The Life of John Bunyan | Page 7

an act of unchastity. "In our days," to quote Mr. Froude,
"a rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had grown
to manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint. If in
Bedford and the neighbourhood there was no young man more vicious
than Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth
century must have been higher than believers in progress will be
pleased to allow." How then, it may be asked, are we to explain the
passionate language in which he expresses his self-abhorrence, which
would hardly seem exaggerated in the mouth of the most profligate and
licentious? We are confident that Bunyan meant what he said. So
intensely honest a nature could not allow his words to go beyond his
convictions. When he speaks of "letting loose the reins to his lusts,"
and sinning "with the greatest delight and ease," we know that however

exaggerated they may appear to us, his expressions did not seem to him
overstrained. Dr. Johnson marvelled that St. Paul could call himself
"the chief of sinners," and expressed a doubt whether he did so honestly.
But a highly-strung spiritual nature like that of the apostle, when
suddenly called into exercise after a period of carelessness, takes a very
different estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral
world, in general. It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to
others, as sins against infinite love - a love unto death - and in the light
of the sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and
while it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The sinfulness of
sin - more especially their own sin - is the intensest of all possible
realities to them. No language is too strong to describe it. We may not
unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may
appear to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is
altogether a mistaken one?
The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan. While still a
child "but nine or ten years old," he tells us he was racked with
convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears. He was scared with
"fearful dreams," and "dreadful visions," and haunted in his sleep with
"apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits" coming to carry him away,
which made his bed a place of terrors. The thought of the Day of
Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud
over his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble.
But though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they
lasted, they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased
"as if they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to
the youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
ringleader. The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him. He
could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
prison to me." The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind." He said to God,
"depart from me." According to the later morbid estimate which
stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight
and ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions." But that
the sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that

while discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is
shown by the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for
godliness dishonoured their profession. "Once," he says, "when I was at
the height of my vanity, hearing one to swear who was reckoned for a
religious man, it had so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my
heart to ache."
This undercurrent of religious feeling was deepened by providential
escapes from accidents which threatened his life - "judgments mixed
with mercy" he terms them, - which made him feel that he was not
utterly forsaken of God. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning; once in
"Bedford river" - the Ouse; once in "a creek of the sea," his tinkering
rounds having, perhaps, carried him as far northward as the tidal inlets
of the Wash in the neighbourhood of Spalding or Lynn, or to the
estuaries of the Stour and Orwell to the east. At another time, in his
wild contempt of danger, he tore out, while his companions looked on
with admiration, what he mistakenly supposed to be an adder's sting.
These providential deliverances bring us to that