The Life of John Bunyan [7]
was totally defeated at
Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to relieve Chester, Charles
shut himself up in Oxford. The royal garrisons yielded in quick
succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were disbanded, and
the first act in the great national tragedy having come to a close,
Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker's work at the
paternal forge. His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be
mentioned, lived all through his famous son's twelve years'
imprisonment, witnessed his growing celebrity as a preacher and a
writer, and died in the early part of 1676, just when John Bunyan
was passing through his last brief period of durance, which was to
give birth to the work which has made him immortal.
CHAPTER II.
It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan's
return home from his short experience of a soldier's life, that he
took the step which, more than any other, influences a man's future
career for good or for evil. The young tinker married. With his
characteristic disregard of all facts or dates but such as concern
his spiritual history, Bunyan tells us nothing about the orphan
girl he made his wife. Where he found her, who her parents were,
where they were married, even her christian name, were all deemed
so many irrelevant details. Indeed the fact of his marriage would
probably have been passed over altogether but for the important
bearing it hid on his inner life. His "mercy," as he calls it,
"was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly," and who,
though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they "came
together as poor as poor might be," as "poor as howlets," to adopt
his own simile, "without so much household stuff as a dish or a
spoon betwixt" them, yet brought with her to the Elstow cottage two
religious books, which had belonged to her father, and which he
"had left her when he died." These books were "The Plain Man's
Pathway to Heaven," the work of Arthur Dent, the puritan incumbent
of Shoebury, in Essex - "wearisomely heavy and theologically
narrow," writes Dr. Brown - and "The Practise of Piety," by Dr.
Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince
Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as
with churchmen. Together with these books, the young wife brought
the still more powerful influence of a religious training, and the
memory of a holy example, often telling her young graceless husband
"what a godly man her father was, and how he would reprove and
correct vice both in his house and amongst his neighbours, and what
a strict and holy life he lived in his days both in word and deed."
Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of the "little he had learnt"
at school, he had not lost it "utterly." He was still able to read
intelligently. His wife's gentle influence prevailed on him to
begin "sometimes to read" her father's legacy "with her." This
must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly at
first not much to his taste. What his favourite reading had been
up to this time, his own nervous words tell us, "Give me a ballad,
a news-book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me
some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables."
But as he and his young wife read these books together at their
fireside, a higher taste was gradually awakened in Bunyan's mind;
"some things" in them he "found somewhat pleasing" to him, and they
"begot" within him "some desires to religion," producing a degree
of outward reformation. The spiritual instinct was aroused. He
would be a godly man like his wife's father. He began to "go to
church twice a day, and that too with the foremost." Nor was it a
mere formal attendance, for when there he tells us he took his part
with all outward devotion in the service, "both singing and saying
as others did; yet," as he penitently confesses, "retaining his
Philiphaugh; and after a vain attempt to relieve Chester, Charles
shut himself up in Oxford. The royal garrisons yielded in quick
succession; in 1646 the armies on both sides were disbanded, and
the first act in the great national tragedy having come to a close,
Bunyan returned to Elstow, and resumed his tinker's work at the
paternal forge. His father, old Thomas Bunyan, it may here be
mentioned, lived all through his famous son's twelve years'
imprisonment, witnessed his growing celebrity as a preacher and a
writer, and died in the early part of 1676, just when John Bunyan
was passing through his last brief period of durance, which was to
give birth to the work which has made him immortal.
CHAPTER II.
It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan's
return home from his short experience of a soldier's life, that he
took the step which, more than any other, influences a man's future
career for good or for evil. The young tinker married. With his
characteristic disregard of all facts or dates but such as concern
his spiritual history, Bunyan tells us nothing about the orphan
girl he made his wife. Where he found her, who her parents were,
where they were married, even her christian name, were all deemed
so many irrelevant details. Indeed the fact of his marriage would
probably have been passed over altogether but for the important
bearing it hid on his inner life. His "mercy," as he calls it,
"was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly," and who,
though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they "came
together as poor as poor might be," as "poor as howlets," to adopt
his own simile, "without so much household stuff as a dish or a
spoon betwixt" them, yet brought with her to the Elstow cottage two
religious books, which had belonged to her father, and which he
"had left her when he died." These books were "The Plain Man's
Pathway to Heaven," the work of Arthur Dent, the puritan incumbent
of Shoebury, in Essex - "wearisomely heavy and theologically
narrow," writes Dr. Brown - and "The Practise of Piety," by Dr.
Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince
Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as
with churchmen. Together with these books, the young wife brought
the still more powerful influence of a religious training, and the
memory of a holy example, often telling her young graceless husband
"what a godly man her father was, and how he would reprove and
correct vice both in his house and amongst his neighbours, and what
a strict and holy life he lived in his days both in word and deed."
Much as Bunyan tells us he had lost of the "little he had learnt"
at school, he had not lost it "utterly." He was still able to read
intelligently. His wife's gentle influence prevailed on him to
begin "sometimes to read" her father's legacy "with her." This
must have been entirely new reading for Bunyan, and certainly at
first not much to his taste. What his favourite reading had been
up to this time, his own nervous words tell us, "Give me a ballad,
a news-book, George on Horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me
some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables."
But as he and his young wife read these books together at their
fireside, a higher taste was gradually awakened in Bunyan's mind;
"some things" in them he "found somewhat pleasing" to him, and they
"begot" within him "some desires to religion," producing a degree
of outward reformation. The spiritual instinct was aroused. He
would be a godly man like his wife's father. He began to "go to
church twice a day, and that too with the foremost." Nor was it a
mere formal attendance, for when there he tells us he took his part
with all outward devotion in the service, "both singing and saying
as others did; yet," as he penitently confesses, "retaining his