The Life of John Bunyan [46]
than in poetry. Besides his world-famous "Grace Abounding," he
produced during the first six years of his gaol life a treatise on
prayer, entitled "Praying in the Spirit;" a book on "Christian
Behaviour," setting forth with uncompromising plainness the
relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children,
masters and servants, by which those who profess a true faith are
bound to show forth its reality and power; the "Holy City," an
exposition of the vision in the closing chapters of the Book of
Revelation, brilliant with picturesque description and rich in
suggestive thought, which, he tells us, had its origin in a sermon
preached by him to his brethren in bonds in their prison chamber;
and a work on the "Resurrection of the Dead and Eternal Judgment."
On these works we may not linger. There is not one of them which
is not marked by vigour of thought, clearness of language, accuracy
of arrangement, and deep spiritual experience. Nor is there one
which does not here and there exhibit specimens of Bunyan's
picturesque imaginative power, and his command of forcible and racy
language. Each will reward perusal. His work on "Prayer" is
couched in the most exalted strain, and is evidently the production
of one who by long and agonizing experience had learnt the true
nature of prayer, as a pouring out of the soul to God, and a
wrestling with Him until the blessing, delayed not denied, is
granted. It is, however, unhappily deformed by much ignorant
reviling of the Book of Common Prayer. He denounces it as "taken
out of the papistical mass-book, the scraps and fragments of some
popes, some friars, and I know not what;" and ridicules the order
of service it propounds to the worshippers. "They have the matter
and the manner of their prayer at their fingers' ends; they set
such a prayer for such a day, and that twenty years before it
comes: one for Christmas, another for Easter, and six days after
that. They have also bounded how many syllables must be said in
every one of them at their public exercises. For each saint's day
also they have them ready for the generations yet unborn to say.
They can tell you also when you shall kneel, when you shall stand,
when you should abide in your seats, when you should go up into the
chancel, and what you should do when you come there. All which the
apostles came short of, as not being able to compose so profound a
manner." This bitter satirical vein in treating of sacred things
is unworthy of its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence.
It has its excuse in the hard measure he had received from those
who were so unwisely endeavouring to force the Prayer Book on a
generation which had largely forgotten it. In his mind, the men
and the book were identified, and the unchristian behaviour of its
advocates blinded his eyes to its merits as a guide to devotion.
Bunyan, when denouncing forms in worship, forgot that the same
apostle who directs that in our public assemblies everything should
be done "to edification," directs also that everything should be
done "decently and in order."
By far the most important of these prison works - "The Pilgrim's
Progress," belonging, as will be seen, to a later period - is the
"Grace Abounding," in which with inimitable earnestness and
simplicity Bunyan gives the story of his early life and his
religious history. This book, if he had written no other, would
stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest masters of the English language
of his own or any other age. In graphic delineation of the
struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a hardly won
freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of hope
and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid self-torturing
questionings of motive and action, this work of the travelling
tinker, as a spiritual history, has never been surpassed. Its
equal can hardly be found, save perhaps in the "Confessions