, showed himself so powerful a
reasoner, so acute and clear and practical a thinker, and so mighty
in his knowledge of the Scriptures--Bunyan himself, in his position
and merits as a theologian, furnishes a standing monument of the
power of the divine Spirit to fashion, by prayer and the study of
the Bible, by affliction and by temptation, and by bitter
persecutions even, a preacher, pastor, and writer, such as no
university need have disdained to own. To that Spirit Bunyan gave
zealous, earnest, and continual worship. Receiving his light and
power from that good Spirit, and anxiously directing to that great
Agent all the hopes and the praises of the flock whom he led, and of
the readers whom he taught, his writings remain to diffuse and
perpetuate the lesson of his life. Into whatever tribe of the
ancient East or of the remote West his Pilgrim has been introduced,
the name and story of the writer bear, as their great lesson, the
testimony that God's Scriptures are the richest of pastures to the
human soul; and that God the Holy Ghost, as working with those
Scriptures and by those Scriptures, is the one Teacher on whose
sovereign aid all the churches, all the nations, and all the ages
must depend. For the absence of those influences of the divine
Spirit no earthly lore can compensate; while the exuberance of those
influences may supply, as on Pentecost, the lack of all human
helpers and patrons, and more than replace all universities and all
libraries. We love to dwell on the illustrious Dreamer, as one of
those characters for whom man had done so little and God did so
much.
And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life
of romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike
to awe and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope. No
scene or station of all the earth that can eye paradise, or catch
the gleams of the atoning cross, is truly ignoble or utterly
forlorn. He who promised that, in the last days, the inscription
which shone on the front of the high-priest's mitre, "HOLINESS UNTO
THE LORD," should be written also on the very bells of the horses,
and that "every pot" in Jerusalem, and its outlying streets should
become holy as the consecrated furniture of his own temple and
altar, can in like manner render the lowliest scenes of human art
and toil and traffic the schools of truth and duty and peace,
schools ministering alike to the truest happiness and to the most
perfect holiness of our race. He who gave, as in Bunyan's case he
did, to the maker or mender of culinary vessels the sacred skill to
grave the all-holy Name, as one dignifying and consecrating them, on
all the objects and scenes and accompaniments of his humble labors,
can, in our times and in our various stations, make each allowable
task of our earthly life to become also "HOLINESS TO THE LORD;" and
as the Christian's body is made a TEMPLE of the Holy Grhost, so can
he render the Christian himself, in all his social relations and
enterprises, "A PRIEST AND A KING UNTO GOD." And the great principle
of conciliation amid earth's jarring tribes and clashing interests,
and of true and helpful communion among mankind, is not external but
internal, not material but spiritual, not, terrene but celestial;
and is found in the blending by this one divine Spirit, of all
earth's inhabitants, in a common contrition before a common
redemption, tending as these inhabitants are, under a common sin and
doom, to the same inevitable graves; but all of them invited, in the
one name of one Christ, to aspire to the same heaven of endless and
perfect blessedness.
WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.
NEW YORK, January, 1851.