BIOGRAPHICAL.

JOHN BUNYAN was born in the year 1628, in the village of Elstow, a mile distant from Bedford, England. His father was a brazier or tinker, and the son followed the same calling.

Bunyan lived in a stormy time of England's political history. Three years before his birth. Charles I. became king. His tyrannical reign of twenty-four years ended in civil war between the king and the royal army on the one side, and the Parliament on the other, supported by the Puritans and law-abiding people of the kingdom. At first the royal forces were successful; but in the decisive battle of Naseby, 14th of June, 1645, they were routed, the king was captured, and was executed as a tyrant on the 30th of January, 1649. Bunyan had served in this war as a private soldier in the Parliamentary army. At the age of nineteen he was married. At twenty-five, he united with the Baptists in Bedford, and became an itinerant preacher.

These years of ministerial labor were spent under the Protectorate of Cromwell. But when the Com

monwealth was overthrown, in 1660, the government of the Restoration, under Charles II., began to persecute the dissenting sects for their adherence to the political doctrines of the Commonwealth.

Charles II. was a dissolute monarch, and no less tyrannical than Charles I. During his reign of twenty-five years the Puritans were sorely persecuted.

Bunyan had become a powerful preacher, and attracted thousands to his audience. His eloquence and wide popularity among the masses drew attention to him as an influential nonconformist, and on the 12th of November, 1660, he was arrested on the warrant of a country magistrate. He was preaching at a country place in Bedfordshire, when the services were rudely interrupted by constables, and Bunyan was taken before the Justice, Wingate, who, as he said, "had resolved to break the neck of such meetings." The Justice could not make him promise to desist from preaching, and, as bail was refused him, he was committed to prison, the Bedford jail. The bill of indictment against him read: "That John Bunyan, of the town of Bedford, laborer, hath devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the

*The Established Church.

good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the king."

Efforts were made by his wife to effect his release. This was his second wife, to whom he had been married only a year or two before his imprisonment. She appeared more than once before the great Sir Matthew Hale, whose sympathies were awakened by the woman's appeals, but the other judges were immovable.

Bunyan was in prison twelve years, engaged in literary labors, and supporting his family by making tagged laces. His personal friend and first biographer, Mr. Doe, who saw him in prison, says, "Nor did he spend his time in a supine and careless manner, or eat the bread of idleness. For there I have been witness, that his own hands have ministered to his and to his family's necessities, by making many hundred gross of long, tagged, thread laces, to fill up the vacancies of his time, which he had learned for that purpose, since he had been in prison. There, also, I surveyed his library, the least and yet the best that ever I saw, consisting only of two books,-a Bible and the Book of Martyrs."* He frequently enjoyed the company of his wife and children, and toward the end of his imprisonment he was allowed unusual freedom, even to occasional preaching in the neighborhood, and spending some of his nights at home.

* Bunyan had also a Concordance. He says, "My Bible and my Concordance are my only library in my writings."

In the last year of his imprisonment, the pastor of the Bedford congregation died, and Bunyan was called to succeed him. He was liberated in September, 1672, and immediately resumed his ministerial labors in Bedford, which were continued sixteen years, till his death. Once a year he would visit London, when thousands of people crowded to hear him. Among his admirers in London was the celebrated Dr. Owen. Once he was asked by Charles II. how so learned a man as he could “sit and hear an illiterate tinker prate." To this he replied, "May it please your Majesty, could I possess that tinker's abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning."

In the summer of 1688, Bunyan went to Reading, in Berkshire, to reconcile a father and son. His mission was successful; but as he was returning on horseback, a violent storm overtook him, and all drenched with rain he stopped at the house of a friend, a Mr. Straddock, on Snowhill, London. Here he fell sick of a violent fever, and died, at the age of sixty.

Bunyan was a voluminous writer. His first literary production was entitled Some Gospel Truths Opened according to the Scriptures. This brought him into controversy with the Quakers. Two years after, when he was thirty years of age, he published a treatise, entitled A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul. More than

nine editions were sold during the author's lifetime. A copy of the first edition, which once belonged to Charles II., is in the Royal Library of the British Museum.

It

But the great work by which Bunyan is known all over the enlightened world is The Pilgrim's Progress, which was composed in Bedford jail, and published in 1678, six years after his release.* has been translated into all the European languages, and, excepting only the Bible, it has gained a wider circulation than anything else in English literature. The eleventh edition was published in the year of Bunyan's death, 1688. It was the uneducated among whom this book at first was so popular. After many years, cultivated people began to take it up, and critics had to pronounce it one of the greatest works in all literature.

Among other works composed in prison are his treatises on The Holy City, Christian Behaviour, Justification by Faith, The Resurrection of the Dead, A Discourse Touching Prayer, Confession of his Faith and Reason of his Practice, together with that remarkable history of his conversion, entitled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

In 1675 appeared a discourse, Saved by Grace.

* His biographer, Philip, says that it was no doubt partly dreamt in prison, but that it was probably not written till after his release in 1672," and then his other works amounted to twenty-two in all. Thus it is unwise to speak of The Pilgrim as if it were not the work of a practiced writer."