John Bunyan and His Experience
4
John Bunyan and
His Experience
(Note: Numbers in parentheses refer to paragraphs of Grace Abounding).
Dr. Robert Harris, who succeeded John Dod at Hanwell, used to say that a preacher had three books to study, the Bible, himself, and the people. It is the purpose of this paper to say something of how Bunyan studied himself and interpreted what he found to the people.
In The Pilgrim’s Progress one of the things that helps to retain our interest to the end is the great variety of adventures that befalls Christian; he meets many kinds of people and travels through many kinds of country. Yet all this variety is actually variation between times of affliction and times of comfort. This is Bunyan’s message about his experience of the Christian life: that God reveals Himself to His people as much in times of temptation as in times of peace, and that both will lead them nearer to the glory which is unchanging.
Bunyan relates his experience in Grace Abounding, written during his first imprisonment, “for the support of the weak and tempted people of God.” He describes it as “something of a relation of the work of God upon my own soul, even from the very first until now, wherein you may perceive my castings down, and raisings up; for he woundeth, and his hands make whole.” There was no single or dramatic moment at which he became conscious of his rebirth, but from the time when “the thoughts of religion were very grievous” (10) there were four incidents which all had a lasting effect: (1) The reading of two books of practical divinity which his first wife had inherited from her father (15); this broke down his prejudice against religious observance. (2) A sermon on Sabbath breaking convicted him of sin (20–22). (3) A rebuke from a woman as ungodly as himself put him to secret shame for his swearing (26–28). (4) The overhearing of a conversation about the work of grace on the soul opened his mind to perceive the glory of the kingdom of heaven (37–38).
Bunyan was now in the position of Christian on the first page of The Pilgrim’s Progress. “And now, methought I began to look into the Bible with new eyes, and read as I never did before . . . . indeed, I was never then out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation, still crying out to God, that I might know the truth, and the way to heaven and glory” (46). And there are many remarkable correspondences throughout Bunyan’s own story with the adventures of his pilgrim. The wicket gate, which Christian must pass through, is foreshadowed in the autobiography in what Bunyan calls a dream or vision; here he became aware of the happiness of professing Christians as being like the warmth and comfort of people on the sunny side of a high mountain, while he shivered in the cold and clouds outside a great wall which surrounded them; and in this wall there was a narrow gap through which he struggled to pass (53–54). This is a typical example of how Bunyan’s imagination gave concrete form to scriptural imagery, and so why he was able to write the greatest allegory in the language: his mind instinctively perceived spiritual reality after this manner, as his remarks in paragraph 55 indicate.
Christian’s first difficulty on his journey is the Slough of Despond; and Bunyan himself had quickly been assaulted by doubts as to whether he was one of the elect, or whether the day of grace for him was not already past: “I was often, when I have been walking, ready to sink where I went, with faintness in my mind” (62). By quoting Romans 9:16 to him Satan repeatedly tempted him to despair. “Therefore, this would still stick with me, How can you tell that you are elected? And what if you should not? How then? O Lord, thought I, what if I should not, indeed? It may be you are not, said the tempter; it may be so indeed, thought I. Why then, said Satan, you had as good leave off and strive no further, for if, indeed you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no talk of your being saved; ‘For it is neither of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy’” (59–60).
The instruction that Bunyan received through the fellowship of the Baptists in Bedford is represented in The Pilgrim’s Progress by Interpreter’s House and by the advice of Evangelist and Good Will; we may note particularly the emphasis on the need for guilt of conscience to be taken off only by the blood of Christ, otherwise “a man grew rather worse for the loss of his trouble of mind, than better” (86).
Bunyan’s first experience of the love of Christ for his soul was the result of a sermon on Canticles 4:19, “Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair.” These words ran through his thoughts and kindled his spirit; “yea I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God, that I remember I could not tell how to contain till I got home. I thought I could have spoken of his love, and of his mercy to me, even the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me” (92). We think of Christian, who had a merry heart and gave three leaps for joy when the burden fell off his shoulders.
So despair and comfort alternated in Bunyan’s experience; difficulties were overcome in order that other trials further along the road might in their turn be tackled and overcome. Christian has to endure the hardships of the Valley of Humiliation, of Vanity Fair and of Doubting Castle; and the first and last of these are the counterparts of two periods of equally ferocious temptations in Bunyan’s life. Only a week or so after his great experience of forgiveness, what Bunyan calls “a very great storm” came upon him: “it came stealing upon me, now by one piece, then by another; first, all my comfort was taken from me, then darkness seized upon me, after which whole floods of blasphemies . . . were poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment” (96). And his struggle in prayer (107) is like Christian’s combat with Apollyon, who commanded the pilgrim to forsake his new Master. The subtlety of the tempter is conveyed very powerfully in Grace Abounding. Bunyan remembers that his periods of comfort and zeal for God, however overwhelming at the time, invariably fade away. “Well,” he said, “I will watch, and take what heed I can. Though you do, said Satan, I shall be too hard for you, I will cool you insensibly by degrees, by little and little. What care I, saith he, though I be seven years in chilling your heart if I can do it at last? Continual rocking will lull a crying child asleep. I will ply it close, but I will have my end accomplished. Though you be burning hot at present, yet, if I can pull you from this fire, I shall have you cold before it be long” (110). The slow grip of despair induced by these words is that felt by Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the reference to the crying child gives us a strange awareness of the malignity of the unseen powers of evil. Bunyan’s deliverance, both now and later, came from constant meditation on the promises of the gospel and their conditions (111–16).
The second great period of trouble recorded in Grace Abounding was much more distressing. This was a temptation to sell and part with Christ, to exchange Him for the things of this life. He was haunted by this for a whole year together, but nothing could diminish its power, and finally, worn out with the struggle, he felt the thought pass through his heart, “Let him go if he will” and thought also that he felt his heart consent to it. At once he was plunged into the most fearful despair, and there seized upon his soul the words of Hebrews 12:16–17: “Or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat, sold his birthright; for ye know, how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected, though he sought it carefully with tears” (141). “These words were to my soul like fetters of brass to my legs, in the continual sound of which I went for several months together” (144). Indeed, for over two years he had few moments of relief. But he was not passive; his intellectual activity was incessant; he continually searched the Scriptures for some guidance as to the true nature of his sin and its remedy. He tried to find parallels: David, Hezekiah, Solomon, and Peter were all guilty of terrible things, but his was most like that of Judas. He had insuperable difficulty in prayer; his desire to come before the mercy seat was constantly frustrated. He was mocked by Satan, who among other things told him at one time that since he had rejected the only mediator with the Father, he must pray for God the Father to be mediator between the sinner and His Son, and at another time that Christ indeed pitied him but had not died for that particular sin. Such thoughts were not the less grievous because he was fully aware that they were essentially ridiculous. But he was mocked most not by Satan, nor by the terrible warnings of Scripture, but by all the promises and most gracious words of the gospel. “Every time that I thought of the Lord Jesus, of his grace, love, goodness, kindness, gentleness, meekness, death, blood, promises, and blessed exhortations, it went to my soul like a sword; . . . Oh, thought I, what have I lost! What have I parted with! What have I disinherited my poor soul of!” (183). Thus the eternal constancy of God, which often comforts the believer, brings only terror when he despairs of salvation.
Bunyan’s experience of this was not by any means unique, but among all the seventeenth-century accounts which have survived his is the one which speaks to us with most power, and which also shows us most clearly how the Christian should react to such an attack. Comparison with two other memoirs will help us here.
In a book called Spiritual Experiences published in 1653, there is an account by a young man, signing himself E.R., which includes an episode frequently found in Puritan autobiographies. The memory of some sin convinces the believer that he is a reprobate, and he refuses to listen to any word of comfort. We usually read of his being visited by his pastor who reasons with him for many days in a vain attempt to alleviate his despair. And so it is with E.R., for he says, “my parents did send for Mr. Knewstubs, a Minister in Edmundsbury, and one Mr. Rogers another Minister of Dedham, who tooke a great deal of pains with me, and asked me whom I did believe in, and I told them that I did believe in God that he would damn me, and they asked me if God would damn me because I did believe in him; I answered no, but it was for that sin committed against God, and my innocent sister, and they asked me, whether I was not sorry for that act, and I told them yes, for I had cause to be sorry, for I must be damned for that sin” (Spirituall Experiences, 359). Later, when told that Christ would pardon a repentant sinner, “I told them no, that he would never open my heart but with terror, for I was born to be damned, and must be damned, and that Christ never died for such a sinner as I was” (ibid., 362). The preachers’ formidable learning and biblical exposition are of no use, because the victim seems to have searched every possible Scripture for himself. Prayer, ingenuity, and earnest persuasion are likewise without effect, for they are matched by answers even more ingenious. Time and again we read how the Puritan physicians of the soul appeared to make no impression on this obstinate refusal to listen to reason: the victim abandoned himself to all his morbid fears, and seemed almost to take a perverse delight to resisting all attempts to help him and in his uniqueness as the one soul whom not even God Himself could save.
Such perversity is spoken of in Mrs. Hannah Allen’s Satan, his Methods and Malice Baffled (1683). She made several attempts at suicide and quotes many remarks which show how she clung to her misery. On hearing a woman swear in the streets, she would say to her companion, “Ah, cousin, I have abhorred such company all my life, I hope they shall not be my companions to eternity” (13). When she would not get up in the mornings, and in other ways led her aunt to complain of weariness, she replied, “Ah, but what must I do, that must have no rest to all eternity” (27).
Now there is no trace of such wilfulness in Bunyan. He never surrendered; he was constantly seeking and was ready to grasp any vestige of hope. But even in his most miserable moments he wanted truth rather than comfort. His knowledge of his own heart and of the grace of God led him to shun a false peace obtained by closing his eyes to any of the facts as he saw them. Thus many Scriptures were brought home to his heart which seemed to lift his burden, but as he followed their implications ruthlessly to a conclusion, every way of escape was found to be a blind alley. This was indeed dreadful at the time, but looking back, he could say, “I never saw those heights and depths in grace, and love and mercy, as I saw after this temptation. Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty” (252). Nevertheless the Christian is not to seek out temptations, and Bunyan explicity claimed that his trials were partly the result of having disregarded the Lord’s command that we should pray to be kept from temptations to come. (See 237–39.) And so Mr. Greatheart points out to the pilgrims the bones of one Heedless, who was “foolishly venturous.”
His incessant reasoning from the Scriptures eventually pointed the way back to peace of mind. He became convinced that his brief periods of comfort were indeed conveying true spiritual comfort from God, and after much questioning concluded that it was not possible for a soul that had sinned the unpardonable sin to receive such comfort. So he got courage to reconsider the texts which condemned him, and concluded that he had been wrongly informed about the nature of his sin. And the way in which the Scriptures worked on his soul is nowhere seen more clearly than in the climax of this period of testing, where the texts of condemnation and of promise struggled within him until “this about the sufficiency of grace prevailed with peace and joy.” (See 204–15.) Bunyan experienced the Scriptures almost as physical presences. The Bible, he says, “was so fresh, . . . that I was as if it talked with me” (63). He constantly refers to it in physical terms: “The glory of these words was then so weighty upon me.” “Then would the former sentence fall like a hot thunderbolt again upon my conscience.” “This sentence stood like a millpost at my back.” And in most references to his spiritual condition there is this almost physical sense of strain. “I should find my heart to shut itself up against the Lord, and . . . my unbelief to set, as it were, my shoulder to the door to keep him out.” “I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir.” These images hardly seem to be images at all, but a direct description of the man’s experience as it actually was. This surely is why he can bring home to the reader the truths of Scripture with all the full power of personal experience. And so we do not just understand his condition, but in some measure know and feel what he felt.
Of other autobiographies in the Puritan tradition, the one which recounts an experience most like Bunyan’s is that of John Rogers, an Independent minister who later became a notorious Fifth Monarchy Man. Anyone who reads Rogers’s story however, which is printed in his treatise on church government Ohel or Bethshemesh, A Tabernacle for the Sun (1654), can see at once why Bunyan is still widely read today when Rogers is not. It is ultimately a question of the nature of his experience, for after ending on a note of complete assurance, Rogers went on to embrace more and more extreme religious and political opinions, but we do not feel convinced by his story because he paints his past in such lurid colours, condemns all his past attitudes out of hand, and concludes that now at last he is entirely right. Bunyan, on the other hand, while no less conscious of the great gulf between despair and assurance, can still speak at the end of his story of “seven abominations” in his heart. One quotation from Rogers, followed by one from Bunyan’s preface, must suffice to indicate the relevance of a man’s style to the substance of what he is really trying to do when he writes.
Rogers: “The more I read the more I roared in the black gulf of despair . . . I have run into barns, stables, house of office, anywhere . . . on purpose to pray, sigh, weep, knocking my breast, curse that ever I was born; wishing I were a stone . . . . for fear of hell and the devils, whom I thought I saw every foot, in several ugly shapes and forms (according to my fancies) and sometimes with great rolling flaming eyes (like saucers) having sparkling firebrands in the one of their hands, and with the other reaching at me to tear me away to torments! O the leaps that I have made! the frights that I have had! the fears that I was in!” (A Tabernacle for the Sun, 426–27).
Bunyan: “I could also have stepped into a style much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do, but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me, the devil did not play in tempting of me, neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me, wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple and lay down the thing as it was.”
The lesson for us is surely that in relating any experience of holy things it is frivolous to use heightened language or pious cliches, which may hinder the passage of the truth. We must try to “lay down the thing as it was.” And we can certainly say that in Bunyan’s case it was the directness and forcefulness with which he portrayed the heights and depths of his experience that enabled him to succeed in his aim to support “the weak and tempted people of God.”
This paper has perhaps been more concerned with the depths than the heights. In conclusion, then, it may be profitable to recall another Puritan writer who can give us a tangible link between the heights of Bunyan and the hope of glory which sustained an earlier generation of Puritans. We are all familiar with that great passage at the end of the Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress where the pilgrims are called one by one across the river. They all in turn receive their summons, make their bequests, and enter into their eternal inheritance. It is an idealised picture of the passing of faithful pilgrims, and it is true to the Puritan tradition, for fifty years before Bunyan wrote these words Edward Bagshaw had described the death of Robert Bolton, that son of thunder and consolation, in words hardly less noble than Bunyan’s.
“About a week before he died, when his silver cord began to loosen, and his golden bowl to break: He called for his wife, and desired her to bear his dissolution, which was now at hand, with a Christian fortitude, a thing which he had prepared her for by the space of twenty years, telling her that his approaching death was decreed upon him from all eternity, and that the counsel of the LORD must stand, and bad her make no doubt but she should meet him again in heaven. And turning toward his children, told them, that they should not expect he should now say anything to them, neither would his ability of body and breath give him leave, he had told them enough in the time of his sickness and before, and hoped they would remember it, and verily believed that none of them durst think to meet him at that great Tribunal in an unregenerate state . . . The night before he died, when the doors without began to be shut, and the daughters of music to be brought low, and he lying very low with his head, expecting every moment when the wheel should be broken at the cistern, yet being told that some of his dear friends were then about him to take their last farewell, he caused himself to be lifted up, and then like old Jacob bowing himself on his bed’s head, after a few gaspings for breath, he spake in this manner. I am now drawing on apace to my dissolution . . . . Hold out faith and patience, your work will speedily be at an end: And then shaking them all by the hands, prayed heartily, and particularly for them, and desired them to make sure of heaven, and to bear in mind what he had formerly told them in his ministry, protesting to them, that the doctrine which he had preached to them for the space of twenty years was the truth of GOD, as he should answer for it at the Tribunal of CHRIST, before whom he should shortly appear. This he spake when the very pangs of death were upon him. Whereupon a very dear friend of his taking him by the hand, and asking him if he felt not much pain, Truly no (said he) the greatest I feel is your cold hand. And then speaking to be laid down again, he spake no more until the next morning when he took his last leave of his wife and children, prayed for them and blessed them all, and that day in the afternoon about five of the clock, being Saturday the 17 day of December, Anno Dom. 1631 in the LXth year of his age, yielded up his spirit to GOD that gave it, and according to his own speech celebrated the ensuing Sabbath in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Edward Bagshaw, The Life and Death of Mr. Bolton; in Bolton’s Works, 1641, 33–35).
The following points were considered in discussion:
1. How far is it right to present Christian truth in an imaginative form, as Bunyan does in Pilgrim’s Progress? Imagination, it was observed, is a gift from God, and, as such, has its proper use—in this case, to make truth vivid (for Bunyan’s book is simply an extended illustration of Scripture principles). The danger here, however, is that imagination should cease to be a handmaid of truth, and its use a means to an end, and that it should be employed simply to entertain. This is always wrong in the sphere of revealed truth; we are not told to make the gospel entertaining. Again, if our attention is diverted from the truth being presented to the medium of its presentation, and our use of the resources of imagination becomes a self-conscious striving after effect, or aping of someone else, we fall into error, and indeed do harm by distracting our readers’ or hearers’ attention from our message to ourselves. Bunyan’s own artless absorption in his message, and the consequent naturalness and integrity of all his imaginative writing, is a lesson to us all.
2. Why is Bunyan’s intensity of experience rare today? Partly, no doubt, because men of Bunyan’s psychological make-up are rare in any age; but is it not also because we preach a different doctrine today—a less exalted doctrine of human sin, and a more superficial doctrine of faith (“believism”). Shallow doctrine creates shallow spirituality.