Be not offended because Christ holds forth the glorious treasure of the Gospel to thee in a poor earthen vessel, by one who hath neither the greatness nor the wisdom of this world to commend him to thee.… Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many nobles are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, etc. This man is not chosen out of an earthly but out of the heavenly University …
JOHN BURTON1
i. Anti-Quaker Pamphlets, 1656–1657
THROUGHOUT his two anti-Quaker pamphlets Bunyan’s stress was on his opponents’ lack of a sense of sin, of the total unworthiness of man before God, which was the essential preliminary to effectual calling. ‘If all the Quakers and Ranters in the world were but under the guilt of one sinful thought, it would make them to cry out with Cain, “My punishment is greater than I can bear”’ (71; cf. 156–60). We recall Samuel Fisher’s mockery of priests whose ‘trick is for money to declare against sin’, and Fox’s ‘now they have gotten our money they hope we will not look for perfection … while we are upon earth, … for we must carry a body of sin about us.… Oh deceivers!’2
Bunyan believed that Satan tries first of all to keep men in love with their sins and pleasures, to prevent them listening to those who warn against them. If this fails, his second ploy is to persuade the sinner that his anxieties about his soul are ‘but a melancholy fit’, calling for physic (14). Ranters, Walwyn, and Winstanley had explained religious melancholy leading to despair in medical terms; for them too physic was the answer. Mr. Badman’s physician gave him the same advice.3 Satan’s third attack was to use consciousness of sin to reduce the sinner to despair of his own prospects. Finally his fourth line was ‘to make thee rest upon thy own righteousness’, to think that heaven can be earned. It was here that Ranters and Quakers could delude ‘unstable souls’ who ‘were shaking in their principles’. They made them ‘slip into high notions’, till they became ‘puffed up’ in their fleshly minds, priding themselves on their knowledge of the Scriptures (13–16).
Ranters and Quakers, in short, responded to the special needs of sincere Christians confused by the collapse of old standards and lack of agreement among the godly on anything to replace them; and they appealed to complacent ‘notionists’ whom the possibility of the coming of a better society had given what Bunyan saw as excessive self-confidence. They ignored what Bunyan regarded as facts: the existence of sin, of a predestined elect saved not by their own efforts or for their own abilities or notions, but by Christ alone. At this point we may recall Victor Kiernan’s remark about predestinarian theories: that they often appealed to the poor and unprivileged, who might or might not be saved, but who felt themselves distinct from the rich. The latter have their good times on earth; few indeed of them could hope for salvation.4 The would-be intellectualism, as Bunyan saw it, of Ranters and Quakers put them with the privileged, the educated elite who were almost certainly damned. The plausibility of their notions to natural human reason was merely evidence of their satanic origin. Bunyan’s hostility to Quakers diminished as they came to share persecution. But Bunyan did not forget. Among the Delectable Mountains lie the unburied bones of those who denied the resurrection. He was still attacking Quakers in the posthumous Israel’s Hope Encouraged.5
The conservative Richard Baxter said he had known learned men who were Arminians; but antinomians, he thought, were normally of ‘the vulgar sort’, uneducated.6 Bunyan often skirted near antinomianism; his hatred for Arminian Quakers (and for Latitudinarians) is perhaps tinged with a social distaste for pseudo-intellectuals. Moreover, Quakers allowed women a liberty in church worship of which Bunyan disapproved.
The political atmosphere was already becoming more conservative in the late 1650s. We must see Bunyan’s personal spiritual crisis against this social background. The optimistic libertine speculations of the late 1640s had proved mere ‘notions’; the state church had not recovered its prestige and authority: nothing had taken its place. Many concluded ‘there are so many sects and judgments in the world, that we cannot tell which way to take’ (126). Bunyan no longer wanted to be perfect. He had seen too many who did, with—as he thought—disastrous consequences. He wanted to be saved. His own conversion, he said, came after he had been ‘killed by the authority of the holy Scriptures’ (53–4). It released him from the overwhelming sense of sin, of worthlessness before God. Bunyan had been horrified at the light-heartedness with which Ranters liberated men and women from sin, apparently oblivious to the possible consequences. In a world dominated by the ungodly rich, the sense of sin gave a tougher courage to endure. Bunyan thought Quakers were more dangerous than Ranters just because they were more morally virtuous, more courageous in their resistance to persecution.
Yet Bunyan still believed that ‘the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ is … nigh, even at the doors’ (99). His sense of sin and of the coming millennium encouraged a desire to separate from the godless mass of mankind, to turn inwards, but also to reject the dominance of the rich, the university-educated opinion-formers of the society, who had never even been troubled by the doubts and hopes to which Ranters and Quakers had responded. Bunyan now saw Ranters and Quakers as seducers on the side of Satan, the established church, and the rich. It was no accident that in the 1660s he was to equate Latitudinarian with Quaker ideas. But in the 1650s it was a gut reaction: ‘I do know they are the poor that receive the Gospel’ (145).
That ‘the poor receive the Gospel’ was one of the few points on which Bunyan agreed with Edward Burrough. After disposing of the Quakers, Bunyan’s next publication was A Few Sighs from Hell (1658), an expansion of a sermon which he had preached on the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the rich man and the beggar. The theme is that which underlies Bunyan’s controversy with the Quakers: the urgent necessity of bringing home to men and women the parlous state of their souls until they become convinced of their depravity. But the parable, made familiar by the Elizabethan Book of Homilies, was regularly employed, mostly by radicals, to make social points.7 Bunyan thought the parable reveals ‘the sad condition of those that are for the most part rich men.’ Rich men ‘are most liable to the devil’s temptations,… most liable to be puffed up with pride’ and other sins: God’s own ‘are most commonly of the poorer sort’ (253–4). ‘God hath chosen the poor, despised and base things of this world.’ Lazarus is ‘a scabbed creep-hedge’. But it is ‘better to hear the Gospel under a hedge than to sit roaring in a tavern’ (304, 307). Bunyan seems almost to have had someone in mind when he observed how ‘the great ones of the world will go strutting up and down the streets’ (252), ‘hunting and whoring, … dancing and playing’ (279). ‘They will build houses for their dogs, when the saints must be glad to wander and lodge in dens and caves of the earth.’ They eject their godly tenants, or ‘pull down the house over their heads’ (257; cf. 315). ‘So far from parting with any worldly gain,… they are still striving, by hook or by crook, as we say, by swearing, lying, couzening, stealing, covetousness, extortion, oppression, forgery, bribery, flattery, or any other way, to get more’ (340).
In A Few Sighs from Hell the state clergy are shown as no better than the rich. They are patterns to their flocks not of godliness but of pride, wantonness, drunkenness, covetousness (127). Bunyan speaks alliteratively of the ‘flatteries and fawning of a company of carnal clergymen’ (307). They preach ‘for filthy lucre’s sake’ (314; cf. 306). Bunyan included gentry, clergy, and the universities in a brilliantly dismissive phrase when he said that God’s little ones ‘are not gentlemen, … cannot, with Pontius Pilate, speak Hebrew, Greek and Latin’ (304; cf. 345).
A Few Sighs from Hell may have been one of the sermons which, Bunyan modestly tells us, had considerable success and won him no small reputation. His vigorous response to a congenial theme cannot have endeared him (or the religious toleration which made such a-sermon by a tinker possible) to the well-to-do citizens of Bedford or to ‘the pretty gentry’ in the town and its immediate neighbourhood.8 Threats were uttered. ‘Would the creatures do as some men would have them, the saints of God should not walk so quietly up and down the streets, and other places, as they do’ (258). Bunyan felt personally menaced. ‘The world rages, they stamp and shake their heads and fain would be doing: The Lord help me to take all they shall do with patience.’ He asked for his readers’ prayers ‘that God would fit me to do and suffer what shall be from the world or devil inflicted upon me’ (248; cf. 399).
The gentry were already preparing for the revenge which was to be theirs after 1660. Bunyan knew that he was a marked man, and he was ready for his ordeal. In attacking Quakers he had been going with the tide; but in A Few Sighs from Hell he set himself resolutely against it.9 ‘Unless the over-ruling hand of God in goodness do order things contrary to their natural inclination, they will not favour you so much as a dog’ (259). But ‘there is a time coming, O ye surly dogged persecutors of the saints, that they shall slight you as much as ever you slighted them.… In your greatest need and extremity they shall not pity you. The righteous … shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked’ (284). Such violent and provocative language made it unlikely that the gentry would pity Bunyan if they had the opportunity to silence him.