The Riches of Bunyan | Page 3

whose edge these have been skilfully detached.
In the character and history of JOHN BUNYAN, the great Head of the
church seems to have provided a lesson of special significance, and
singular adaptedness, for the men and the strifes of our own time. Born
of the people, and in so low a condition, that one of Bunyan's modern
reviewers, by a strange mistake, construed Bunyan's self-disparaging
admissions to mean that he was the offspring of gypsies--bred to one of
the humblest of handicrafts, and having but the scantiest advantages as
to fortune or culture, he yet rose, under the blessings of God's word and
providence and Spirit, to widest usefulness, and to an eminence that
shows no tokens of decline. Down to our own times, the branches of
his expanding influence seem daily spreading and extending
themselves; and the roots of his earthly renown seem daily shooting
themselves deeper, and taking a firmer hold on the judgment of critics
and the hearts of the churches. When the English houses of Parliament
were recently rebuilt, among the imagery commemorative of the
nation's literary glories, a place was voted for the bust of the Bedford
pastor, once so maligned and persecuted. Once tolerated by dainty
Christians for the sake of his piety, while they apologized for what they
deemed his uncouthness; he is now, at last, even from men of the world,

who do not value that piety, receiving the due acknowledgment of his
rare genius and witching style. It is not many years since Gilpin, an
English clergyman of cultivated taste--himself a ready and popular
writer--issued an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, modified, if not
rewritten in much of its phraseology, because he deemed the original
too rude for usefulness. In our own day, one of the highest authorities
as to the graces and powers of our language, the English statesman and
scholar, T. B. Macaulay, has pronounced upon that style, which Gilpin
by implication so disparaged, the most glowing eulogies. Schools and
leisure and wealth are useful, but they are not indispensable either to
felicity or to honor. Bunyan lacked them all; and yet in the absence of
them achieved greatness --and what is far better, wide and enduring
usefulness. No man, with God's exhaustless Scriptures in his hands, and
with the rich book of nature and providence open in its pictured
radiance before his eyes, needs to have either a dwindling or an
impoverished soul. Of that latter volume, the works of God, as of that
former, the word of God, Bunyan was evidently a delighted and
unwearied student. His references to birds and insects, flowers and
running brooks and evening clouds, and forests and mountains, all
show a man whose nature was genially awake to the harmony and
beauty of the material world that lay in order and splendor around him.
It was, in Bunyan, no mere mimicry caught from books and
companions--the echo of any fashion of his times. He writes of what he
had seen with his own eyes; and seems to avoid aiming at aught beyond
that. Hence to the ocean, which probably he never thus saw--and which
had he beheld it in its placid vastness, or in its stormy wrath, he could
not well have forgotten--his writings contain, as far as we remember,
no allusions, in all the varied and exuberant imagery which they
employ. His books, more than those of his more learned
contemporaries, Richard Baxter, and John Owen, that "mighty
armor-bearer of the truth," as Bunyan happily calls him, were written
exclusively from the resources of his own personal observation. And, in
consequence of this, they have the freshness and odors of the outer
world pervading them--scents and sounds of the highways along which,
in the trampings of his trade, he had plodded, and of the hedges that
had shaded him. To use the language of the patriarch's benediction,
they have "THE SMELL OF A FIELD WHICH THE LORD HATH

BLESSED." His books are, like Walton's Angler, of the open air, and
the purling streams. You catch, back of the good man's Bible, as he
reverently ponders and commends it, glimpses of rural landscapes, and
of open skies--God's beautiful world, still lovely, even though sin has
marred it. Like the Sermon on the Mount, Bunyan's page has the traits
of field-preaching. And it was so, also, in his references to the inner
world of his own heart. He wrote not from the dried specimens of
earlier collectors--from the shrivelled and rustling leaves of some old
herbary--from the philosophy and metaphysical analysis of other men's
emotions, so much as from the glowing records of his own
consciousness and experience, the fruits of grace and plants of
righteousness, blooming and fragrant in the watered garden of his own
heart. And this dipping of the pencil into