The like order for Francis Holcroft and James Rogers for frequenting unlawful meetings as by certificate from the Sheriffe of Cambridge of the 10th and 11th Instant. [The sheriff's return cannot be found.]

At a Court at Whitehall, ye 22d May 1672,

A similar order was made for Walter Penn and twelve others, prisoners in Wilts.

At a Court ye 7th of June 1672,

On a Certificate of the Mayor, Sheriff and Aldermen of Worcester, Robert Smith, a Baker, was ordered to be inserted in the pardon.

On the 12th of June, the petition of twenty-two prisoners was read and referred to the Sheriffs, and on the 26th their names were ordered to be inserted in the pardon.

On the 14th of June Thomas More the Quaker obtained a similar order, and on the 26th of June Thomas Gower Durham and eight prisoners in Devon and Exeter were ordered to be inserted in the pardon.

Through all these minutes the intended patent is referred to as the general pardon to the Quakers. Thus we find undoubted proof upon the records of the Privy Council of England, presided over by the King in person, that John Bunyan's only crime, as certified by the sheriff, and for which he was counted worthy of so cruel an imprisonment, was being present with others to worship his Maker in simplicity and in truth. This was all his crime; the very head and front of his offence.' O that all her Majesty's subjects would constantly follow his example! then might our prisons be converted into colleges and schools, and our land become an earthly paradise.

In pursuance of this great and benevolent object, these indefatigable Quakers obtained a warrant to the Attorney-General, for a free pardon, of which the following is a copy:

Our will and pleasure is, that you prepare a bill for the royal signature, and to pass our Great Seal of England, containing our gracious pardon unto [here follow the prisoners' names]. Of all offences, contempts and misdemeanours by them, or any of them committed before the 21st day of July 1672, against the several statutes made in the first, twentythird, and thirty-fifth years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; in the third year of the reign of our late royal grandfather, King James; and in the 16th year of our reign-in not coming to church and hearing divine service; in refusing to take the oath of allegiance and supremacy, and frequenting or being present at seditious conventicles; and of all premunires, judgments, convictions, sentences of excommunication, and transportation thereupon; and of all fines, amercements, pains, penalties, and forfeitures whatsoever, thereby incurred, with restitution of lands and goods, and such other clauses, and non obstantes, as may render this our pardon most effectual; for which this shall be your warrant.

Given at our Court at Whitehall the twenty-fourth year of our reign.

thirty pounds for each person whose name was inserted in it. Whitehead again applied to the King, and at length all difficulties were removed by the following order:―

His Majesty is pleased to command, that it be signified as his pleasure to the respective officers and sealers, where the pardon to the Quakers is to pass, that the pardon, though comprehending great numbers of persons, do yet pass as one pardon, and pay but as one. ARLINGTON.

At the Court at Whitehall, the 13th of Sep. 1672.

Whitehead adds, Though we had this warrant from the King, yet we had trouble from some of the covetous clerks, who did strive hard to exact upon us.'

A very considerable sum for those days, and for such poor persons to raise, was needful to carry this pardon into full effect. The dissenters had been enormously plundered. Hundreds, if not thousands, had been stripped of all that they possessed, so that the prison, intended and used as a place of rigorous punishment, was in fact their only shelter from the inclemency of the weather. The expenses of a royal pardon for such a number of prisoners was very great, not merely in the drawing, engrossing, and passing through the various offices and departments of the state, but in employing efficient persons to go through the kingdom to plead this pardon before the various sessions and assizes. Every impediment that cruelty could invent was thrown in the way of the release of these Christian prisoners for nonconformity, by the squirarchy and clergy. To raise the requisite funds, a strong appeal was made by the following circular sent to the Quakers in the country:

FRIENDS AND BRETHREN,

But now a new and very serious difficulty presented itself in the shape of enormous fees, in the different offices through which the pardon had to pass; these amounted to between twenty and

them by gratifying them for their pains. Wherefore we saw meet to recommend it to such Friends in the Counties as are or have been lately prisoners for the truth's sake and who are

It is said that Bishop Barlow interceded for Bunyan; but if he did, there is no record or petition to that effect preserved either in the State Paper or Privy Council Offices. He was not then a bishop, but possessed great influence, and had written, The case of a Toleration in Matters of Religion, which he extended further than any divine of that age. This, and his friendship with Dr. Owen, might have given rise to the report. Barlow became afterwards a trimmer, and sided with the court party-a very natural effect of his clevation into bad company.

My conviction is, that Bunyan owed his release to the desolating effects produced by a wholesale persecution visiting tens of thousands who dared not, as they valued the honour of Christ or the salvation of their souls, attend the national, and, in their opinion, anti-scriptural service; and that the Privy Council, finding that the country must be plunged into revolution or ruin if the wretched system of compulsive uniformity was continued, determined to relax its severity, grant liberty of worship, and discharge the prisoners. As this could not be done by proclamation, and the prisoners were too poor to sue out a patent individually, much difficulty and delay might have arisen to prevent their discharge. This was removed by the active benevolence of George Whitehead. The appeal which he and his friends made was allowed; and he appears to have obtained the insertion of twenty names which were not in the Privy Council list to be added to the pardon. Whitehead's concern appears to have followed immediately after the declaration for liberty of conscience was published. Whether it arose from some intimation given him by Mr. Moor, or from a secret influence of the Holy Spirit, can only be known in a future state. For the payment of the fees, and for sending his release to the prison, and for obtaining his liberty, Bunyan was indebted to the Quakers. By this patent, all fines were remitted, and that without finding security for future conduct.

useful church of Christ, under the name of 'The Society of Friends.' When they understood each other's peaceful and pious principles, all hostility came to an end.

Charles Doe states that, on the 21st of December 1671, while Bunyan was yet a prisoner, he was, by the church at Bedford, called to the pastoral office. This was in or about the last of his twelve years' imprisonment; and when set at liberty, he preached the gospel publicly at Bedford, and about the countries, and at London, with very great success, being mightily followed everywhere.

From this time to his peaceful removal to the celestial city, he was divinely protected, and his liberty preserved, in the midst of the severe persecutions under which many of his nonconforming brethren suffered. No man in the kingdom was more fearless and uncompromising in the publication of Divine truth, both through the medium of the press and of the pulpit. With him, the fear of man was swallowed up in the fear of God; so that he boldly persevered in the path of duty, at the imminent risk of losing all his tem poral blessings, and even life itself; and yet he was unmolested! After producing such a work as the Pilgrim's Progress,' the fruit of his prison meditations; after coming forth from his thirteen years' incarceration in a narrow, damp, wretched dungeon, which, by Divine power, had been transformed into the house of God and gate of heaven; he appeared like a Christian giant, refreshed by wholesome discipline and diet. The emissaries of Satan dared not again to risk the sending him to a jail, where he might produce some other and more potent instrument for the destruction of their kingdom. Protected by his God, he devoted himself, body, soul, and spirit, to the building up of that spiritual kingdom which disarms tyrants and despots, both civil and ecclesiastical, sets the captive free, and fills the souls of those that receive it with blessing and praise.

He possessed a devoted wife, to whom he was married about the year 1658, he being then a widower with four children. His marriage to his first wife, one of his biographers says, 'proves, too, I readily grant, that she had little prudence.' If by prudence he means worldly pelf, Bunyan valued it not; they were happy in their union, and she was highly honoured. Had she been unhappy, he would have been charged as the cause of her unhappiness. She was the chosen vessel to assist him in obtaining the treasures of the gospel, and must be honoured as one of the means by which he was prepared to publish his universal guide to Christian pilgrims. It was his second wife, who pleaded

2 The Struggler.

his cause with such modest intrepidity before the judges, and she must have assisted him greatly in arranging his affairs. One of his oldest biographers tells us, that 'when he came abroad again, he found his temporal affairs were gone to wreck; and he had, as to them, to begin again, as if he had newly come into the world; but yet he was not destitute of friends, who had all along supported him with necessaries, and had been very good to his family; so that, by their assistance, getting things a little

But the same heart and head, fingers and pen,
As did the other. Witness all good men;
For none in all the world without a lie,
Can say that this is mine, excepting I.
I write not this of any ostentation,
Nor 'cause I seek of men their commendation;

I do it to keep them from such surmise,
As tempt them will my name to scandalize.
Witness my name, if anagram'd to thee,
The letters make, Nu honey in a B.

'JOHN BUNYAN.'

A circumstance which took place on the 6th of November 1673, must have greatly comforted him. His sufferings and ministry were a blessing to his son, Thomas, who not only became a member of his church, but was set apart as an occasional preacher, and exercised his ministerial gifts in the villages round Bedford. In six years after his liberation, he had published nine valuable treatises, among which were his controversial books with his Baptist brethren; and then he, having overcome all his scruples, pubfished, although against the wish of some of his friends, the First Part of this greatest of all his labours, his vade-mecum of the heaven-ward pilgrim, by which his memory is embalmed and his name diffused throughout all the Christian churches of every sect and denomination.

CHAPTER V.

WAS BUNYAN ASSISTED IN THE COMPOSITION OF HIS
PILGRIM?

To this question take his own reply-
'Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine

In name and fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother.
Or that so fond I am of being sire,
I'll father bastards: or, if need require,
I'll tell a lie in print to get applause.

I scorn it; John such dirt-heap never was,
Since God converted him. Let this suffice
To show why I my Pilgrim patronize.

'It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dribble it daintily.

'Manner and matter too was all mine own,
Nor was it unto any mortal known,
"Till I had done it. Nor did any then,

By books, by wits, by tongues, or hand, or pen,
Add five words to it, or wrote half a line
Thereof: the whole, and ev'ry whit is mine.
Also for this thine eye is now upon,
The matter in this manner came from none,

1 Life, 18mo, 1692; re-published by Ivimey, 1832, p. 31. The Holy War,' in which these lincs were inserted.

everything; but this I can say, I have endeavoured so to do. True, I have not for these things fished in other men's waters; my Bible and Concordance are my only library in my writings.' 3

He who doubts the word of John Bunyan, knows nothing of the character and soul of a man who suffered nearly thirteen years' imprisonment in Bedford jail, rather than utter a falsehood or use the slightest simulation. Such objectors deserve chastisement in Doubting Castle, and should be flogged with the royal garter-Honi soit qui mal y pense. But such there have been from 1678 to a late period; and the same feeling which led the Scribes and Pharisees to reject the Messiah, because he appeared as the son of a carpenter, probably has led authors of great repute to express their doubts as to the originality of the Pilgrim's Progress,' because the author was an unlettered man-the reason why, as his pastor says, 'the archers shot so sorely at him.'

Dr. Dibdin, in his Typographical Antiquities, describing Caxton's Pilgrimage of the Soul, saysThis extraordinary production, rather than Bernard's Isle of Man, laid the foundation of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."" The late Dr. Adam Clarke, in a Postscript to a Life of Bunyan, observes that his whole plan being so very similar to Bernard's religious allegory, called the Isle of Man, or, Proceedings in Manshire; and also to that most beautiful allegorical poem, by Mr. Edmund Spenser, oddly called the Faëry Queen, there is much reason to believe that one or other, if not both, gave birth to the "Pilgrim's Progress.'

that Bunyan did not write the " Pilgrim's Progress, as that Porson did write a certain copy of verses entitled the Devil's Thoughts.' Now, as these verses were doubtless written by Southey himself, he had arrived at a conviction that Bunyan was fully entitled to all the honour of conceiving and writing his great allegory. Still, he says, 'the same allegory had often been treated before him. Some of these may have fallen in Bunyan's way, and modified his own conceptions when he was not aware of any such influence." It is high time that these questions were fully investigated, and set at rest.

It must be kept in mind that Bunyan knew no language but his own; and that all his characters, as well as the trial by jury, are purely English. When he used five common Latin words in Dr. Skill's prescription, Ex carne et sanguine Christi, this perfectly unassuming author tells his readers, in a marginal note, The Latine I borrow.' It is absurd to suppose that learned men read to him old monkish manuscripts, or the allegories of a previous age; for his design was unknown, he had formed no plan, nor had he any intention to have written such a book, until it came upon him suddenly. His first idea was inspired from one of his own works while composing it, and then the whole story flowed into his mind as quick as he could write it. Every attempt has been made to tarnish his fair fame; the great and learned, the elegant poet and the pious divine, have asserted, but without foundation in fact, or even in probability, that some of his ideas were derived from the works of previous writers.

Every assertion or suggestion of this kind that came to my knowledge, has been investigated, and the works referred to have been analyzed. And beyond this, every allegorical work that could be found previous to the eighteenth century, has been examined in all the European languages; and the result is a perfect demonstration of the complete originality of Bunyan. It came from his own heart.' The plot, the characters, the faithful dealing, are all his own. And what is more, there has not been found a single phrase or sentence borrowed from any other book, except the quotations from the Bible, and the use of common proverbs. To arrive at this conclusion has occupied much time and labour, at intervals, during the last forty years. The works read and analyzed commence with our monkish manuscripts, and continue through the printed books published prior to the Reformation, when the church, having no competition in the cure of souls, spoke out without disguise; and from that time to 1678, when our Pilgrim appeared. Many, if not all the works so examined,

1 Southey's Life of Bunyan, p. xc.

contain useful information; and some of them show what was taught by the Church of England when she refused the Bible to the laity, and was unreformed. And, as my readers ought to judge for themselves, while, in most cases, these rare volumes are beyond their reach, it may prove useful to print these analyses, and then every reader can form his own opinion as to the probability, or rather the impossibility, of Bunyan's having gained any idea, or phrase, or name, from any source but his own prolific imagination. My determination in all these researches has been to report the whole truth; and had it been discovered that some hints might have been given by previous writers, it would not have been any serious reflection upon the originality of a work which has no prototype. This idea is well represented by Mr. Montgomery: If the Nile could be traced to a thousand springs, it would still be the Nile; and so far undishonoured by its obligations, that it would repay them a thousand-fold, by reflecting upon the nameless streams, the glory of being allied to the most renowned of rivers." But there has been no discovery of any tributary spring; no borrowed phrases; no more hints, even, than such as naturally arise from the open treasury or storehouse of Holy Writ.

The greatest characteristic of original genius is its spontaneous exertion-the evidence of having written without labour and without the consciousness of doing anything remarkable, or the ambitious aim of doing a great work. The greatest efforts of genius flow as naturally as it is for common men to breathe. In this view, Bunyan's work comes nearer to the inspired poetry of the Hebrews in its character than any other human composition. He wrote from the impulse of his genius, sanctified and illuminated by a heavenly influence; as if, indeed, he had exerted no voluntary supervision over its exercise. Everything is as natural and unconstrained as if it had not been intended for public inspection. There has not been found any model with which it can even be compared. It is a beautiful transparency, seen as the heavenly light shines through-the renewed spirit alone enjoys the picture in its perfection, with all its chaste but glowing colours. It can be fully appreciated only by him who possesses that spiritual light without which the things of God and heaven cannot be discerned.

Bunyan's works furnish ample proof that his mind was preparing, for many years, the plan and incidents which render this allegory so striking. This may easily be traced in his works, although it was not known to himself; for, however he was all his spiritual life employed in unintentionally pre

2 Introductory Essay to the Pilgrim's Progress,' p. xxv. Collins.

3 Dr. Cheever.