Old Portraits and Modern Sketches; Personal Sketches and Tributes; Historical Papers | Page 9

thought I, I must venture you all
with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as
a man who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and
children; yet I thought on those 'two milch kine that were to carry the
ark of God into another country, and to leave their calves behind them.'
"But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations:
the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, 'Leave thy
fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust
in me;' and again, 'The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thy
remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the time
of evil.'"
He was arrested in 1660, charged with "devilishly and perniciously
abstaining from church," and of being "a common upholder of
conventicles." At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have
been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful at Vanity Fair, he was
sentenced to perpetual banishment. This sentence, however, was never
executed, but he was remanded to Bedford jail, where he lay a prisoner
for twelve years.
Here, shut out from the world, with no other books than the Bible and
Fox's Martyrs, he penned that great work which has attained a wider
and more stable popularity than any other book in the English tongue.
It is alike the favorite of the nursery and the study. Many experienced
Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself would
not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with delight, as in the
main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, without
indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the month

of his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced from
some other portions of his allegory. A recollection of his fearful
sufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures,
relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder tone
to the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with the
Calvinism of the seventeenth century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's
allegory." In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight
of the fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of
his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order,
and arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination,
no longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
of its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary
prisoner, addressed to his Muse:--
"The dull loneness, the black shade Which these hanging vaults have
made, The rude portals that give light More to terror than delight; This
my chamber of neglect, Walled about with disrespect,-- From all these,
and this dull air, A fit object for despair, She hath taught me by her
might, To draw comfort and delight."
That stony cell of his was to him like the rock of Padan-aram to the
wandering Patriarch. He saw angels ascending and descending. The
House Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed
him. He looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The
Valley of Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard
"the curious, melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day
long in the spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines

warm, and make the woods and groves and solitary places glad." Side
by side with the good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked
through the green and lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies
over," through "meadows beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but
fresh-faced shepherd- boy, who lived a merry life, and wore the herb
heartsease in his bosom, sounded through his cell:--
"He that is down need fear no fall; He that is low no pride."
The broad and pleasant "river of the Water of Life" glided peacefully
before him, fringed "on either side with