(_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, May 1854.)
John Bunyan, {132}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 {133}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.
Byland, 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, O earth 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 {134}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, acknowledge 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. A rector of the school of Laud
would {135}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.
When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was
interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts.
He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served during the decisive
campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at
the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was
killed by a shot from the town. Bnnyan ever after considered himself as
having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.
It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to
draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from
guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under
its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain
Credence, are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among
those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax’s army.
In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some
pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.
And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined
by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infections
virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began
to be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict
Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His
favourite amusements were {136}one after another relinquished, though
not without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tipcat he
paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick in his hand. He
had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go
to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an
awful countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of
bell-ringing he renounced: but he still for a time ventured to so to
the church tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the
thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple
would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place.
To give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some
months elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling
sin. When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by
the maxims of that austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as
an eminently pious youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever.
Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding
in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements
which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some
special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies
which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.
At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood
would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but
his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had
no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.
At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: “If I have
not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, {137}I can work miracles.” He was
tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, “Be ye dry,”
and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.
Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the
neighbouring villages was past; that all who were to be saved in that
part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray
and strive some months too late.
Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right,
and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal
impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to
the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated
before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran
through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He
began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin,
and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the
forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and
especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.
Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined,
were repeating close to his ear the words, “Sell him, sell him.” He
struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were
ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour:
“Never, never; not for thousands of worlds; not for thousands.” At
length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to
escape him, “Let him go, if he will.” Then his misery became more
fearful than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He had
forfeited his part of {138}the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had
sold his birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance.
“None,” he afterwards wrote, “knows the terrors of those days but
myself.” he has described his sufferings with singular energy,
simplicity, and pathos, he envied the brutes; he envied the very stones
in the street, and the tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold
its light and warmth from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould,
and though still in the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days
together with the fear of death and judgment. He fancied that this
trembling was the sign set on the worst reprobates, the sign which
God had put on Cain. The unhappy man’s emotion destroyed his power of
digestion. He had such pains that he expected to burst asunder like
Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.
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 {139}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 {140}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 tomorrow.” Year after year he
lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worst 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 {141}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.
He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. No two things,
according to him, had less affinity than the form of prayer and the
spirit of prayer. Those, he said with much point, who have most of the
spirit of prayer are all to be found in gaol; and those who have most
zeal for the form of prayer are all to be found at the alehouse. The
doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly praised, and defended
against some {142}Arminian clergymen who had signed them. The most
acrimonious of all his works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint of
Pelagianisin.
Banyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to which
he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the distinguishing
tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that tenet as one of high
importance, and willingly joined in communion with quiet Presbyterians
and Independents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him
a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original
combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with
rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert
Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical Writer has
ever surpassed.
During the years which immediately followed the Restoration,
Bunyan’s confinement seems to have been strict. But, as the
passions of 1660 cooled, as the hatred with which the Puritans had been
regarded while their reign was recent gave place to pity, he was less
and less harshly treated. The distress of his family, and his own
patience, courage, and piety softened the hearts of his persecutors.
Like his own Christian in the cage, he found protectors even among the
crowd of Vanity Fair. The bishop of the diocese, Dr. Barlow, is said
to have interceded for him. At length the prisoner was suffered to
pass most of his time beyond the walls of the gaol, on condition, as it
should seem, that he remained within the town of Bedford.
He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of the
worst governments that England has ever {143}seen. In 1671 the Cabal was
in power. Charles II. had concluded the treaty by which he bound himself
to set up the Roman Catholic religion in England. The first step which
he took towards that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exercise
of his prerogative, all the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics;
and, in order to disguise his real design, he annulled at the same
time the penal statutes against Protestant nonconformists. Bunyan was
consequently set at large. In the first warmth of his gratitude he
published a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane and
generous Persian king who, though not himself blessed with the light of
the true religion, favoured the chosen people, and permitted them, after
years of captivity, to rebuild their beloved temple. To candid men, who
consider how much Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could guess the
secret designs of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness with which
he accepted the precious boon of freedom will not appear to require any
apology.
Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made his name
immortal. The history of that book is remarkable. The author was, as he
tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had occasion to speak of the
stages of the Christian progress. He compared that progress, as many
others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered
innumerable points of similarity which had escaped his predecessors.
Images came crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into
words, quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft
vales, sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was strewn
with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town all bustle and
splendour, like London on the Lord {144}Mayor’s Day, and the narrow
path, straight as a rule could make it, running on up hill and down
hill, through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the
Shining Gate. He had found out, as most people would have said,
by accident, as he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of
Providence, where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he
was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory
would occupy in English literature; for of English literature he knew
nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might
easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a detailed
examination of the passages in which the two allegories have been
thought to resemble each other. The only work of fiction, in all
probability, with which he could compare his pilgrim, was his old
favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton. He would have thought
it a sin to borrow any time from the serious business of his life, from
his expositions, his controversies, and his lace tags, for the purpose
of amusing himself with what he considered merely as a trifle. It was
only, he assures us, at spare moments that he returned to the House
Beautiful, the Delectable Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. He had no
assistance. Nobody but himself saw a line till the whole was complete.
He then consulted his pious friends. Some were pleased. Others were
much scandalised. It was a vain story, a mere romance, about giants, and
lions, and goblins, and warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters
and sometimes regaled by fair ladies in stately palaces. The loose
atheistical wits at Will’s might write such stuff to divert the painted
Jezebels of the court: but did it become a minister of the gospel to
copy the evil fashions of the world? There had {145}been a time when the
cant of such fools would have made Bunyan miserable. But that time was
passed; and his mind was now in a firm and healthy state. He saw that,
in employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, he
was only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to
himself; and he determined to print.
The _Pilgrim’s Progress_ stole silently into the world. Not a single
copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. The year of
publication has not been ascertained. It is probable that, during
some months, the little volume circulated only among poor and obscure
sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified
the imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a
fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a
multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human
beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within
and from without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some
stroke of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his
mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to
produce its effect. In puritanical circles, from which plays and novels
were strictly excluded, that effect was such as no work of genius,
though it were superior to the Iliad, to Don Quixote, or to Othello, can
ever produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary luxury. In 1678
came forth a second edition with additions; and then the demand became
immense. In the four following years the book was reprinted six times.
The eighth edition, which contains the last improvements made by the
author, was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the tenth in 1685.
The help of the engraver had early been {146}called in; and tens of
thousands of children looked with terror and delight on execrable
copperplates, which represented Christian thrusting his sword into
Apollyon, or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland, and
in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his
native country. Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that
in New England his dream was the daily subject of the conversation of
thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding.
He had numerous admirers in Holland, and amoung the Huegonots of France.
With the pleasures, however, he experienced some of the pains of
eminence. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name;
and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor
ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book which was called
his.
He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him and
those who slandered him. He continued to work the gold-field which he
had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures, not indeed with quite
such ease and in quite such abundance as when the precious soil was
still virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far
behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It
was soon followed by the “Holy War,” which, if the “Pilgrim’s Progress”
did not exist, would be the best allegory that ever was written.
Bunyan’s place in society was now very different from what it had been.
There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who could talk
Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with scorn. But his
fame and influence now far exceeded theirs. He had so great an authority
among the Baptists that he was popularly {147}called Bishop Bunyan. His
episcopal visitations were annual. From Bedford he rode every year to
London, and preached there to large and attentive congregations. From
London he went his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of
his brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up quarrels.
The magistrates seem in general to have given him little trouble. But
there is reason to believe that, in the year 1685, he was in some danger
of again occupying his old quarters in Bedford gaol. In that year the
rash and wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the Government a pretext for
prosecuting the Nonconformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of the
Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained unmolested.
Baxter was in prison: Howe was driven into exile: Henry was arrested.
Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy,
were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged:
and Kiffin’s grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is that,
during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a
waggoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a
smock-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took
place. James the Second was at open war with the church, and found
it necessary to court the Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the
government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that
he had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore
hoped that he might be equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But
fifteen years of thought, observation, and commerce with the world
had made him wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a
professed Protestant: James was a {148}professed Papist. The object of
Charles’s indulgence was disguised: the object of James’s indulgence
was patent. Bunyan was not deceived, he exhorted his hearers to prepare
themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which menaced their
civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier
who came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was
supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal dignity to the Bishop
of the Baptists.
Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the summer of 1688 he
undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and at
length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one. This
good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride
through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was
seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was buried in
Bunhill Fields; and the spot where he lies is still regarded by the
Nonconformists with a feeling which, seems scarcely in harmony with the
stern spirit of their theology. Many puritans, to whom the respect paid
by Roman Catholics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish
or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their
coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin of the author
of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which
followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined
to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom
was he during that time mentioned with respect by any writer of great
literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the
wretched D’Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the adventures of
Christian are ranked {149}with those of Jack the Giant-Killer and John
Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did
not venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance that, till
a recent period, all the numerous editions of the “Pilgrim’s Progress”
were evidently meant for the cottage and the servants’ hall. The paper,
the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description. In
general, when the educated minority and the common people differ about
the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally
prevails. The “Pilgrim’s Progress” is perhaps the only book about which,
after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over
to the opinion of the common people.
The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate this book
are not to be numbered. It has been done into verse: it has been
done into modern English. “The Pilgrimage of Tender Conscience,” the
“Pilgrimage of Good Intent,” “The Pilgrimage of Seek Truth,” “The
Pilgrimage of Theophilus,” “The Infant Pilgrim,” “The Hindoo Pilgrim,”
are among the many feeble copies of the great original. But the peculiar
glory of Bunyan is that those who most hated his doctrines have tried to
borrow the help of his genius. A Catholic version of his parable may be
seen with the head of the Virgin in the title page. On the other hand,
those Antinomians for whom his Calvinism is not strong enough may study
the pilgrimage of Hephzibah, in which nothing will be found which can be
construed into an admission of free agency and universal redemption. But
the most extraordinary of all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work
of art was ever defaced was committed so late as the year 1853. It was
determined to transform {150}the “Pilgrim’s Progress” into a Tractarian
book. The task was not easy: for it was necessary to make the two
sacraments the most prominent objects in the allegory; and of all
Christian theologians, avowed Quakers excepted, Bunyan was the one in
whose system the sacraments held the least prominent place. However,
the Wicket Gate became a type of Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the
Eucharist. The effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious
person who made it never contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim
passes through the Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful hurries past
the House Beautiful without stopping, the lesson, which the fable in its
altered shape teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptized, and
that the Eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody would have discovered
from the original “Pilgrim’s Progress” that the author was not a
Pædobaptist. To turn his book into a book against Pædobaptism was an
achievement reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders must
necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a great
work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.