LECTURE I.

BUNYAN AND HIS TIMES.

Historical sketch of the period.—Bunyan's contemporaries. His boyhood and convictions of sin.-The Providence and Grace of God illustrated in his life and conversion. The characters he met with.-His Evangelist. His spiritual and intellectual discipline.-Necessity of experimental piety, for a full appreciation and understanding of the Pilgrim's Progress.

Ir a man were to look about the world, or over all the world's history, for that one of his race, in whose life there should be found the completest illustration of the providence and grace of God, he could hardly fix upon a more perfect instance than that of John Bunyan. The detailed biography of this man I shall not attempt to present, in so short a sketch as that to which I must of necessity confine myself. But there are points in his life, where the Divine Providence is unfolded so gloriously, and junctures where the Divine grace comes out so clearly and so brightly, that nothing could be more simple, beautiful, and deeply interesting, than their illustration. On some of these points I shall dwell, premising, in order to a right view of them, a rapid but important glance at the age in which he lived.

It was an age of great revolutions, great excitement, great genius, great talent; great extremes both in good and evil; great piety and great wickedness; great freedom and great tyranny and oppression. Under Cromwell there was great liberty and prosperity; under the Charleses there was great oppression and disgrace. Bunyan's life, continuing from 1628 to 1688, embraces the most revolutionary and stirring period in English history. There pass before the mind within this period the oppressive reign of Charles First; the characters of Laud and Strafford; the star chamber, and the king's tyrannical men, courts, and measures; the noble defence of liberty in the house of Commons; Hampden and Pym; the war between the King and Parliament; the king's defeat, and death upon the scaffold; the glorious protectorate of Cromwell, few years, but grand and prosperous, a freedom and prosperity united, such as England had never known; then comes the hasty, unconditional restoration of a Prince who cared for nothing but his own pleasure, the dissolute, tyrannical reign of Charles Second, one of the most promising, lying, unprincipled, worthless, selfish, corrupted and corrupting kings that ever sat upon the throne of England; in the terribly severe language of the Edinburgh Review, a king, "who superseded the reign of the saints by the reign of strumpets; who was crowned in his youth with the Covenant in his hand, and died with the Host sticking in his throat, after a life spent in dawdling suspense between Hobbism and Popery;" a king and a reign, of which one of the grand climacterics in wickedness embraced the royal murders of the noble patriots Russell and Algernon Sydney; immortal be their names, and honoured ever be their memories; a reign the very beginning of which, threw John Bunyan into prison, and produced a Bartholomew's day to thousands of the conscientious ministers of the Church of England,

The king's reign from the time of the restoration, began in contempt of all religion, and continued in debauchery and drunkenness. Even those persons who may have taken their views of the history of this period simply from the pages of Hume, may, if they will look narrowly, gather so much as this. Agreeable to the present prosperity of public affairs," says Hume, "was the universal joy and festivity diffused throughout the

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nation. The melancholy austerity of the fanatics fell into discredit, together with their principles. The royalists, who had ever affected a contrary disposition, found in their recent success new motives for mirth and gayety; and it now belonged to them to give repute and fashion to their manners. From past experience it had sufficiently appeared that gravity was very distinct from wisdom, formality from virtue, and hypocrisy from religion. The king himself, who bore a strong propensity to pleasure, served, by his powerful and engaging example, to banish those sour and malignant humours, which had hitherto engendered such confusion. And though the just bounds were undoubtedly passed, when once returned from their former extreme, yet was the public happy in exchanging vices, pernicious to society, for disorders, hurtful chiefly to the individuals themselves who were guilty of them."

This means simply that the nation, under the example of the king and the royalists, having thrown off the vices and vicious restraints of gravity, formality, and hypocrisy, so generally pernicious to society, became almost entirely abandoned to the more individual "disorders" of profligacy and sensual licentiousness. They were happy in exchanging "those sour and malignant humours" for the more luscious and generous qualities of sin. The restoration, says Bishop Burnet, brought with it the throwing off the very professions of virtue and piety; and all ended in entertainments and drunkenness, which overran the three kingdoms.

As the reign began so it continued; and it was a period when just such men, as God had been preparing in the case of Bunyan, were most needed; just such men also, as he had ready in Baxter, Owen, Howe, and a multitude of others, perhaps quite equal in piety, though not so distinguished as these. So was fulfilled the great principle, that when the Enemy cometh in like a flood, then the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.

As to the measures of this reign for the destruction of religious liberty, with which more especially we are now concerned, it opened with what is called the Corporation Act, by which, in defiance of all the king's previous stipulations, all persons, whose religious principles constrained them conscientiously to refuse conformity to the established Episcopal Church, were at once expelled and excluded from every branch of the magistracy, and rendered incapable of serving their country in the meanest civil offices.

Next followed the memorable statute against the Society of Friends, by which upwards of four thousand persons were cast into prison for their religious scruples, and treated with the utmost cruelty, with even a savage barbarity.

In the second year of this reign, 1662, came the Act of Uniformity, suppressing by force, all diversity of religious opinions, imposing the book of Common Prayer, and reviving for this purpose the whole terrific penal laws of preceding reigns. This was to take effect from the feast day of St. Bartholomew, in 1662; the day of a former wellknown dreadful massacre of Protestants in Paris, and other French cities, the 24th of August, 1572, nearly an hundred years previous; and a day, on which more than two thousand conscientious ministers were silenced, ejected from their pulpits, and thrown into persecution and poverty. For these men, to preach, or conduct public worship, was made a penal offence against the state; and among these men are such names as those of Owen, Bates, Manton, Goodwin, Baxter, and Howe; towards whom that very cruelty was enacted by the Established Church of England, which, in the case of the Jewish Church, is said to have filled up the measure of its crimes, and prepared the Jewish people for the divine vengeance; "forbidding the apostles to speak to the Gentiles, that they might be saved." No matter how holy, nor how eminently useful the body of the non-conforming clergy might be; the act would have passed, it has truly been said, though the measure had involved the eternal misery of half the nation.

Of this act Hume himself says; (and I like to take authorities of which it may be said, our enemies themselves being judges ;) Hume himself says that in it the Church party gladly laid hold of the prejudices (the conscientious scruples) which prevailed among the Presbyterians," in order to eject them from their livings. By the Bill of Uniformity it was required that every clergyman should be reordained, if he had not before received Episcopal ordination; should declare his assent to every thing contained in the book of Common Prayer; should take the oath of canonical obedience; should abjure the solemn league and covenant; and should renounce the principle of taking arms, on any pretence whatsoever, against the king. This bill reinstated the Church in the same condition in which it stood before the commencement of the civil wars; and as the old persecuting

laws of Elizabeth still subsisted in their full vigour, and new clauses of a like nature were now enacted, all the king's promises of toleration and of indulgence to tender consciences were thereby eluded and broken." The same historian observes that the ecclesiastical form of government, according to the Presbyterian discipline, is "more favourable to liberty than to royal power;" and hence the readiness of Charles to break all promises of tolerance which he had made for the gaining of the throne, and to produce an iron uniformity of ecclesiastical subjection, in which he might break down all the defences raised against regal encroachments. The spirit of religious liberty always has been, and ever must be, the world's greatest safeguard against the oppression of political tyranny.

Two years after this statute came the memorable Conventicle Act, in 1664. It was found that these holy clergymen, though banished from their own pulpits, would preach, and that people would hear; preach any where, and hear any where; in dens and caves of the earth, in barns and private houses, so it were but the Gospel. To put a stop to this, and to extirpate all public worship, not within the walls of Episcopal consecration, the barbarous statute of a preceding reign was declared in force, which condemned all persons refusing to attend the public worship appointed by the State to banishment; and in case of return, to death without benefit of clergy. It was then enacted that if any person should be present at any assembly, conventicle or meeting, under colour or pretence of any exercise of religion in other manner than is allowed by the liturgy or practice of the church of England; or if any person shall suffer any such meeting in his house, barn, yard, woods, or grounds; they should, for the first and second offence, be thrown into jail or fined; for the third offence, transported for seven years, or fined a hundred pounds; and in case of return or escape after such transportation, death, without benefit of clergy! Troops of horse and foot were on the alert, to break up such meetings; the ravages and forfeitures for this crime of religious worship according to conscience, became very great; the jails were filled with prisoners; others were transported as convicts; other whole families emigrated, informers were multiplied, and the defence and security. of life, liberty, and property, in the trial by jury, were broken down.

Next came the Great Plague, in which the non-conformist clergy, having before been driven from their pulpits by power of persecution, the established clergy fled from theirs through fear of death. But when men fled, who feared death more than God, then those men entered their places, who feared nothing but God. They came, those same persecuted and silenced clergy, when the court and parliament had removed to Oxford, and the hirelings had fled from their flocks, they came, in defiance of law and contagion, and ministered the bread of life to pale multitudes, at altars, from which they would have been driven with penal inflictions in the season of health. But this too must be stopped; and therefore, by this very parliament sitting in Oxford, through fear of the plague in London, and to shut out those men, who entered with the Gospel where others dared not enter, a fresh penal law was enacted, by which, unless they would take an oath that the Earl of Southampton declared in parliament no honest man could take, all non-conformist ministers were banished five miles from any city, town, or borough, that sent members to Parliament, and five miles from any place whatsoever, where they had, at any time, in a number of years past, preached. This savage act produced, of course, great suffering, but it also called into exercise great endurance and patience, for Christ's sake. Ministers who would not sacrifice their duty to God and their people, and who had to be concealed at a distance, sometimes rode thirty or forty miles, to preach to their flocks in the night, fleeing again from their persecutors before the dawn of day.

In 1670, the barbarous Conventicle Act was renewed with still greater severity, the trial by jury in case of offenders was destroyed, no warrant to be reversed by reason of any default in the form, persons to be seized wherever they could be found, informers encouraged and rewarded, and justices punished, who would not execute the law. Archbishop Sheldon addressed a circular letter to all the bishops of his province, commanding them to take notice of all offenders, and to aid in bringing them to punishment. The Bishop of Peterborough declared publicly concerning this law, that "It hath done its business against all fanatics, except the Quakers; but when the parliament sits again, a stronger law will be made, not only to take away their lands and goods, but also to sell them for bond-slaves." The magistracy became, it has been truly remarked, under this law, an encouragement to evil doers, and a punishment of those who did well.

We shall pursue no further the history of political and ecclesiastical cruelty in this

arbitrary persecuting reign. It is enough to make the very name of the union of church and state abhorred in the mind of every man, who has a spark of generosity or freedom in his composition. Thus much was absolutely necessary to illustrate the life of Bunyan, and the providence and grace of God in the age where God placed him. It was an age for the formation and intrepid action of great minds; it was also an age for the development of apostolic piety, and endurance of suffering, on the part of men and ministers who chose to obey God rather than man. If great qualities and great capacities of virtue existed, there were great flames to try them; sharp tools and terrible, to cut and polish the hidden jewels of the Saviour.

Into this age Bunyan was thrown; a great pearl, sunk in deep and troubled waters, out of which God's Spirit would, in due time, draw it, and place it in a setting, where its glorious lustre should attract the admiration of the world. There were along with him great men, and men of great piety, both in the established church and out of it. He was born in the village of Elstow, in the year 1628, thirty years after the death of Spenser, twelve years after the death of Shakspeare, when Milton was in his twentieth year, and three years before the birth of Dryden. Bunyan's life and times were also Baxter's, Baxter being but thirteen years the oldest. Bunyan died in 1688, Milton in 1674, Baxter in 1691. Owen was another contemporary, 1616-1683. John Howe was another, born 1630. Philip Henry was another, born 1631. The sweet poet George Herbert should be named as another. Matthew Poole was another, born 1623. Lord Chief Justice Hale was another,

Thomas Goodwin was another, born in 1600. born in 1609. Cudworth was born in 1617; Henry More was born in 1614, and died in 1687, a year before the death of Bunyan; Archbishop Usher and Bishop Hall both of them died in 1656. Taking these names together, you have a striking picture of the great richness of the age, both in piety and genius; an ascending series of great minds and good men from every rank and party.

But, for complete originality of genius, Bunyan, all things considered, stands foremost amongst them all. The form of his work, the nature of the subject, and its creation so completely out of the depths of his own soul, unaided by learning or art, place it before every other uninspired production. Without the teaching of the Spirit of God, the genius of the poet, though he were Shakspeare himself, could no more have portrayed the inward life of the soul by external images and allegories, than a man born blind could paint the moon and the stars, the flowers, the forests, and the foliage. The education of Bunyan was an education for eternity, under the power of the Bible and the schooling of the Holy Spirit. This is all that the pilgrims in this world really need, to make them good, great, powerful. But, set aside the Bible, and in Bunyan's education there was not one of the elements, out of which the genius and learning of his contemporaries gathered strength and richness. Baxter was not, any more than Bunyan, a child of the universities; but Baxter's intellect was sharpened by a great exercise with the schoolmen; though, even if this discipline had been entirely wanting in Baxter's development, the result, on the whole, might not have been less happy, nay, it might have been richer. He would not have preached with less fervour, nor less scriptural power and beauty; and, though he might not have been so keen a disputant, so subtle a casuist, yet we cannot believe that his Saint's Rest would have lost one ray of its heavenly glory. Neither would the Pilgrim's Progress have gained in its beauty or its truth,-it would have lost in both, had Bunyan's soul been steeped in that scholastic discipline, without which, the learned Selden used to say, a divine knows nothing logically; just as if the Bible were not the best logic in the world! Bunyan never heard of Thomas Aquinas, it is true, and he scarcely knew the philosophical meaning of the word Logic any more than a breathing child, whose pulse beats freely, knows the place of its heart, or the movement of its lungs; but Bunyan wrote the Pilgrim's Progress for all that; which, indeed, is itself the sweet logic of Celestial Love.

Bunyan's own life is an illustration of the guidance of Divine Providence, as clearly as his Pilgrim's Progress is a delineation of the work of the Divine Spirit. And perhaps the Providence of God, in the education of this man, may be traced quite as distinctly in the things from which he shut out Bunyan's soul, in order to prepare him for his mission, as in the influences by which he surrounded him. The fountains from which he was prevented drinking, though other men drank to the full, and almost worshipped the springs, it was better to keep sealed from his soul, if the pure river of the water of life was to flow through his pages. This peculiarity of his training fitted him to be

one of the most original writers in the world. Almost the only books Bunyan ever read, at least before he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress, were the Bible, the Book of Martyrs, a copy of Luther on Galatians, and two volumes, the Plain Man's Path-way to Heaven, and the Practice of Piety, which formed the marriage portion of his wife. Foxe's old Book of Martyrs had, next to the Bible, a great and thrilling power over Bunyan's spirit. Bunyan has given an account of his own conversion and life, especially of the workings of the grace of God, and the guidance of his providence, in a little work entitled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It is powerfully written, though with extreme and studied plainness; and almost all the material obtained and worked into various shapes by his various biographers was gained in that book. It is deeply interesting, and in following its delineation I shall mark some successive particulars, in which the providence and grace of God are clearly illustrated, and which, on a comparison with the Pilgrim's Progress, make it evident at once that in that work Bunyan was following his own experience, and that in such experience, God was so ordering all things as to fit Bunyan for that work.

As you read the Grace Abounding you are ready to say at every step, Here is the future author of Pilgrim's Progress. It is as if you stood beside some great sculptor, and watched every movement of his chisel, having had his design described to you beforehand, so that at every blow some new trait of beauty in the future statue comes clearly into view. In the Grace Abounding you see at every step the work of the Divine Artist on one of the most precious living stones that ever his wisdom and mercy selected in this world to shine in the glory of his living temple. Nay, to lay aside every figure but that employed by the Holy Spirit, you see the refiner's fire, and the crucible, and the gold in it, and the Heavenly Refiner himself sitting by it, and bending over it, and carefully removing the dross, and tempering the heat, and watching and waiting for his own perfect image. How beautiful, how sacred, how solemn, how interesting, how thrilling the process!

But with Bunyan it begins in dreams. Would you think it? Indeed it is no illusion, but the very beginning of God's refining work on Bunyan's soul. The future dreamer for others was himself visited with dreams, and this is the first point which I mark, where the providence and grace of God are illustrated together; for it is the first point which Bunyan himself has noted down, after describing the iniquity of his childhood, "in cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God." "Yea," says he, "so settled and rooted was I in these things, that they became as a second nature to me; the which, as I have also with soberness considered since, did so offend the Lord, that even in my childhood he did scare and affrighten me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with fearful visions. For often after I had spent this and the other day in sin, I have in my bed been greatly afflicted while asleep, with the apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which I never could be rid." If now you would have a glimpse of the nature of these terrifying dreams, with which Bunyan's sinful childhood was visited, you have only to turn to your Pilgrim's Progress, and there read the powerful description of the last sight shown to Christian in the House of the Interpreter. There you have the manner in which, even in Bunyan's childish soul, his partly awakened conscience, with his vivid imagination, and the word and the Spirit of God, wrestled together. And now, before leaving this point for another, let me call your attention to a text strikingly illustrative of it, which I marvel that Bunyan himself had not used, to which none of his biographers, that I am aware of, save one, in dwelling upon this early experience, have referred, but which, in the unconverted state of a man, made afterwards by God's grace so signally useful, receives, as well as reflects, a very striking illustration. It is that remarkable passage in Job, where the Divine Spirit is recounting the discipline of God with his creatures for the salvation of their souls. "For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. You may find this in the thirty-third chapter, and the whole is worthy of studying. Bunyan not only in his childhood, but all his life, was made the subject of such discipline. The next point which I shall select as an illustration of Divine Providence in Bunyan's life, sets us down with him in the parliamentary army, as a soldier. It was probably in 1645, at the siege of Leicester. He was drawn to be one of the besiegers; but when he