Christ’s church is an hospital of sick, wounded and afflicted people.
BUNYAN1
It is disgraceful and disgusting that the Christian religion should be supported by violence.
MILTON2
i. Bunyan and his Congregation
GRACE ABOUNDING contains the last autobiographical information we have about Bunyan. So we are denied the answers to some interesting questions. Did he remain secure in his faith after his imprisonment? What, if any, spiritual conflicts recurred? Was he still tempted by the urge to blaspheme? In Grace Abounding Bunyan feared making a bad end and so bringing disgrace on God’s cause; Christian was afraid to cross the River of Death; and the lengthy discussion arising from Mr Badman’s peaceful end shows that the subject was still in Bunyan’s mind. We would welcome revelations of the type that Grace Abounding gives, however much we may discount them.
After 1660 we have only Bunyan’s posthumous London biographers. There is remarkably little from local sources. There are legends, some of them plain wrong, or distorted—like putting Bunyan’s jail on Bedford bridge. We should not read too much into this absence of local material: Bunyan had become a national figure. But it remains a fact.
In the 1650s the Bedford congregation had been able to remain part of the Church of England. Presentation to the living of St John the Baptist was in the hands of the mayor and corporation of Bedford, who in 1653 presented Gifford. When he died in 1655, after some manœuvring they were pressurized by Oliver Cromwell to present John Burton, the congregation’s nominee. This gave Burrough the opportunity to sneer at Burton (and, he implied, Bunyan as well) as a ‘hireling’.3
After 1660 ‘the persecution that always attends the Word’ fell upon the Bedford church. Persecution of dissenters was erratic in the 1660s, varying with central and local circumstances. But it intensified after 1669. The Archbishop of Canterbury observed in 1670 that conventicles were spreading from cities and greater towns to villages and hamlets. At the restoration seven ministers were ejected from their Bedfordshire livings; when in 1672 Charles issued his Declaration of Indulgence to dissenters, twenty-four took out licences. The county had a higher proportion of licensed dissenting congregations in proportion to area than any other in the country. The Bedford church bought a barn as a permanent meeting-place.4
The Declaration had a polarizing effect. Most protestant dissenters accepted it gladly, including Bunyan’s church, which was listed as Congregational. Parliament opposed the Declaration because it included papist as well as protestant dissenters, and because the Commons held the royal claim to suspend the operation of Parliamentary penal statutes by prerogative to be illegal. But the Declaration created the possibility of new alignments, new alliances between protestant dissenters and some Anglicans.
The Bedford congregation perforce existed semi-legally until 1672. One of its members, Samuel Fenn, yeoman, was in trouble in 1669 for saying the King was not head of the Church of England: but a jury returned an ignoramus verdict. In the following year Nehemiah Coxe, cordwainer, recently admitted to the congregation, was accused of saying ‘the Church of England as it now stands is an Antichristian church.’ He repeated the remark in the presence of the mayor.5
Bunyan’s view of the Anglican establishment was no more favourable. In 1657 he had written of the ‘loose conversation’ and ‘wicked walking’ of preachers of the state church, who ‘harden their hearers in their sins’. ‘Would a parishioner learn to be proud? he or she need look no further than to the priest, his wife and family.’ Would they learn to be wanton, drunkards, or covetous, ‘they need but look to their ministers’—‘riding and running after great benefices and parsonages by night and by day.’ Next year in A Few Sighs from Hell he attacked ‘the carnal priests’ who ‘tickle the ears of their hearers with vain philosophy and deceit, and thereby harden their hearts against the simplicity of the Gospel.’6
It was not always easy after 1660, in view of the censorship, for Bunyan to be open about his rejection of the state church. But in 1662, in I Will Pray with the Spirit, Bunyan attacked ‘trencher chaplains’ in ‘great men’s families’, ‘whose great business is their own bellies’, and denounced the set forms of the Antichristian prayer book. ‘A good sense of sin, and the wrath of God, with some encouragement from God to come unto him, is a better Common Prayer Book than that which is taken out of the papistical Mass-Book.’7
In The Holy War Diabolus set up his own church, a sufficient ministry with lecturers, preaching a holy law unto which the inhabitants must conform. And in Antichrist and his Ruin, which Bunyan prudently did not publish, he cautiously but clearly criticized the surviving rags of Antichrist in the Church of England, its convocations, church courts, and lordships, and warned against the danger of a return to popery. Ministers should not rule, he wrote in A Discourse of the Building … of the House of God (1688); they should be waiters at table.8
Erratic enforcement of the laws against nonconformity may in part be explained by the sympathy which local residents felt for their more godly neighbours. But the uncertainty helped to increase the deterrent and destabilizing effects of persecution. Two Bedford men who were sentenced to deportation in 1668 were still in England four years later, when they were pardoned.9
Meetings of the congregation were correspondingly erratic. There are no entries in the church book for early 1661, late 1662, and almost all of 1663, and none at all between 1664 and late 1668, when the Conventicle Act expired and nonconformists won some relief. Persecution was renewed when the second Conventicle Act (1670) encouraged widespread use of informers; it empowered a single JP to take punitive action against nonconformists. But even in 1668–9 1,400 cases of prosecution of dissenters had been recorded in the Archdeacon’s court for Bedford and Bedfordshire. Many of the congregation’s meetings went unrecorded when it met in villages outside Bedford. Members of the congregation had to flee from their houses. In 1669 Brother Merrill backslid so far as to charge the church with rebellion, with having their hands in the blood of Charles I.
Two years later Robert Nelson was cast out ‘because he was openly baptized after the Antichristian guise of the Church of England.’ Many members withdrew from communion ‘in these troublous times’, and attended ‘at the superstitious and idolatrous worship that with force and cruelty is maintained in opposition to the true worship and worshippers of God.’ ‘While the world are continuing their persecution and spoil of us’, to cite the words of the church book, the pamphlet A True and Impartial Narrative of some Illegal and Arbitrary Proceedings … in and near the town of Bedford gave a vivid account of actions in 1670, when church members were fined and their goods distrained. When the church was licensed there were a number of applications to join or rejoin. But this licence was revoked in 1675.10
In 1672 Bunyan had accused Edward Fowler of overthrowing three of the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles. We may compare Milton’s quotation of the Thirty-nine Articles in Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration and what means may be used against the Growth of Popery (1673). Milton no doubt had his tongue in his cheek in this attempt to align protestants against popery. But Bunyan expressed the genuine sentiments of those protestant dissenters who looked back approvingly to the church of Grindal and Abbott. Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), William Penn’s One Project for the Good of England (1679), and William Dell’s The Increase of Popery in England (1681) all had the same political objective.11
In 1675 Bunyan was summoned to appear before the Archdeacon’s Court for failing to attend services at his parish church. He went into hiding rather than obey the summons. The case was transferred to the secular arm. A warrant was issued for Bunyan’s arrest, with what Brown noted as ‘a formidable and unusual list of names’ of thirteen Bedfordshire JPs attached. Bunyan was still regarded as a dangerous man. From December 1676 to June 1677 he suffered his second imprisonment. Nonconformists reacted to this new wave of persecution by organizing a series of lectures on the dangers of popery at Pinners’ Hall, Old Broad Street, to which Bunyan contributed.12 These lectures attracted much attention and won respect from staunchly protestant members of the Church of England.
From the start the Bedford congregation had a deep sense of the corruption of the society in which it had to exist, of the dangers of formal righteousness. Life seemed to have gone out of the old Puritans, a fortiori out of the state church. Much of Grace Abounding is concerned with this problem of the inadequacy of mere morality. Hence in 1665 Bunyan declared that church organization was necessary for the saints to meet and edify each other, and also meet their God, by whom they are blessed and refreshed. To abandon outward gospel-worship looked to Bunyan ‘too like Ranting opinions’, to the danger of which he was always alert. With a little poetic hyperbole he wrote in 1688:
What though some slight it, it a cottage call,
Give’t the reproachful name of beggars’ hall,
Call it an alms-house builded for the poor:
it is still the House of God. Vagabonds, highwaymen, fornicators, liars, debtors can all be received into the church13—though one suspects they would have got short shrift if they had relapsed into these bad habits after joining the church.
The congregation retained the power of excommunication, after appropriate private advice and public warnings. ‘This tremendous sentence’ was God’s. The church preferred decisions to be unanimous rather than by majority, and the pastor had no formal superiority, though no doubt his views would normally count for more than those of most members.14
The gathered congregation was thus in one sense a defensive rearguard against the world. It turned in on itself, protected and helped its poor and its weaker brethren, purged inadequate professors, but tried not to drive away its well-to-do members. It worked out a new casuistry to adjust to life as it had to be lived in an increasingly commercial world. As we shall see, the covenant theology, with its suggestion that by conscious effort we could almost choose to be saved, was well suited to enhance the self-respect of artisans, small men at sea in a troubling world. We could ‘roll upon free grace’, so long as this doctrine did not lead to antinomian ideas that God was within his elect.15
So Bunyan’s harsh theology of the 1650s and early 1660s, aimed against the competition of Quakers and Latitudinarians, yielded to a more compassionate theology in the 1670s and 1680s, combined still with severity against smug professors. The millenarian hope had prevailed in a society which it had seemed possible to transform. Now individuals and small communities had to accept that sinful society and strive to live the best lives they could within it. The church gave a sense of solidarity and comradeship, of shared risks and sufferings for shared belief. It provided support in adversity, and gave consolatory assurances of incomparably better times to come, possibly in this life, certainly in the hereafter.
In the 1670s and 1680s Bunyan ministered to his own congregation in Bedford, and to affiliated churches in Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire, and Cambridgeshire16—so far as was possible in the intermittent persecution of those years. ‘Some, though in jeering manner, no doubt, gave him the epithet of Bishop Bunyan’ in consequence of his preaching and pastoral visits to remote congregations. The church also had links with London congregations—with George Griffith’s church in Addle Street, and with George Cokayne’s in Southwark. Bunyan preached frequently in London, at John Owen’s church and especially at Cokayne’s, to crowded congregations. ‘If there were but one day’s notice given’, his devoted follower Charles Doe tells us, ‘there would be more people come together to hear him preach than the meeting house could hold.’ He speaks of thousands of hearers. Bunyan almost certainly preached at the Independent Stepney church of Matthew Meade, a Bedfordshire man who had the largest congregation in the London area.17
When Bunyan preached at Newington Green in the early 1680s, ‘some … if not all’ of the students at Charles Morton’s dissenting academy went to hear him. This despite the fact, the Revd Samuel Wesley tells us with the prim sectarianism of the lapsed nonconformist, that he had no form of ordination’. Bunyan’s reputation as a preacher must have been sensational for Charles II—of all people—to have heard of him and to ask John Owen about him. Two Londoners stood surety for Bunyan when he was released from prison in 1677.18
Attempts were made to boost the sagging morale of the godly party by illegal publications like the anonymous Mirabilis Annus tracts, which in 1661–2 recorded signs and portents of God’s wrath against the restored monarchy. Bunyan’s friends Henry Jessey and George Cokayne were probably the authors, and the tracts were printed by men whom Bunyan patronized. The Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the Dutch invasion of the Medway the year after, all seemed to confirm God’s displeasure.19
In the posthumous Of Antichrist and his Ruin Bunyan regretted:
the forwardness of some … who have predicted concerning the time of the downfall of Antichrist, to the shame of them and their brethren; nor will the wrong that such by their boldness have done to the church of God be repaired by them nor their works.… I shall not therefore meddle with the times and seasons.
Who can tell? ‘Let Christians beware that they set not times for God, lest all men see their folly.’ But in Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized (1688) Bunyan recognized that the saints were impatient. Christ ‘accomplished all the first part of his priesthood in less than forty years’; but now ‘he has been above in heaven above sixteen hundred years, and yet has not done.’ This, Bunyan admitted, calls for ‘faith and patience’. Saints have often been mistaken in their ‘guesses’ at the time of the Second Coming, he observed in Of Antichrist and his Ruin. But if it was wrong to try to fix a date (as Owen agreed with Bunyan in thinking) the millennium always remains a possibility, when God decides. If we cannot foretell the time, we can read the signs of the fall of Antichrist, some of which are now visible: the slaying of the Witnesses does not ‘seem to be a great way off. Of that point Bunyan remained convinced from the time of his first published work.20
In Prison Meditations (1663) Bunyan foresaw the saints reigning with Christ, an idea which he often repeated. In The Resurrection of the Dead (1665?) he insisted that the saints will ‘be set upon the throne with Christ, as kings and princes with him, to judge the world. The rule of the saints will continue until Christ’s kingdom itself shall wither away, ‘that God may be all in all’. This vision had been familiar in the 1640s and 1650s, shared by John Canne, Mary Cary, Milton and George Cokayne among many others. The Shining Ones recall it to Christian and Hopeful at the end of The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘the saints also shall have a voice in that judgment, because they were his and your enemies’.21
This is a waiting, not an active millenarianism; it is the millenarianism of the Quakers after 1660, and of Milton. Millenarianism had been closely linked to the separatist principle. In the heady days when the millennium seemed ‘at the door’ it was right to separate from the Antichristian state church. When the millennium came, the saints would displace the present rulers in church and state. But as it became painfully clear that the millennium was not imminent, the saints had to adapt themselves to life in a world in which the ungodly had recovered their hold on the levers of power and were unlikely to be dislodged except by violence.22 After 1661 it would clearly be folly to advocate such a policy. So the whole rationale of the coexistence of sects with a hostile state church had to be thought out anew, with all the problems of conduct and discipline which this raised. And now all the cards were held by Antichrist’s representatives.
Henry More in 1664 sneered at ‘the rude and ignorant vulgar’ who ‘have so fouled’ the words Antichrist and Antichristian that they are now ‘unfit to pass the lips of any civil person’. In their ‘mad mistaken zeal’ they denounce ‘every legitimate magistrate’ as Antichrist, ‘and every well ordered church’ as the Whore of Babylon.23 Those very revealing remarks, taken in conjunction with what Owen and Bunyan had to say about ‘the wrong done to the church of God’ by rash predictions of the millennium, confirm that the early 1660s were not a favourable moment for discussing the last times.
Bunyan, however, published his most millenarian tract in 1665, The Holy City. With the caution appropriate for a jailbird writing under strict censorship, he depicted the church returning out of a long Antichristian captivity, which he sometimes dates from soon after the days of the Apostles, sometimes from Constantine. The holy city, the New Jerusalem, will be built only after Antichrist is overthrown. ‘The western part of the world … will be the last part of the world that will be converted.’ Meanwhile the saints are ‘disputing about the glorious state of the church in the latter days’ with ‘crossness of judgment and persuasion’. Bunyan had a vivid and disturbing picture of dissent in restoration England. ‘The saints are yet but as an army routed, and are apt, sometimes through fear, sometimes through forgetfulness, to mistake the word of their Captain-General, … the Son of God.’ They are ‘too prone to shoot and kill even their very right-hand man.’24
The church ‘hath lain now in the danger of Antichrist for above 1000 years.’ But ‘the … time is near, yea very near’. ‘Dominion … shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High’, who will exact vengeance against ‘the high ones, lofty ones, haughty ones and the proud.’ ‘The implacable enemies of God’ will ‘shrink and creep into holes’, to the contentment of ‘such men that have for several years been held in the chains of affliction.’ ‘Our Antichrist’ treads down the church. But though ‘Satan and Antichrist have had their day in the world, and by their outrage have made fearful havoc of the souls of sinners’, yet the church of Christ will obtain ‘a complete conquest and victory over the world’, and will subdue her enemies and rule over their oppressors on earth. When it comes to building the New Jerusalem, ‘most of the kings and great ones of the earth will be found employed and taken up in another work than to fall in love with Mount Sion’; they prefer Mistress Babylon. Meanwhile Bunyan, writing from jail, thought it necessary to add reassuringly that the church is not a ‘rebellious city’; it will not meddle with the property of the governors of this world. It is not ‘destructive to kings and a diminisher of their revenues’. Bunyan left it an open question whether his generation will see the New Jerusalem. But in the posthumous Exposition on Genesis I-X he hoped that ‘some of us shall live to see it’. As Brown observed, The Holy City is not about ‘the life beyond’ but about living on earth, now.25
After The Holy City Bunyan published no overtly millenarian works until The Holy War (1682). Here he accepted that Mansoul could be liberated only by military power. Something very like the army of the saints of the 1640s must do the job. In Antichrist and his Ruin, probably written in the early 1680s, but not published because of the censorship, Bunyan insisted that Antichrist—like Diabolus in The Holy War— has set up his own church government, officers, and discipline. Interference with freedom of worship, by penal laws and constraints, indeed persecution of any sort, is Antichristian.26 He did not say that this government must be overthrown, but the conclusion was inescapable.