FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS
CHAPTER XIX
An Account of the Life and Persecutions of John Bunyan
This great Puritan was born the same year that the Pilgrim
Fathers landed at Plymouth. His home was Elstow, near Bedford,
in England. His father was a tinker and he was brought up to the
same trade. He was a lively, likeable boy with a serious and
almost morbid side to his nature. All during his young manhood
he was repenting for the vices of his youth and yet he had never
been either a drunkard or immoral. The particular acts that
troubled his conscience were dancing, ringing the church bells,
and playing cat. It was while playing the latter game one day
that "a voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my soul, which
said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy
sins and go to Hell?'" At about this time he overheard three or
four poor women in Bedford talking, as they sat at the door in
the sun. "Their talk was about the new birth, the work of God in
the hearts. They were far above my reach."
In his youth he was a member of the parliamentary army for a
year. The death of his comrade close beside him deepened his
tendency to serious thoughts, and there were times when he seemed
almost insane in his zeal and penitence. He was at one time quite
assured that he had sinned the unpardonable sin against the Holy
Ghost. While he was still a young man he married a good woman who
bought him a library of pious books which he read with assiduity,
thus confirming his earnestness and increasing his love of
religious controversies.
His conscience was still further awakened through the
persecution of the religious body of Baptists to whom he had
joined himself. Before he was thirty years old he had become a
leading Baptist preacher.
Then came his turn for persecution. He was arrested for
preaching without license. "Before I went down to the justice, I
begged of God that His will be done; for I was not without hopes
that my imprisonment might be an awakening to the saints in the
country. Only in that matter did I commit the thing to God. And
verily at my return I did meet my God sweetly in the prison."
His hardships were genuine, on account of the wretched
condition of the prisons of those days. To this confinement was
added the personal grief of being parted from his young and
second wife and four small children, and particularly, his little
blind daughter. While he was in jail he was solaced by the two
books which he had brought with him, the Bible and Fox's "Book of
Martyrs."
Although he wrote some of his early books during this long
imprisonment, it was not until his second and shorter one, three
years after the first, that he composed his immortal "Pilgrim's
Progress," which was published three years later. In an earlier
tract he had thought briefly of the similarity between human life
and a pilgrimage, and he now worked this theme out in fascinating
detail, using the rural scenery of England for his background,
the splendid city of London for his Vanity Fair, and the saints
and villains of his own personal acquaintance for the finely
drawn characters of his allegory.
The "Pilgrim's Progress" is truly the rehearsal of Bunyan's
own spiritual experiences. He himself had been the 'man cloathed
in Rags, with his Face from his own House, a Book in his hand,
and a great Burden upon his Back.' After he had realized that
Christ was his Righteousness, and that this did not depend on
"the good frame of his Heart"--or, as we should say, on his
feelings--"now did the Chains fall off my legs indeed." His had
been Doubting Castle and Sloughs of Despond, with much of the
Valley of Humiliation and the Shadow of Death. But, above all, it
is a book of Victory. Once when he was leaving the doors of the
courthouse where he himself had been defeated, he wrote: "As I
was going forth of the doors, I had much ado to bear saying to
them, that I carried the peace of God along with me." In his
vision was ever the Celestial City, with all its bells ringing.
He had fought Apollyon constantly, and often wounded, shamed and
fallen, yet in the end "more than conqueror through Him that
loved us."
His book was at first received with much criticism from his
Puritan friends, who saw in it only an addition to the worldly
literature of his day, but there was not much then for Puritans
to read, and it was not long before it was devoutly laid beside
their Bibles and perused with gladness and with profit. It was
perhaps two centuries later before literary critics began to
realize that this story, so full of human reality and interest
and so marvelously modeled upon the English of the King James
translation of the Bible, is one of the glories of English
literature. In his later years he wrote several other allegories,
of which of one of them, "The Holy War," it has been said that,
"If the 'Pilgrim's Progress' had never been written it would be
regarded as the finest allegory in the language."
During the later years of his life, Bunyan remained in
Bedford as a venerated local pastor and preacher. He was also a
favorite speaker in the non-conformist pulpits of London. He
became so national a leader and teacher that he was frequently
called "Bishop Bunyan."
In his helpful and unselfish personal life he was apostolic.
His last illness was due to exposure upon a journey in which he
was endeavoring to reconcile a father with his son. His end came
on the third of August, 1688. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, a
church yard in London.
There is no doubt but that the "Pilgrim's Progress" has been
more helpful than any other book but the Bible. It was timely,
for they were still burning martyrs in Vanity Fair while he was
writing. It is enduring, for while it tells little of living the
Christian life in the family and community, it does interpret
that life so far as it is an expression of the solitary soul, in
homely language. Bunyan indeed "showed how to build a princely
throne on humble truth." He has been his own Greatheart,
dauntless guide to pilgrims, to many.
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Mark 1:15 (KJV)