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This great Puritan was born the same year that the Pilgrim Fathers landed
at
At about this time he overheard three or four poor women in
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.
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
In his vision was ever the
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,
During the later years of his life, Bunyan remained in 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 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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