A History of English Literature

eligious instinct and his obstinate self-will. He has told the whole story
in his spiritual autobiography, 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,'
which is one of the notable religious books of the world. A reader of it
must be filled about equally with admiration for the force of will and
perseverance that enabled Bunyan at last to win his battle, and pity for
the fantastic morbidness that created out of next to nothing most of his
well-nigh intolerable tortures. One Sunday, for example, fresh from a
sermon on Sabbath observance, he was engaged in a game of 'cat,' when he
suddenly heard within himself the question, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and
go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' Stupefied, he looked up to
the sky and seemed there to see the Lord Jesus gazing at him 'hotly
displeased' and threatening punishment. Again, one of his favorite
diversions was to watch bellmen ringing the chimes in the church steeples,
and though his Puritan conscience insisted that the pleasure was 'vain,'
still he would not forego it. Suddenly one day as he was indulging in it
the thought occurred to him that God might cause one of the bells to fall
and kill him, and he hastened to shield himself by standing under a beam.
But, he reflected, the bell might easily rebound from the wall and strike
him; so he shifted his position to the steeple-door. Then 'it came into his
head, "How if the steeple itself should fall?"' and with that he fled alike
from the controversy and the danger.
Relief came when at the age of twenty-four he joined a non-sectarian church
in Bedford (his own point of view being Baptist). A man of so energetic
spirit could not long remain inactive, and within two years he was
preaching in the surrounding villages. A dispute with the Friends had
already led to the beginning of his controversial writing when in 1660 the
Restoration rendered preaching by persons outside the communion of the
Church of England illegal, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Bedford
jail. Consistently refusing to give the promise of submission and
abstention from preaching which at any time would have secured his release,
he continued in prison for twelve years, not suffering particular
discomfort and working for the support of his family by fastening the ends
onto shoestrings. During this time he wrote and published several of the
most important of his sixty books and pamphlets. At last, in 1672, the
authorities abandoned the ineffective requirement of conformity, and he was
released and became pastor of his church. Three years later he was again
imprisoned for six months, and it was at that time that he composed the
first part of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' which was published in 1678. During
the remaining ten years of his life his reputation and authority among the
Dissenters almost equalled his earnest devotion and kindness, and won for
him from his opponents the good-naturedly jocose title of 'the Baptist
bishop.' He died in 1688.
Several of Bunyan's books are strong, but none of the others is to be named
together with 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' This has been translated into
nearly or quite a hundred languages and dialects--a record never approached
by any other book of English authorship. The sources of its power are
obvious. It is the intensely sincere presentation by a man of tremendous
moral energy of what he believed to be the one subject of eternal and
incalculable importance to every human being, the subject namely of
personal salvation. Its language and style, further, are founded on the
noble and simple model of the English Bible, which was almost the only book
that Bunyan knew, and with which his whole being was saturated. His
triumphant and loving joy in his religion enables him often to attain the
poetic beauty and eloquence of his original; but both by instinct and of
set purpose he rendered his own style even more simple and direct, partly
by the use of homely vernacular expressions. What he had said in 'Grace
Abounding' is equally true here: 'I could have stepped into a style much