Where sin, sore-wounding, doth oppress me There grace abounding doth redress me.
JOHN DOWLAND1
Of sinners, I am the chief.
ABIEZER COPPE2
Until I came to the state of marriage, I was the very ringleader of all the youths that kept me company in all manner of vices and ungodliness …. In these days the thoughts of religion was very grievous to me.
BUNYAN3
GRACE ABOUNDING was not published until 1666, but it must be discussed here because it tells us much about Bunyan’s spiritual development in the 1650s—as he saw it in retrospect. Grace Abounding was written after the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II, after religious toleration had been brutally ended and Bunyan himself had been imprisoned. It is our principal source for the years between Bunyan’s return to Elstow in 1647 and his move to Bedford in 1655, when he was accepted into full membership of the Bedford congregation. Even the assiduous John Brown found very little other material relating to these years.
Grace Abounding is an unsatisfactory document for the biographer. It is a spiritual autobiography, describing the events which led up to Bunyan’s conversion. The chronology is at best imprecise, at worst chaotic. Any references to external events in Bunyan’s life during this period are quite accidental. We may assume that after demobilization he worked with his father in Elstow as a brazier, or tinker, until he set up on his own after his marriage. The job would involve journeying round the countryside mending pots and pans.
In Grace Abounding Bunyan says nothing about his military service. This may be due to caution. Since he was in prison as a subversive, it would have been imprudent to draw attention to his active participation in the army which had defeated Charles I. The only (neutral) reference to a military experience was added in the third edition, published between 1672 and 1674 when he was out of jail (xxxvii. 18). But there is also very little about his first marriage, except that his wife brought with her Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety. There is virtually no mention of his children, of his first wife’s death, or of his remarriage. It is almost impossible to establish the sequence of events. In The Pilgrim’s Progress Christian’s journey does not follow a straight geographical or chronological line, but reflects his psychological states; so the narrative of Grace Abounding appears to jump backwards and forwards as it describes Bunyan’s long battle with Satan.
Since W. Y. Tindall published his trail-blazing John Bunyan, Mechanick Preacher, in 1934 it has been accepted that the spiritual autobiography as a literary genre dates from around 1649. This is perhaps a little too precise, and may conceal an optical illusion. Anticipations of spiritual autobiographies can be found in diaries (spiritual balance sheets), prefaces to the collected writings of preachers, or biographical appendices to funeral sermons. The revolutionary decades saw the publication of this new genre.4 Spiritual autobiographies of ordinary people could not have got into print before the breakdown of censorship and the establishment of effective religious toleration. Tawney, when asked about ‘the sufferings of the peasantry in the sixteenth century’, is said to have boomed back, ‘The sufferings of the peasantry in the sixteenth century are due to the invention of printing.’ The prevalence of a literature of despair and conversion during the English Revolution may be the result of unprecedented freedom of publication.
Members of the congregations which everywhere sprang up discussed one another’s conversion experiences, and recorded them to help others: as congregations became settled, an account of experience of grace was often required as a condition of full admission to the church. By 1651 the famous Hugh Peter—former New England minister, ex-Army chaplain—was calling for a collection of ‘cases of conversion’ to be printed.5 There had been upper-class conversions earlier, naturally, which were sometimes recorded; but published discussions of the subject seem to occur only below the elite level. The novelty lay in sharing such experiences. There are no Laudian spiritual autobiographies. Despair leading to conversion was no doubt frequent, though rarely recorded, before 1640. We recall the two attempted suicides and ultimate conversion recounted by the London turner Nehemiah Wallington. If he had been born a little later he might have been tempted to publish some of the voluminous autobiographical writings which he composed from the 1620s onwards.6
A standard pattern for spiritual autobiographies soon took shape, but we should not therefore assume either that the saints copied from one another, or that their feelings became wholly conventional. In those critical times men and women had to face agonies of temptation and despair, as Bunyan did, alone. Knowledge that others had suffered the same devastating experience, and freedom to communicate and discuss, must have been a wonderful relief. What could be a more important subject than the experience of conversion? It became privileged as a rite of passage to elect status, and was therefore of intense interest to all potential saints. What more necessary than to be able to identify a ‘true’ conversion? It was only relatively late, in 1678, that Bunyan thought it necessary to warn against stereotypes of conversion. It was not even essential, he suggested, to roar aloud with the guilt of sin. ‘If God will deal more gently with thee than with others of his children, grudge not at it.’ The depth of the sense of sin proves nothing: witness Cain, Balaam, Judas.7 Quakers were moderating their own external ‘signs’ and gestures at about the same time.
We are not therefore necessarily bound to accept everything in Grace Abounding as autobiographical truth. The object of the work is to convey a message. But the emotional intensity of the writing carries its own conviction:
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 (3–4).
That perceptive critic Alick West pointed out that few books before Grace Abounding speak so energetically in the first person singular. Montaigne perhaps: but none addressed by a mechanic to his fellow artisans.8
Bunyan’s primary object in writing Grace Abounding was pastoral. He aimed not to convert but to convince the elect that they were indeed saved, whatever their doubts and temptations. ‘The Philistines understand me not.’ The local touch was all-important for his purposes. ‘Remember … how you sighed under every hedge for mercy.… Have you forgot the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn and the like, where God did visit your soul?’ (3) Intimations of grace occurred in normal daily life. ‘One day, as I was travelling into the country …. At another time, as I sat by the fire in my house, and musing on my wretchedness …’ (36). ‘One morning, as I did lie in my bed …’ (43). ‘Once as I was walking to and fro in a good man’s shop …’ (52). ‘One day, as I was in a meeting of God’s people, full of sadness and terror …’ (65). ‘As I was passing in the field …’ (72). It was when Bunyan was ‘in the midst of a game at cat … just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul’ (10; cf. 29,58,61,81).
A powerful feature of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was its careful accuracy and attention to homely detail. It did not derogate from the dignity of the martyrs to portray them as ordinary lower-class Englishmen—like most of Foxe’s readers. In stressing the familiarity of ‘the thing as it was’, Bunyan showed how even a saint, a martyr for the faith, could go through years of struggle with Satan, long after his apparent conversion. The theological need for precise and detailed observation contributed to literary realism.
At first Bunyan tried to escape from the Scriptures, as so many of his Ranter-influenced contemporaries did. But he could not. So he tore through the Bible, desperately trying to find authoritative assurance that he was saved, just as Milton had done to find justification for divorce. To Bunyan the texts appeared contradictory, but there must be a resolution, and it must be found in the protestants’ infallible book.
One of the astonishing features of Grace Abounding is the audibility of the exchanges between Bunyan and the tempter. Texts are hurled backwards and forwards like mountains in Milton’s War in Heaven. ‘The words began thus to kindle in my spirit, “Thou art my love, thou art my love”, twenty times together, and still as they ran thus in my mind, they waxed stronger and warmer.’ ‘I was much followed by this scripture, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you (Luke XXII. 31)”. And sometimes it would sound so loud within me and as it were call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily some man had, behind me, called to me’ (30–1). ‘Then would the text cry … aloud with a great voice, “Return unto me, for I have redeemed thee”’ (52). A text which Bunyan heard could silence ‘all those tumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me’ (53). ‘I had no sooner said it but this returned upon me, as an echo doth answer a voice, “This sin is not unto death”’ (59). ‘These words did sound suddenly within me;… that piece of a sentence darted in upon me.’ ‘These words did, with great power, suddenly break in upon me’ (64–5). ‘Suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul …’ (72). ‘That word of God took hold of my heart …. I suddenly felt this word to sound in my heart’ (80, 82). And when Bunyan was on trial in 1661,
while he [Judge Kelyng] was speaking these words, God brought that word into my mind, in the eighth of the Romans, at the 26th verse. I say God brought it, for I thought not on it before; but as he was speaking it came so fresh into my mind and was set so evidently before me, as if the Scripture had said, ‘Take me, take me’. (115)
Texts fight against texts. ‘As I strove to hold by this word, that of Esau would fly in my face like to lightning’ (60). ‘The Scriptures could not agree in the salvation of my soul’ (72). ‘This made me, with careful heart and watchful eye, with great seriousness, to turn over every leaf, and with much diligence, mixed with trembling, to consider every sentence’ (77). At last ‘I durst venture to come nigh unto those most fearful and terrible Scriptures, with which all this while I had been so greatly affrighted, and … had much ado an hundred times to forebear wishing them out of the Bible, for I thought they would destroy me’ (69–70). Sometimes two rival texts ‘bolted both upon me at a time, and did work and struggle strangely in me for a while.’ ‘At last, that about Esau’s birthright began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish.’ ‘Oh, what work did we make! It was for this in John (6: 37) … that we did so tug and strive; he [Satan] pulled and I pulled; but, God be praised, I got the better of him’ (67–8). Finally, ‘those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me’ (72).
So, in the course of his years of agony, Bunyan came to know the Bible better than most even in that Biblical age. He could nearly always out-text a disputant. The textual slogging match with Satan prepared him to become a great preacher and controversialist.
Sometimes the texts hurled at Bunyan were not from the Bible. He searched for one ‘above a year’ before he found it in the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 2: 10 (62–3; cf. 72). On another perplexing occasion he asked his wife, ‘Is there such a scripture, “I must go to Jesus”?’ She did not know, but Hebrews 12: 22–4 ‘came bolting in upon me’, and he slept happily (82).
Sociological and psychological historians have not got very far in explaining why there was so much despair in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, leading some to suicide, some to atheism, some to conversion. It seems to have been at its height in the hectic middle decades of the seventeenth century. It may be that anxiety was especially prevalent in this period because they were the years of the great economic divide, in which the lucky few might prosper whilst the mass of their neighbours were plunged into deeper poverty. Predestinarian theologies both stimulated anxiety and offered relief. Conversion perhaps played a role like that of the drug culture in our similar age of economic crisis, personal insecurity, and degradation.9
Where was certainty to be found after the breakdown of the 1640s and 1650s? Some looked for it in the teaching of a prophet like John Reeve, who claimed that God had given him greater knowledge of the Scriptures than to any other man. In the same year, 1651, Hobbes offered certainty through surrender to Leviathan, the mortal God. But that was not for the godly. Conversion was one answer: Bunyan’s future pastor, John Gifford, was converted in the early 1650s. Luther escaped from a similar spiritual crisis by wrestling with God until he won faith. Like Luther, Bunyan combined phenomenal moral toughness with his neuroses. He had to break through. But it took a long and exhausting struggle before Bunyan, like his contemporary Pascal, cast himself on to the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
Bunyan convinced himself that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and so put himself outside God’s mercy. The analogy which recurs in Grace Abounding is Esau’s sale of his birthright and his inability to recover it. ‘He found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears (Heb. XII, 16–17)’. Bunyan returns to that text a score of times (42–71). He was afraid that he had ‘disinherited my poor soul’. In the seventeenth century the words ‘inheritance’ and ‘birthright’ normally referred to landed property. Jack Lindsay suggested that Bunyan’s obsession relates to his family’s sales of land in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, their birthright whose loss had necessitated the wandering life of tinkers. ‘The whole earth, therefore’, Crowley had written over a century earlier, ‘[by birthright] belongeth to the children of men. They are all inheritors thereof by nature.’10 Levellers, Diggers, Army radicals, and the Quaker Edward Burrough emphasized the importance of Englishmen’s birthright freedom, and had striven unsuccessfully to recover it by political means. Winstanley and other Diggers used the story of Esau and Jacob in this context. Kingly government (‘Esau’) ‘took his younger brother’s creation birthright from him’, Winstanley wrote.11 We have no reason to suppose that Bunyan supported such political campaigns. By 1649–50 they had been defeated, by 1666 they were a distant memory. But he must have known about them.
The birthright which Bunyan was tempted to sell was access to salvation. Esau’s ‘birthright signified regeneration’, ‘the birthright to heaven.’ The saints were ‘“heirs of God!” God himself is the portion of the saints’ (71–81); theirs was ‘the church of the first-born’. For what was Bunyan tempted to sell this birthright? Grace Abounding never makes this entirely clear. ‘To exchange him for the things of this life, for anything’, Bunyan says (41). For acceptance of the unequal social order re-established in the 1650s and confirmed in 1660?—a society in which tinkers should know their place? For a life aimed at worldly success and wealth? The Life and Death of Mr. Badman was to show the possibilities here even for small men if they were unscrupulous enough. Or for acceptance of a life of averagely decent behaviour, no better and no worse than one’s neighbours, but abandoning the struggle to wring eternal life from an inscrutable God? The only clues we have are contained in Bunyan’s own writings—in Grace Abounding itself, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Badman, and The Holy War. But the idea of selling out, of betraying one’s own convictions, of getting by at a low but accepted level of achievement, of self-love rather than self-denial, remained to haunt Bunyan throughout his life.
In The Pilgrim’s Progress Christian seeks ‘an inheritance … laid up in heaven’. For ‘such as sell their birthright, with Esau’, there is a ‘by-way to hell, a way that hypocrites go in at’. Christian and Hopeful have their only serious dispute when Hopeful suggests that Little-faith (who had been robbed) might have sold or pawned some of his jewels. Christian slaps him down with a tartness that takes Hopeful aback. ‘Esau sold his birthright’, Hopeful expostulates, ‘… his greatest jewel; and if he, why might not Little-faith do so too?’ Christian thereupon lectures him on the allegorical significance of the jewels, which seemed to have escaped Hopeful.12
The Barren Fig-tree (1673), The Strait Gate (1676), and the posthumous The Heavenly Foot-man all return to Esau’s sale of his birthright and subsequent despair.13 Bunyan reverted to the question of losing one’s inheritance in The Advocateship of Jesus Christ, one of the last books he published (in 1688).
The man in Israel that, by waxing poor, did sell his land … in Canaan should not by his poverty lose his portion in Canaan for ever. The Lord, their head, reserved to himself a right therein.… ‘The land is mine’ (for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. Levit. XXV. 23–5). The law of grace has provided that the children shall not for their sin lose their inheritance in heaven for ever, but that it shall return to them in the world to come …. Your profuseness and prodigality shall not make him [Christ] let go his hold that he hath of you for heaven …. A spendthrift though he loses not his title may yet lose the present benefit. But the principal will come again at last.… When our evidences are taken from us because of a present forfeiture of this inheritance … they are not ordinarily got … again but by the help of a lawyer, an advocate. Thus it is with the children of God.… Jesus Christ our advocate is ready … to send us from heaven our old evidences again.
Such analogies appear to support Lindsay’s conjecture: Bunyan’s attention had been caught by the ability of poor Israelites to recover alienated land in the year of Jubilee, which he equated with the day of judgment.14
For a time Bunyan had fallen in ‘very eagerly with the religion of the times’, going to church regularly. But he still indulged in Sunday sports or even work on the Sabbath, until pulled up by a sermon from his parson. Vavasor Powell was similarly impressed by a rebuke which he received at the age of around 20 for watching games on the Sabbath. That must have been just before 1640. Margaret Spufford quotes an eighteenth-century account of a man who used to play football on Sundays in the 1630s, despite his minister’s admonitions. But when he heard the parson read the Book of Sports, and saw that iniquity was established by law, ‘chill horror not to be described’ descended on him. ‘What judgments are to be expected upon so wicked and guilty a nation! What must I do? Whither shall I fly? How shall I escape the wrath to come?… I date my conversion from that time.’15 Bunyan went home from hearing a sermon against Sabbath sports ‘with a great burden upon my spirit’. But even a voice from heaven darting into his soul whilst playing tipcat had only a temporary effect, and led to a ‘kind of despair’ that ‘heaven was gone already’ (8–11).
Bunyan was rebuked for swearing by a woman shopkeeper, which made him wish ‘with all my heart that I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing.’ He ‘fell to some outward reformation’, so that his neighbours ‘did take me to be a very godly man, a new and religious man,’ and were very impressed, as Bunyan presumably intended. But he still had trouble with bell-ringing and it was ‘a full year’ before he could quite stop dancing, though he was ‘now a brisk talker in matters of religion’ (11–16).16
A first turning-point came when ‘the good providence of God did cast me to Bedford, to work on my calling; and in one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and talking about the things of God …. They spake as if joy did make them speak.… They were to me as if they had found a new world.… They were far above and out of my reach.’ But as he went about his job, ‘their talk and discourse went with me’, and he began to appreciate the superficiality of his own apparent godliness. He made a point of ‘going again and again into the company of these poor people, for I could not stay away.’ They softened his heart, and bent his mind to meditate on what they had said (14–16).
The women in the sunlight were poor and unlearned. But they knew more than the Ranter-influenced ‘brisk talker’. The symbolism is as powerful as the thawing of the ice in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. At crises in Bunyan’s spiritual development he returned to the women, and they entered his dreams. ‘I saw, as if they were set on the sunny side of some high mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold.’ There was a wall between him and them. After much searching he found a narrow gap through which with great efforts he managed to squeeze himself (19–20). This clearly prefigures the wicket gate in The Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘Oh that I had turned sooner! Oh that I had turned seven years ago!’ Bunyan cried. Ultimately he began to ‘break my mind to those poor people’, who introduced him to their pastor, John Gifford (22–6).
But Bunyan’s struggles were not yet over. He believed that he would never forget the joy given him by the words ‘“Thou art my love, thou art my love” in forty years’. He ‘could have spoken of his love … even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me.… But alas! within less than forty days I began to question all again’ (30).
What kept Bunyan going was his fierce determination to be saved, his refusal to forget the promises, as Christian was to forget them in Doubting Castle, his refusal to despair. The Pilgrim’s Progress is at many points a commentary on Grace Abounding. The pilgrims encounter Giant Despair late in their progress, long after their conversion. What is remarkable is Bunyan’s isolation in his battle with Satan—at least as depicted in Grace Abounding. ‘As yet I had in this matter broken my mind to no man’, he observes (18). His wife is barely mentioned in this context, except when he asked her to identify a text. (She couldn’t.) Even when ‘with joy I told my wife “O now I know, I know”’, his real longing was ‘for the company of some of God’s people’ (82).
Bunyan alone knows fully of the despairing agonies he experiences as he battles with Satan and his old Ranter friends, as he pores in terrifying isolation over his Bible. Was his struggle really as lonely as that, or is this the way he wished to present it to his audience? Such questions arise continually when we try to use Grace Abounding as historical evidence. The quest for salvation was indeed a lonely one, perhaps always so for followers of the lonely Luther, but especially for those who had lived through the English Revolution, in which all traditional certainties were called in question. The old episcopal church collapsed in 1640, and no one seemed to mind very much. What survived was protestantism, any threat to which, real or imaginary, could unite Englishmen of the most divergent views. But in the free-for-all of discussion in the 1640s it was revealed how very varied the views of protestant Englishmen were. Not least in the Army, as Bunyan experienced.
What should protestant Englishmen do to be saved? Who was to help them? The Reformation had abolished priestly mediators. The episcopal church under Laud seemed to be reverting to popery. The Presbyterian state church which replaced it had very little popular appeal. The Army guaranteed religious toleration, but could provide no agreed religious settlement. Bunyan himself experienced and participated in bitter wrangling between orthodox Puritans and Baptists, between Baptists, Ranters, and Quakers. ‘I never cared to meddle with things that were contentious and in dispute amongst the saints’, he tells us, truthfully enough (87). Bunyan was driven back to the individualistic foundations of protestantism, to Luther—‘an ancient godly man’s experience, who had writ some hundreds of years before I was born.’ Bunyan regarded Luther’s Commentary on Galatians as second only to the Bible, ‘most fit for a wounded conscience’ (40–1).17 But the Ranter presence remains all-pervasive in Grace Abounding, as it had been in the Army and apparently was in Bedfordshire in the early 1650s. Behind Ranters and Army radicals was the traditional sceptical materialist anti-clericalism that went back at least to the Lollards. Such ideas, and criticisms of the authenticity of the Bible, had been canvassed in Ralegh’s and Marlowe’s circles in the late sixteenth century, and were refuted by Arthur Dent in 1601. Mrs Attaway, Walwyn, Winstanley, Roger Crab, and Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe gave them new publicity.18
There are—for myself at least—moments of tedium in the repetitiveness of Bunyan’s temptations, but also moments when the intense emotional power of his elation or despair carry us with him. And even the longeurs tell us much about Bunyan’s insecure personality. How did he develop after 1660? There have been so many ups and downs in the story that we are left with less certain conviction than Bunyan seems to feel that his doubts and temptations are all behind him. The book ends with his establishment as a highly successful preacher for the Bedford congregation. Theoretical doubts seem to have been resolved in practice: all his conflicts are turned outwards. Grace Abounding was written in jail, and looking back after six years of imprisonment Bunyan writes with the confident conviction of one whose elect status has been confirmed by martyrdom.