The Life of John Bunyan | Page 9

take its place among the baseless
creations of a fertile fancy.
Bunyan's military career, wherever passed and under whatever standard,
was very short. The civil war was drawing near the end of its first stage
when he enlisted. He had only been a soldier a few months when the
battle of Naseby, fatal to the royal cause, was fought, June 14, 1645.
Bristol was surrendered by Prince Rupert, Sept. 10th. Three days later
Montrose 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
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