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John Bunyan is best known for his famous book “Pilgrims Progress” But he also wrote other books such as “Visions of Heaven and Hell,” ”Grace abounding to the Chief of sinners,” and “Holy War made by Shaddai upon diabolist”, John Bunyan was born on 1628 in Elstow, near Bedford. Johns Father, Thomas Bunyan was a tinker. This job seems to have been held in low reputation in those days, probably because of the traveling and cheating lifestyle of most of the tinker society. But Bunyan’s father had a settled place of dwelling in Elstow and a good reputation among his neighbors. After Johns Mother died in 1644, He enlisted in the army, the side of the parliament. Also, Thomas made sure that John went to school at a time when it was much less universal for parents in a humble position to benefit themselves of the blessings of education for their children than happily it is now. John learned to read and write even though he later said that he “did soon lose that little [that he had] learned” (Bunyan p.9). During John’s early life, he made some incredible escapes from pending danger. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning, and when he served in the Parliamentary army, a soldier asked to take Bunyan’s post. That man was “shot into the head with a musket bullet, and died” (Bunyan p.10). Afterwards, Bunyan looked back with a bottomless emotion of thankfulness to a preserving and long-suffering God who had cut him off in his sins but had mingled mercy with judgment. Among those mercies, not the smallest amount of which, was his being led while yet a very young man “to light upon a wife” ( Bunyan p.10) who had been religiously educated. Her example and conversation swayed the young tinker to go somewhat often to church and to choose his own fireside and her company to the alehouse and his drinking buddies. His wife just happened to have two books that she brought to their marriage which played a major influence on Bunyan’s spiritual development. To truly develop a desire to seek the Christian faith, nevertheless, John was yet a foreigner to a true encounter with God. He had acquired a certain taste for churchgoing and an immense reverence. John’s strong and lively imagination would often be effectively excited by situations that would have had a small impression on the typical person’s mind. But he was still a total foreigner to true faith. John’s devotions were as proper as could well be conceived, and they were often futile to keep his conscience quiet even though be felt a certain type of satisfaction in returning to them. His spiritual thinking was stupendously confused and contradictory. They seemed to have been accompanied by a strong leaning toward mysticism as well as bold speculation. From time to time a glimmer of light and hope shot across the darkness of his anxious soul, and he thought he could distinguish what it was reasonable and expedient for him to do in order to be at peace with himself and his God. John said on one occasion: “I stood in the midst of my play, before all that were present, but yet I told them nothing; but having made this conclusion, I returned desperately to my sport again. And I remember that presently this kind of despair did so posses my soul that I was persuaded I could never attain no other comfort than what I should get in sin, for heaven was gone already so that on that I must not think. Wherefore I found within me great desire to take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed that I might taste the sweetness of it lest I should die before I had my desires.” (Bunyan p.12).
From this miserable path, he was rescued in an unusual way. A woman, herself, of very bad character, happened one to day scold him for swearing. She told him that he was “the ungodliest fellow that ever she heard in all her life” (Bunyan p.13) and fit to corrupt all the youth in the town. The criticism hit him so powerfully that from that hour, he decided to put an end to the sin of swearing. He also pledged himself anew to the reading of his Bible, His behavior was so changed that his neighbors started to come across on him as quite a transformed character. Formerly, he had taken great delight in ringing the church bells. With his conscience growing very tender, he began to feel that “such practice was but vain” (Bunyan p.13) He abandoned that amusement and also quit dancing, considering it an ensnaring and frivolous recreation. He did not know the necessity of a deeper, more powerful changed of heart and nature than anything he had yet experienced; however, he felt certain misgivings and unrest as his true condition in the sight of God. Happenings to overhear some pious women talking about regeneration, he became at last convinced that his views of religion were very defective-that he “lacked the true tokens of a true godly man” (Bunyan p.13). The woman to whom Bunyan was indebted for his new light were members of a small Baptist congregation in Bed ford which John Gifford was pastor. This good man, Mr. Ivimey, in his History of the English Baptists said: “His labors were apparently confined to a narrow circle, but their effects have been very widely extended and will not pass away when time will be no more. We allude to his having baptized and introduced to the church the wicked tinker at Elstow. He was doubtless the honored evangelist who pointed Bunyan to the wicketgate by instructing him in the knowledge of the Gospel, by turning him from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. Little did he think such a chosen vessel was sent to his house when he opened the door to admit the poor, the depraved, and the despairing Bunyan”(Ivimey p.13-14). It is affirming too much to stand for Mr. Gifford as having been the means of Bunyan’s conversion; but that his conversion and preaching were greatly blessed to the once “wicked tinker of Elstow,” we have the best authority for believing. Bunyan endured great inward disturbance of soul not only because of his own consciousness of sin but also because the destructive talk of some Antinomians (who taught that Christ’s forgiveness eliminated the need for laws) into whose company he had fallen. But Bunyan had already studied the Scriptures with great diligence and zealous prayer, and by the blessing of Gods’ Spirit, he gained a resting place for his anxious spirit in the scriptural assurance the “none ever trusted God and was confounded” (Bunyan p.14).
In 1655, Bunyan, then twenty-seven years of age, was admitted as a member of Mr. Gifford’s Church. Soon after, the church deprived of its pastor by death, and the young brother so recently added to their fellowship was, after some trial of his qualifications, called on to undertake the office of occasional preacher or exhorter among them. About this engagement, Bunyan wrote: “Some of the most able among the saints with us, I say the most able for judgment and holiness of life as they conceived, did perceive that God had counted me worthy to understand something of His will in His holy and blessed Word and had given me utterance in some measure to express what I saw to others for edification. Therefore they desired me, and that with much earnestness, that I would be willing at some times to take in hand one of the meetings to speak a word of exhortation unto them; the which though at the first it did much dash and abash my spirit yet being still by them desired an entreated, I consented to their request” (Bunyan p.15). When Bunyan first began to preach, people came from all parts to hear him. Such was the visible success of his ministry that before long. When John first began to preach, he dealt chiefly on the terrors of the law. As his own spiritual horizon cleared up, his preaching took a better tone. He now labored, “still preaching what he saw and felt,” to preach Christ, “the sinner’s friend, while sin’s eternal foe” (Rev Thomas p.16) and to convince his listeners to lean completely on the work and offices of Christ. He made it a foremost purpose in his sermons “to removed those false chains and props on which the world does lean and by them fall and perish” (Rev Thomas p.16).
In 1657, Bunyan was indicted for preaching at Eaton. Nothing came of it, although Dr Robert Southey, a biographer of Bunyan, labored to prove the existence of an extremely persecuting spirit at that time in the British Commonwealth. A few months after the Restoration, however, a warrant was issued against Bunyan, and he was arrested at Samsell in Bedfordshire and carried before Justice Wingate. When Bunyan refused to refrain from preaching, he was committed to the Bedford jail. At the quarter sessions, his indictment stated: “John Bunyan of the town of Bedford, laborer, had devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service and was a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles (secret religious meetings not sanctioned by law) to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord of king.” (Rev Thomas p.18).On this ridiculous charge, he was sent back to prison for three months and informed that if at the end of that period he did not submit to go to church and quit preaching he would be banished from the realm. "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 (Encyclopedia Britannica). At this period, Bunyan was the father of four young children by his first wife. Mary, his oldest child, had been born blind. A year following his first wife’s death, he had married a second wife. Her confinement was approaching. News of John’s imprisonment and the prospect of his impending banishment so affected Bunyan’s wife that she prematurely delivered a dead child. Yet in the middle of all this complicated suffering, this noble-minded young woman struggled hard to obtain her husband’s deliverance. With simplicity of heart, she traveled to London to petition the House of Lords for her husband’s liberation but was directed to apply to the judges at the judicial inquest. She then returned home, and with modesty and “a trembling heart”, she put forth her request to the judges in the presence of many magistrates and gentry of the country. Sir Matthew Hale was one of them, but he shook his head and professed his inability to do anything for her husband. “Will your husband leave off preaching?” asked Judge Twisden. “If he will do so, then send for him.”(Judge Twisden p.19) “My lord,” replied the courageous woman, “he dares not leave preaching as long as he can speak” (Bunyan p.19). Sir Matthew listened sadly to her, but Twisden brutally taunted her and said “poverty was her cloak” (Twinsden p.19). “Yes,” observed she, “and because he is a tinker and a poor man, therefore he is despised and cannot have justice” (Bunyan p.19).Elizabeth Bunyan concluded her own account of this interview in these words:”Though I was somewhat timorous at my first entrance into the chamber, yet before I went out, I could not but break forth into tears-not so much because they were so hard-hearted against me and my husband, but to think what a sad account such poor creatures will have to give at the coming of the Lord” (Bunyan p.19).
Bunyan stayed in prison twelve years, but frequently during that period, through the connivance of the jailer, he was permitted to steal out under cover of night. On one time, he was even able to pay a visit to the Christians in London. It was during this long imprisonment, while the flower of his age in confinement and with no books except the bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that he penned his immortal work, The Pilgrims Progress, besides many other treatises that have afforded much instruction and comfort to the people of God. During the last year of his imprisonment (1671), he was chosen pastor of the Baptist Church in Bedford. He appears to have been permitted to attend the church meetings for the last four years of his imprisonment. Doubtless, his word was considered a sufficient pledge that he would return every evening to prison. At last his release was ordered. It is said that Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, intervened on Bunyan’s behalf. Soon after his release, a new chapel was built at Bedford, where he preached to large audiences during the rest of his life. Once a year, he visited London, where he preached with great acceptance, generally at the meetinghouse in Southwark. On being asked by Charles II how a learned man such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker, that’s a great and divine scholar he replied, “May it please your majesty, if I could possess that tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning”(Charles II p.20).
Little is recorded of the rest of Bunyan’s life. It is not known whether he was again made a sufferer for conscience’ sake when the spirit of persecution revived and waked hot against the people of the Lord in the later part of Charlie’s reign. He died in London on the twelfth day of August 1699 of a fever that he had caught by exposure to rain. He was buried in Bunhill fields, a churchyard in London. His widow survived him four years. The names of a few of his offspring appear in the books of the Baptist church at Bedford, but his last known offspring, Hannah Bunyan, a great-granddaughter, died in 1770 at the age of seventy-six. In 1692, the year of Elizabeth Bunyan’s death, her husband’s collected works were published in two folio volumes by Ebenezer Chandler his heir in the ministry at Bedford, and John Wilson, a fellow minister. These volumes contain about sixty pieces of various degrees of merit; all are richly impregnated with the unction of deep and fervent faith.
Bibliography
“Bunyan, John”. Visions of Heaven and Hell. His sheep
n.d. 21 march 2010 http://www.hissheep.org/messages/visions_of_heaven_and_hell.htm
“Bunyan John”. visions of Heaven and Hell
New Kensington, Whitaker House, 2007
“Bunyan John”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed. Vol IV
N.D 22, March 2010 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910.
“John Bunyan”. Encyclopedia of Religion Summary. Book rags.
N.D 21, March 2010 http://www.bookrags/research/bunyan-john.eork-02/
The Life of John Bunyan. Adapted from the introductory notes of Rev. Thomas Scott in Bunyan’s whole Allegorical Works, Glasgow, Fullarton, 1840 |
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