How if all our faith, and Christ, and Scriptures, should be but a think-so?
BUNYAN1
BUNYAN came to hate Ranters and Quakers because he had so nearly been convinced by them. Their ideas attracted him, but failed to give him what above all things he sought—assurance of his own salvation. For a long time Bunyan was assailed by blasphemous thoughts. They were Ranter commonplaces—doubts about the existence of God and the historical Jesus Christ,
and whether the holy Scriptures were not rather a fable and cunning story than the holy and pure Word of God.… How can you tell but that the Turks had as good Scriptures to prove their Mahomet the Saviour, as we have to prove our Jesus is? And, could I think that so many ten thousands, in so many countries and kingdoms, should be without the knowledge of the right way to heaven; if there were indeed a heaven, and that we only, who live in a corner of the earth, should alone be blessed therewith? Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors, and Pagans! and how if all our faith, and Christ, and Scriptures, should be but a think-so too? … Paul … being a subtle and cunning man, might give himself up to deceive others with strong delusions. (31–2)
And Bunyan had many even worse thoughts, ‘which at this time I may not nor dare not utter’ (31–2; cf. 76, 102). One wonders what they were.
The Koran had been translated into English in 1649, with upsetting effects. A mid-sixteenth-century Italian translation gave rise to similar anxieties.2 Bunyan remained very conscious of radical criticisms of the Bible’s authenticity, ‘written by some politicians, on purpose to make poor ignorant people to submit to some religion and government.’ He made a damned soul in A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) remember calling it ‘a dead letter, a little ink and paper of 3 or 4 shillings price.’ He had preferred ‘a ballad, a newsbook, George on horseback or Bevis of Southampton’. Hell existed only in men’s consciences.3
Of all the temptations which Bunyan experienced, he thought that ‘to question the being of God, and the truth of his gospel, is the worst, and worst to be borne.’ Sometimes ‘the whole Bible has been to me as dry as a stick.’ The first of seven abominations which he found in his heart was ‘inclining to unbelief’. Even in prison he still suffered from doubts about the afterlife. In Prison Meditations (1663) he counters the Ranter idea that the Bible was ‘devised by cunning men’. In One Thing is Needful (1665) he refers to scepticism about heaven and hell as ‘that trick of youth’, presumably referring to his own.4
Bunyan was tempted to solve his problems by settling for the belief that there was no such thing as a day of judgment, no resurrection, and ‘that sin was no such grievous thing’. If you are damned you are damned: worrying will not help you. He would possess his mind ‘with some such conclusions that Atheists and Ranters do help themselves withal’ (49). The Ranter Lawrence Clarkson taught that sin existed only in the imagination: Bunyan, like Clarkson, ‘found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed, that I might taste the sweetness of it’ (11).
Even when Bunyan had been admitted to fellowship with the Bedford church he was tempted to blaspheme the ordinance of holy communion ‘and to wish some deadly thing to those that then did eat thereof’ (79). He felt, but overcame, similar temptations to blaspheme from the pulpit in his early preaching days (90). In the posthumous Christ a Complete Saviour he returned to the subject: ‘some of those that are coming to Christ’ have ‘many strange, hideous and amazing blasphemies’. It is ‘common to such … to have some hellish wish or other against God.’ In The Pilgrim’s Progress Christian fails to realize that the ‘many grievous blasphemies … which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind’ were in fact whispered to him by a devil.5 Did Bunyan cease to have such thoughts?
Since it has recently been alleged that there were no Ranters,6 it is interesting that so many of the opinions which Bunyan encountered were commonplaces of Ranter libertinism. Bunyan names the Ranters only in the third edition of Grace Abounding (1672–4) (16–17, 49), though from the first edition his reference is clearly to their doctrines. In 1656 he had spoken of ‘a company of loose Ranters’. Perhaps by the early 1670s he distinguished more distinctly between Ranters and Quakers than he wished to do in 1666. He tells us that he met a great many Ranters in Bedfordshire, and ‘some Ranter books that were put forth by some of our countrymen, which books were also highly in esteem by several old professors.’ Bunyan’s one ‘religious intimate companion … turned a most devilish Ranter, and gave himself up to all manner of filthiness, especially uncleanness.’ He would deny the existence of God, angels, and spirits. ‘He told me … that in a little time I should see all professors turn to the ways of the Ranters.’ Bunyan ‘left his company forthwith’, but on his travels (as a tinker, presumably) he met several people who, ‘though strict in religion formerly, yet were also swept away by these Ranters. These would … condemn me as legal and dark; pretending that they only had attained to perfection that could do what they would and not sin.’ (This again was Clarkson’s doctrine.) ‘These temptations were suitable to my flesh’, Bunyan adds, ‘I being but a young man’ (16–17).7
We already know of Ranters in more than twenty counties.8 Further local research might well reveal more, and so put into perspective the legislative and other measures directed against them in 1650–1. These were so effective, at least in driving Ranter heresies underground, that historians have perhaps too easily assumed that the legislation was superfluous because dealing with an insignificant phenomenon. The long history of views like theirs, before and after the Revolution, suggests otherwise. Ranters—unlike Bunyan, unlike Quakers—recanted easily under threat, because they expected no reward in heaven for martyrdom; but they almost certainly remained of the same opinion still.
For the rest of Bunyan’s life he continued to wage battle against Ranter ideas. 1665 saw The Holy City attacking ‘Ranting opinions’; The Resurrection of the Dead is throughout concerned with mortalism, ‘the chief doctrine of the Ranters’, ‘the faith of Ranters, not of Christians’, which had earlier tempted Bunyan (49, 76). Ranters are everywhere in Grace Abounding. In Bunyan’s allegories their ideas and practices continued to be a major concern. Mr. Badman has many Ranter qualities; Carnal Security and Atheism in The Holy War appear to be Ranters. So perhaps are the Doubters. Bunyan thought it a knock-down argument against separate meetings for women of his church that Ranters and Quakers favoured them.9 In his Exposition on … Genesis, on which he was still working when he died, Bunyan wrote ‘the first thing that God made was time: I say it was time.’ God created time before he created man, indeed before he created matter, the heavens, or the earth. The philosophic nature of the statement is outside Bunyan’s range: he must have taken it over from somebody, though I do not know from whom. But the heavy emphasis which he lays on it attracts attention. It had been anticipated in Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, where Matthew gives Prudence the right answer to the first question she asks when she catechizes him. Was there, she inquires, ‘ever anything that had a being antecedent to or before God?’ ‘No’, Matthew replies, ‘for God is eternal, nor is there anything excepting himself that had a being until the beginning of the first day. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is.’10
Bunyan is refuting the traditional heresy, which Ranters took over from popular sceptical materialism, that matter was eternal, that God did not create the universe. Bunyan regarded this as atheism; refuting it was essential to his refutation of Ranterism. If no creation, there would be no afterlife, no rewards and punishments, no sense of sin, no hierarchy, degree or order on earth. That Bunyan was still attacking such ideas at the very end of his life suggests that Ranterism was not dead in the areas which he knew best, Bedford and the surrounding countryside, and London. They still seemed to Bunyan to offer a real threat.
The crucial fact in Bunyan’s life was the conviction that he was one of the elect, which came to him around 1653. The nearest he gets to giving a date is ‘just before the men called Quakers came into the country’—a significant way of putting it.11 Ranters were then being persecuted out of existence, and Quakers were picking up many of them. Bunyan’s first publications were directed against Quakers. For this there are two reasons. First he did not differentiate them from Ranters. Many of his contemporaries confused the two, just as they confused Levellers and Diggers; and indeed lines of division were not always clear-cut. There was no Ranter organization at all, and although Quakers had many personal connections with one another, there was at this date no way of identifying a Quaker. A large penumbra of unorganized radicals, libertines, and others hung around the movement.
We think of Quakers as wholly serious, courageous men and women of pacifist principle. But the habits of early Quakers were disturbing. They were not pacifists; they indulged in symbolic actions like going naked for a sign (with only a loincloth about their middles, for decency’s sake), or disrupting religious services; they wrote large tomes to prove that the Bible was not the Word of God. For Bunyan all this must have seemed the height of frivolous irresponsibility. And in 1659–60 the Quakers played politics with the Commonwealth government. ‘We look for a new earth as well as a new heaven,’ Burrough told Parliament.12
Bunyan’s earliest tracts against Quakers seem to us wrong-headed; they were certainly ill-tempered. He was defending the Bible to which he owed his conversion and the congregation which had given him a sense of security, of belonging. But his attitude towards Quakers mellowed after he had shared Bedford gaol with fifty of them. Their unflinching courage under persecution won the admiration of many who did not agree with them. It was particularly likely to impress Bunyan. One contemporary critic suggested that in his refusal to attach symbolic importance to baptism Bunyan came close to the Quakers: ‘I walk according to my light with God.’ Bunyan’s release from gaol in 1672 is said to have been due to Quaker mediation.13
A second reason for Bunyan’s hostility to Quakers was their sudden and successful propaganda campaign in Bedfordshire. In 1654 William Deusbury, ‘the Quaker Apostle of Bedfordshire’, converted John Crook, a county magistrate who had been a captain in the Parliamentary army. In 1653 Crook was proposed as a member of Barebone’s Parliament; the following year William Dell recommended him for election to Parliament, remarking that he was ‘against the paying of tithes and taxes’. Crook was in prison in 1656. His house, Beckrings Park, became a Quaker centre, the Swarthmore Hall of the Midlands. In 1658 the first Quaker yearly meeting took place there. In 1659 there was a disturbance at a Quaker meeting at Crook’s house, caused by ‘many of Bunyan’s people’. (The phrase is incidental evidence of Bunyan’s prominence in popular estimation: he was not pastor of the congregation until twelve years later.) From 1656 onwards there were clashes between Quakers and the Bedford congregation; they led to Bunyan’s attacks. As early as 1654–5 the Quakers Thomas Stubbs and Thomas Storey were making conversions around Dunstable, a former Digger centre. Deusbury won supporters at the same time in Wellingborough, which also had maintained a Digger colony. Fox held ‘a great meeting there’ in 1655. Quakers appear to have looked especially to Baptist congregations for converts. By 1669 there were more Quakers than Independents in Bedford.14
There was much which shocked Bunyan in the beliefs of Ranters and Quakers. Most Ranters were mortalists—i.e. they believed that the soul dies with the body, and does not revive until the final resurrection—if then. They regarded the resurrection as a symbolic rather than a historical event: ‘nothing but the resurrection from a sinful to a holy state in this life’. Bunyan attributed mortalism and denial of the resurrection of the body to Quakers. Mortalism could lead to atheism, which Bunyan also attributed to Ranters—‘if there be such a thing as an atheist in the world’. He came to share the wholly conventional view that denial of rewards and punishments after death would ‘open a flood-gate to all manner of impiety’.15
Ranters denied the Scriptures to be the Word of God; so did the Quaker Samuel Fisher. Ranters thought the Bible was a historical document to be criticized like any other. Many of them denied the historical existence of Jesus Christ, or at least held with Gerrard Winstanley the Digger that ‘the mystery’ was more important than ‘the history’, Christ within us more important than the Christ who died at Jerusalem. Ranters were sceptical about Christ’s Second Coming, regarding it too as a metaphor for transformations within believers—as Winstanley had done. Bunyan attributed ‘mocking at the Second Coming of the man Christ’ to Quakers as well as to Ranters.16 Ranters rejected baptism and holy communion—‘and are not you the same?’ Bunyan asked Quakers.17 The Ranters Clarkson and Coppe extended antinomianism to cover sexual licence and promiscuity. The practice of some on the fringes of the Quaker movement made it easy to accuse all Quakers of similar immoralism.
Bunyan believed that
the opinions that are held at this day by the Quakers are the same that long ago were held by the Ranters. Only the Ranters had made them threadbare at an ale-house and the Quakers have set a new gloss upon them again, by an outward legal holiness or righteousness.
The Baptist Thomas Collier said something similar though less striking in the same year, 1657; Richard Baxter and many others were to echo it later. For Bunyan the authenticity of the Bible, the doctrine of justification by faith, Christ’s historical existence and his sacrifice on the cross, had been fundamental factors in his conversion. To call them in question was to tear up the roots of his faith.18
In Grace Abounding Bunyan suggested that Quaker opposition to God’s truth, as he saw it, meant that ‘God did the more confirm me in it, by leading me into the Scriptures’ (39). Ranters and Quakers ‘knowingly, wilfully and despitefully’ rejected the atonement of Christ, his resurrection, and Second Coming. Their errors, he said in The Strait Gate (1676), meant that they ‘will seek to enter in, and shall not be able’.19 Edward Burrough, a leading Quaker, replied to Some Gospel-truths, and again to Bunyan’s A Vindication. He rightly corrected Bunyan’s confusion of Quakers with Ranters. The exchange was very abusive on both sides. Burrough referred to Bunyan’s ‘carnal sottishness’, his ‘sinful, wicked, devilish nature’, ‘his damnable doctrines and errors’—‘a man given up to wickedness’. Bunyan retorted in kind against Burrough’s ‘railings’, ‘deceit’, ‘lame arguments’, ‘like a blind man in a thicket of bushes’, ‘raging expressions’, ‘bawlings’. There was much slinging of texts backwards and forwards. Quakers, Bunyan said, were ‘the greatest enemies to the Christ of God without.’20
Burrough replied by accusing John Burton, pastor of the Bedford congregation, of preaching for hire: he did in fact hold a living in the state church until 1660, which Burrough estimated at £150 per annum, and thought Bunyan got some of it. ‘Bunyan is railing against the priests, and runs up into the pulpit himself’, George Fox snorted when he intervened in the dispute in 1659. Much of the disagreement was semantic. Neither Bunyan nor Burrough tried to understand the different ways in which the other used words like ‘light’ and ‘Christ’; each accused the other of confusion for not using words in his sense. Burrough claimed that at a meeting at Pavenham on 12 April 1656 Bunyan had said, ‘there is nothing in me nor in any man to be taken notice of.’ That sounds like an agreeable piece of modesty. But Burrough interpreted it to mean that Bunyan was ‘a reprobate and without Christ in him, one that hath denied Christ in him, or else thinks Christ not worth taking notice of.’ Bunyan did not reply to Burrough’s second tract, nor to Fox’s The Great Mistery of the Great Whore. Thomas Collier joined in on Bunyan’s side against Burrough in 1657.21
Bunyan regarded the Quaker inner light as simply that ‘law of nature’ which ‘is universal in every individual man in the world’. But unregenerate man is without Christ. Bunyan was no doubt even more indignant with Quaker disparagement of ministers who ‘preach up sin’. If sin and salvation and the historical Christ are not real, Bunyan thought, we can rely only on our own righteousness. Ranters and Quakers dismissed the fears and scruples which overwhelmed Bunyan.22
Like Milton, Bunyan had to hold on to the Bible, and the historical Christ. Ranters demonstrated how rudderless men could become once the Bible was discarded. Milton was prepared to interpret the Bible, drastically and Jesuitically; but never to jettison it. The Quaker Samuel Fisher’s scholarly tome arguing that the Bible was so internally inconsistent and contradictory that it could not be the Word of God was published only in 1660, too late to make an impact on popular opinion. It was left to Spinoza and other philosophers to follow up this lead.23 The sceptical moment had passed. Yet Bunyan’s fury against the Quakers showed how insecure this questioning of the foundations had made him. Why was the Bible more authoritative than the Koran, if wide acceptance of the former was a main argument for its authenticity? If the inner light, the Christ inside one, was supreme, then how could there be agreed interpretations of the Bible—or of anything else? This made way for Hobbism.
The Quakers were to grapple with these problems, painfully, after 1660. They proclaimed pacifism and abstention from politics, and withdrew from making the sort of antisocial gestures to which the spirit had moved the first generation. They reinstated sin and the Bible. They came nearer to Bunyan as he came nearer to them.
For Bunyan—historically correctly—the Bible in English was the basis of popular protestant culture, won in two-and-a-half centuries of struggle by Lollards, Marian martyrs, and separatists. Calling the Bible in question would seem to him to call in question all the achievements of the people of the Book. There had always been tension in protestantism, between the individual conscience and the authority of the church, or the state, or accepted norms of social behaviour. But now norms were changing; and individual consciences were necessarily the vehicles of change. There was no final solution to that problem: only temporary halting-places on the way. Hence Bunyan’s ecumenism, his impatience with squabbles about ceremonies, once the essentials were agreed on. But how difficult to extend that agreement beyond a small group!