The Life of John Bunyan [8]
wicked life," the wickedness of which, however, did not amount to
more than a liking for the sports and games of the lads of the
village, bell-ringing, dancing, and the like. The prohibition of
all liturgical forms issued in 1645, the observance of which varied
with the strictness or laxity of the local authorities, would not
seem to have been put in force very rigidly at Elstow. The vicar,
Christopher Hall, was an Episcopalian, who, like Bishop Sanderson,
retained his benefice unchallenged all through the Protectorate,
and held it some years after the Restoration and the passing of the
Act of Uniformity. He seems, like Sanderson, to have kept himself
within the letter of the law by making trifling variations in the
Prayer Book formularies, consistent with a general conformity to
the old order of the Church, "without persisting to his own
destruction in the usage of the entire liturgy." The decent
dignity of the ceremonial of his parish church had a powerful
effect on Bunyan's freshly awakened religious susceptibility - a
"spirit of superstition" he called it afterwards - and helped to
its fuller development. "I adored," he says, "with great devotion,
even all things, both the High Place" - altars then had not been
entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire - "Priest, Clerk,
Vestment, Service, and what else belonging to the church, counting
all things holy that were therein contained, and especially the
Priest and Clerk most happy, and without doubt greatly blessed
because they were the servants of God and were principal in the
Holy Temple, to do His work therein, . . . their name, their garb,
and work, did so intoxicate and bewitch me." If it is questionable
whether the Act forbidding the use of the Book of Common Prayer was
strictly observed at Elstow, it is certain that the prohibition of
Sunday sports was not. Bunyan's narrative shows that the aspect of
a village green in Bedfordshire during the Protectorate did not
differ much from what Baxter tells us it had been in Shropshire
before the civil troubles began, where, "after the Common Prayer
had been read briefly, the rest of the day even till dark night
almost, except eating time, was spent in dancing under a maypole
and a great tree, when all the town did meet together." These
Sunday sports proved the battle-ground of Bunyan's spiritual
experience, the scene of the fierce inward struggles which he has
described so vividly, through which he ultimately reached the firm
ground of solid peace and hope. As a high-spirited healthy
athletic young fellow, all kinds of manly sports were Bunyan's
delight. On week days his tinker's business, which he evidently
pursued industriously, left him small leisure for such amusements.
Sunday therefore was the day on which he "did especially solace
himself" with them. He had yet to learn the identification of
diversions with "all manner of vice." The teaching came in this
way. One Sunday, Vicar Hall preached a sermon on the sin of
Sabbath-breaking, and like many hearers before and since, he
imagined that it was aimed expressly at him. Sermon ended, he went
home "with a great burden upon his spirit," "sermon-stricken" and
"sermon sick" as he expresses it elsewhere. But his Sunday's
dinner speedily drove away his self-condemning thoughts. He "shook
the sermon out of his mind," and went out to his sports with the
Elstow lads on the village green, with as "great delight" as ever.
But in the midst of his game of tip-cat or "sly," just as he had
struck the "cat" from its hole, and was going to give it a second
blow - the minuteness of the detail shows the unforgetable reality
of the crisis - he seemed to hear a voice from heaven asking him
whether "he would leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins
and go to hell." He thought also that he saw Jesus Christ looking
down on him with threatening countenance. But like his own Hopeful