It is the duty and wisdom of those that fear God so to manage their time and work that he hath allotted unto them, that they may not have part of their work to do when they should be departing the world.
BUNYAN1
If you would understand the Scriptures you shall read it calleth rich wicked men mountains, and poor believing men valleys.
CLARKSON2
BUNYAN left a dozen treatises unpublished at his death. Of these, we are told, most were prepared for the press, and he was still working on Exposition on … Genesis. It seems pertinent to ask why Bunyan left so much material unpublished which was ready for printing. Censorship clearly had something to do with it. In 1685 so relatively harmless a man as Richard Baxter was jailed for publishing a Paraphrase on the New Testament. In the four months between the Declaration of Indulgence of April 1688 and his death, Bunyan published five books and had passed proofs of a sixth. It looks as though he was working rapidly through a backlog of hitherto unpublishable material but had not got very far.
Let us look first at the incomplete Exposition on … Genesis. Tindall described this as an ‘exercise in veiled sedition’.3 This may seem to be putting it rather strongly; but the treatise is certainly designed to convey points to which the censor might have objected if put directly. Seventeenth-century use of Biblical commentaries to make covert political suggestions has never, I believe, been properly studied. It could be a way of discussing the undiscussable. Thus William Sedgwick, son of a Bedfordshire gentleman, in his Inquest for the Blood of our late Soveraign (1660), used Genesis to criticize the Parliamentarian politicians who had enjoyed his support until Providence decided against them.4
Bunyan’s Exposition on … Genesis depicts the struggle of good and evil from the week of creation: light against darkness, the waters above the firmament against those below. This struggle thus antedates Cain and Abel. But the murder of Abel involves all humanity and the social order. When Cain ‘left off to fear the Lord, and had bloodily butchered his holy brother, Abel, then he seeks to be a head or monarch.’ ‘Abel was set in the lower rank’, like Isaac and Jacob; but ‘the blessing of God is not led by outward order.’ ‘Cain’s brood are ‘lords and rulers first, while Abel and his generation have their necks under persecution.’ Cain endeavoured ‘the extirpating of all true religion out of the world.’ ‘Tyrants matter nothing … how much they destroy.’ ‘This is the word of the Lord against all those that are for the practice of Cain’—i.e. persecution. ‘As I live, saith the Lord, I will prepare thee unto blood and blood shall pursue thee.’ ‘The proper voice of all the blood of the godly is to call for vengeance on the persecutors, even for the blood of Abel.’ This moral had been drawn from the story of Cain and Abel by Winstanley and other Diggers. ‘Cain is still alive in all great landlords’, said a Digger pamphlet of 1650. William Erbery, John Canne, Baptists and Fifth Monarchists, the Ranters Abiezer Coppe, Lawrence Clarkson, and Jacob Bauthumley, William Sedgwick, Sir Henry Vane and George Fox had also used the myth.5 But Bunyan could hardly be more specific in associating Cain, the first murderer, with monarchy and persecution.
Bunyan depicted Noah’s as the first gathered church. It should ‘maintain a separation from the cursed children of Cain’. (The locusts of Egypt were a type of ‘our graceless clergy’ of the Church of England.) Noah’s separation ‘should teach us not to fear the faces of men, no not the faces of the mighty.’ So Bunyan brought Genesis immediately home to England and the state church’s persecution. ‘We are hated because we are religious, because we stand to maintain the truth of God.’ ‘To maintain God’s truth … cannot be done but with great hazard so long as Cain or his offspring remain.’ Bunyan even questioned ‘whether it be lawful for a man to urge … the promise of grace and forgiveness’ to persecutors. They fall ‘beyond the reach of God’s mercy’.6
‘All persecutors are not brutal alike; some are in words as smooth as oil; others can show a semblance of reason of state’ (my italics). Persecutors are afraid of godly men and godliness, insignificant though the godly are in human terms. ‘Let us learn therefore to be quiet and patient under the hand of wicked and blood-thirsty men.… When we are dead, our blood will cry from the ground against them.’ ‘Let Cain and God alone, and do you mind faith and patience.’ Enos, ‘a man that was miserable in this world for the sake and cause of God’ nevertheless held out and made head against Cain and his offspring. The giants of Genesis, as of The Pilgrim’s Progress, were persecutors.7
The waters of the Flood represent the great and mighty of the world; ‘the flowing of them, their rage’. Here Bunyan apostrophized: ‘thou church of God in England, which art now upon the waves of affliction and temptation’ (my italics). Referring perhaps to James II’s overtures to protestant dissenters, he added:
When the great ones of this world begin to discover themselves to the church by way of encouragement, it is a sign that the waters are now decreasing.… This should teach us while we are in affliction to look this way and that, if it may be the tops of the mountains may be seen.… Though men may be borne with, if they lie in their holes at the height of the tempest: but to do it when the tops of the mountains were seen, if then they shall forbear to open their windows, they are worthy of blame indeed.8
Could Bunyan be opening a window, to see if James would help to overthrow Antichrist? An alternative explanation would be that Bunyan knew that aristocratic support for William of Orange was growing in England.
The symbolism of mountains and valleys runs through Bunyan’s writings, as it had through those of the Diggers, Clarkson, and other radicals: we should always be on the look out for it. Heights may be giants or walls. ‘The grace of God is compared to water’, Bunyan declared in The Water of Life (1688). ‘The element of water naturally descends and abides in low places, in valleys and places which are undermost.’ It passes by the established church. It does not flow over ‘steeples and hills’, and consequently is in ‘low esteem … with the rich and the full’. ‘It is therefore for the poor and needy.’ A similar point had been made in The Holy City (1665); in the new heaven and the new earth ‘there shall be a smooth face upon the whole earth, all snugs and hubs and hills and holes shall now be took away.’9
We must not set times for God’s salvation; but Bunyan foresaw some of the godly ‘feeding upon … the kingdoms and estates of the Antichristian party.’ There will be a time ‘when thou comest out of the furnace’. ‘It is counted a heinous crime for a man to run his sword at the picture of a king; how much more to shed the blood of the image of God?’10 Noah, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Paul, Bunyan said, were excused of the treason of rebellion, since ‘a man is not to be counted an offender, how contrary soever he lieth, either in doctrine or practice to men, etc., if both have the command of God and are surely grounded upon the words of his mouth.’ The ultimate consoling thought was that ‘the world is in our hand, and disposed by our doctrine, by our faith and prayers, although they think far otherwise and shall one day feel their judgments are according.’11
The Biblical description of Nimrod as ‘a mighty hunter’ means that he was a great persecutor. ‘I am apt to think’, Bunyan added:
that he was the first that in this new [post-diluvian] world sought after absolute monarchy.… He therefore would needs be the author and master of what religion he pleased, and would also subject the rest of his brethren thereto, by what ways his lusts thought best. Wherefore here began a fresh persecution … to lord it over the sons of God and to enforce idolatry and superstition upon them.
Some sons of the godly ‘went away with Nimrod and the rest of that company into idolatry, tyranny and other profaneness.’ ‘Apostatizing from the Word, and desiring mastership over their brethren, they, as lords, fomented their own conceptions and then enjoined the people to build … mystical Babel.’12 Nimrod was a traditional code word for monarchy, used by Milton, Erbery, and the Fifth-Monarchists John Rogers and Christopher Feake.13 Nimrod was ‘the usual symbol for Charles II among the Baptists.’ Cain and Nimrod were captains of Bloodmen in The Holy War.14 Bunyan treats tyranny, idolatry, and persecution as almost interchangeable. The relevance of this to post-restoration England is obvious. Also noteworthy is that he seems to have thought all men were brethren, and presumably equal, before monarchy was established.
Tindall was after all not so far from the mark. Did Bunyan ever hope to publish his Exposition on … Genesis? The other unpublished works are less openly ‘seditious’, and we must assume that Bunyan at one time or another had hoped they might be printed. They are difficult to date, but The Heavenly Foot-man is generally assigned to the late 1660s or early 1670s. Despite this early date it does not seem to have been one of those which Bunyan had prepared for the press before his death. Most of the volumes which Bunyan did prepare were probably written later. Why did he refrain from publishing, especially in view of the remark quoted as epigraph to this chapter? The Heavenly Foot-man condemns persecution as Antichristian, and threatens divine vengeance against it.15 When repression tightened after the interlude of relative freedom in 1678–82, Bunyan may have decided that the times were not propitious for publishing such views except in the form of allegory. Like Locke, he prepared some treatises carefully for the press, keeping them ready in the hope of another relaxation, such as in fact occurred after his death.
This is mere speculation, but I have seen no better explanation, and it fits in with what we know of Bunyan’s determination to say his say whenever possible. It will not explain failure to publish The Desire of the Righteous Granted, which Charles Doe heard Bunyan preach in 1685 or 1686. This seems wholly innocuous from the censor’s point of view. Equally harmless is Justification by an Imputed Righteousness, which manages to discuss Cain and Abel with no social or political overtones. The same is true of The Acceptable Sacrifice: this, Cokayne tells us, had actually been ‘put into the press by the author himself’.16 All the other unpublished works contain passages to which the censor might well have objected. Bunyan may have turned to Exposition on … Genesis with a sense of desperation.
Of Antichrist and his Ruin, one of those prepared but not published, appears to date from the very early 1680s. (‘This twenty years we have been degenerating’, Bunyan said.) W. R. Owens suggests that the repeated protestations of loyalty which Bunyan makes in this tract, his rejection of revolution, may indicate a hope of publishing. We should not blame our governors for persecuting us, Bunyan says: they are misinformed by their servants. Kings (and no others) shall pull down Antichrist, but ‘in God’s good time’, when they come to be enlightened. The ruin of Antichrist will be gradual. The King’s tardiness may be the fault of the godly: ‘be up and doing.… Pray that God would make him [the King] able to drive away all evil men from his presence, that he may be a greater countenancer than ever of them that are holy and good.’ If that was written under Charles II, as is suggested by a reference to plots and conspiracies against the King’s person and government, ‘evil men’ might well refer discreetly to the King’s brother James.17
Owens adds that the expiry of the Licensing Act in May 1679 may have made it easier for a brief period to print speculations about the identity and fate of Antichrist. The reaction after 1681 may explain Bunyan’s failure to publish. ‘I do confess myself’, Bunyan remarked, ‘one of the old-fashion professors, that covet to fear God and honour the King. I also am for blessing them that curse me … and for praying for them that persecute me.’ And he added, even more ambiguously, ‘I only drop this because I would show my brethren that I also am one of them; and to set them right that have wrong thoughts of me.’18
Hence Bunyan was able, in Of Antichrist and his Ruin, simultaneously to call for the pulling down of Antichrist and to urge the godly to fear God and honour the king. Similarly in The House of the Forest of Lebanon (posthumous) he argued that ‘the war that the church makes with Antichrist is rather defensive than offensive.’ ‘Let not therefore kings and princes be afraid: they will not be assaulted by temporal weapons.’19
Of Antichrist and his Ruin contains severe criticisms of the government in church and state. References to England and especially to the established church, are covert but clear. ‘Civil laws that enforce … matters of worship … as in the Spanish Inquisition, … as long as there is life in them, … the spirit of the Man of Sin yet remaineth in them.’ It will be some time before kings and princes come to be enlightened about the evils that are in such ‘wicked Antichristian penal laws’ and ‘the abominable filthiness of that which is Antichristian-worship’ in the Church. All that Bunyan asked for was toleration by the law of God and the law of the King. But now Antichristian names ‘are worn by men of spiritual employ’—i.e. bishops. ‘God has a quarrel with the names as well as with the persons.’ ‘There are men that are idols as well as things.’ ‘God honours no high priest but one.’20
The Whore ‘hath turned the sword of the magistrate against those that keep God’s law.’ But her ‘church-state … must of necessity tumble.’ Allusion to the Church of England is made clear by Bunyan’s use of the word ‘convocations’. ‘Money, money, as the pedlar cries, … is the sinews of their religion’, ‘the object of their offices and government’. That might apply equally to the Roman or the Anglican church. None are so insatiably covetous as the Antichristians. They have kingdoms and crowns, places, preferments, sacraments, etc.—all to get money. But ‘a time is coming wherein there shall be no Antichrist to afflict Christ’s church any more.’ The saints ‘shall take them captive whose captives they were; they shall rule over their oppressors (Isaiah 14.2).’ And the conclusion is that ‘Antichrist must be pulled down, down, stick and stone.’ ‘When men intend to build a new house, … they first pull down the old one, raze the foundations, and then they begin their new.’ The implications are clear. For all his calculated expressions of loyalty to the monarchy, Bunyan was careful to single out for specific praise ‘the noble King, King Henry VIII’ and ‘the good King Edward, his son’, as well as ‘the brave Queen’ Elizabeth. The Stuart kings were conspicuous by their absence.21
Bunyan reveals a deeper pessimism in this treatise than anywhere else. The worst is yet to come: the witnesses will be slain. When ‘plots and conspiracies are laid against God’s church all the world over, and … none of the kings, princes, or mighty states of the world will open their doors, then is the ruin of Antichrist at hand.’ That would suggest that Bunyan was writing in the lastyears of Charles II or the first years of his successor. In the last days ‘the basest of all sorts, sects, professions and degrees shall take shelter in Babylon … to devour and eat up the poor and needy, and to blow out the light of the Gospel.’ ‘There shall, for a time, be no living visible church of Christ in the world … A church, but no living church, as to church-state: a church in ruins.’ These may be signs of the last times.22
A Discourse of the House of the Forest of Lebanon cannot be dated, but may come from the same period. Like Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized, it is largely allegorical and typological, dealing with the mystery rather than the history. But it also discusses the tactics which the godly should pursue in time of persecution, when they are on the defensive, and how the church ‘at last shall recover herself from the yoke and tyranny of Antichrist.’ Faithful men will ‘bear up the truth above water all the time of Antichrist’s reign and rage.’ A long quotation from ‘Pomponius Algerius, an Italian martyr’, taken from Foxe, stresses fortitude under torment and persecution. Its enemies allege that the church is ‘for destroying kings, for subverting kingdoms and for bringing all to desolation.’ But kings, princes, and potentates have nothing to fear. The church ‘moveth no sedition’. ‘The saints … know their places’; and Bunyan specifically rejected the ‘extravagant opinions’ of those [Fifth Monarchists] who think the kingdom of Christ will be won by ‘carnal weapons’. ‘Let but faith and holiness walk the streets, without control, and you may be as happy as the world can make you’—rather a large demand perhaps, if we consider how Bunyan would be likely to interpret ‘walk the streets without control’. Yet earlier he had written ‘and suppose they were the truly godly that made the first assault, can they be blamed? For who can endure a boar in a vineyard?’ That surely lets a rather large cat out of the bag. God will ‘return the evil that the enemies do to his church … when his time is come’, ‘even in this world’. ‘The Medes and Persians helped to deliver the church from the clutches … of the King of Babylon.’ ‘Let this then encourage the saints to hope, … notwithstanding present tribulations.… I have a bad master, but I have but a year to serve under him, and that makes me serve him with patience’.23 (Whether men looked to the Duke of Monmouth or to William of Orange to succeed the ‘bad master’, such calculations must have influenced many in the 1680s).
Of Paul’s Departure and Crown Offor says: ‘it bears the marks of having been composed … towards the end of his pilgrimage.’ It is another call for courage under persecution. Notwithstanding ‘the murders and outrages that our brethren suffer at the hands of wicked men … through the violence of the enemies of God, there must be ‘a full and faithful performance of [the saints’] duty to God and man, whatever may be the consequences thereof.’ ‘We seem to lie under a contempt, and to be in a disgraceful condition.’ But Bunyan is severe against those who ‘throw up their open profession of his name for fear of those that hate him’ and turn their coats as ‘chief ringleaders of this cowardliness’.24
In all these unpublished treatises the themes of the godly under persecution, and of God’s ultimate revenge, loom large. Terror or corruption are equally dangerous for the saints. But the day is coming ‘of breaking up of closet-councils, cabinet-councils, secret purposes, hidden thoughts’ of those that have been ‘bold and audacious in their vile and beastly ways’. That was from Christ a Complete Saviour. In Israel’s Hope Encouraged Bunyan assumed that ‘we are sure to be concerned’ in ‘that common evil of persecution’. A persecutor is ‘but the devil’s scarecrow, the old one himself lies quat.’ But that confident statement came after a grim vignette of ‘a man at the foot of the ladder, now ready in will and mind to die for his profession.’ ‘Antichrist as yet is stronger than we.’25 The Saints’ Knowledge of Christ’s Love similarly attacked persecution by ‘wicked spirits in high places’, ‘the rulers of the darkness of this world’.26
The unpublished writings may help us to a better understanding of Bunyan’s thinking about politics. It changed over time, and it contained apparent contradictions. We must relate the posthumous material to what Bunyan said in his published writings, where he was above all anxious to make it clear that God’s people were wrongly ‘looked upon to be a turbulent, seditious and factious people.’ Nothing in his doctrines, he insisted in A Confession of my Faith, written towards the end of his first imprisonment, ‘savoured either of heresy or rebellion’, or justified twelve years in jail. Magistracy is God’s ordinance.27 In The Holy City (1665), he had reassured ‘the governors of this world’ ‘that they need not at all … fear a disturbance’ from that city. ‘It is true, that kings and nations of this world shall one day bring their glory and honour to this city; but yet not by outward force or compulsion.’ ‘In the first day of the gospel, the poor, the halt, the lame and the blind are chief in the embracing of the tenders of grace. Yet in the latter day thereof, God will take hold of kings.’ ‘All the injuries that the kings and great ones of the earth have done to the church and spouse of Christ in these days of the New Testament, it hath been through the instigation and witchcraft of this mistress of iniquity.… This gentlewoman being laid in her grave, … these kings will change their mind …’—apparently after Antichrist’s overthrow rather than taking a lead in the process.28
But Bunyan’s advocacy of non-resistance was not as absolute as it appears; the unpublished writings make this clear. God will one day take revenge on persecutors. But persecution can be ended only by the exercise of state power. ‘By magistrates and powers we shall be delivered from Antichrist.’ Short of popular rebellion, who but kings could wield the necessary power? (‘You have power in your hand’, wrote Winstanley in his last desperate appeal to Oliver Cromwell; ‘I have no power’.) This surely explains Bunyan’s greater emphasis on the role of kings in the 1680s. What did he really hope for from the monarchy of Charles II and James II? Did he see Antichrist principally as the administrative power of the church and of the gentry, who do the persecuting; and did he really think that the monarchy would turn against them—as James briefly did in 1687–8? We recall that in The Holy War Antichrist was a gentleman. After his overthrow, those ‘that are the slaves of Antichrist now … will have none to put them upon persecuting of the saints. Now they shall not be made, as before, guilty of the blood of those against whom this gentleman shall take a pet.’29 Or were Bunyan’s eyes on a successor to Charles and James?
It is likely that Bunyan revealed more of his mind in his posthumous treatises than in those which he published himself. But we cannot be certain that even the former represent his uncensored thoughts: he presumably intended them to be published one day. Moreover, his ideas must have been changing rapidly in reaction to the changing policies of James II and the changing news from the Netherlands. Bunyan’s providential view of history would incline him to keep his options open, to leave the godly room for manoeuvre in an uncertain world for which God’s immediate intentions were unclear. About God’s ultimate intentions there could be no doubt; but during the forty years of Bunyan’s adult life he had moved in ways mysterious to his faithful, and it was not for them to commit him or themselves in advance.
We know that the downfall of Antichrist was not imminent, and that the expulsion of James II was. But Bunyan was still uncertain whether he was living in the last times or not. In the Old Testament treason and rebellion are justified when the rebels acted on God’s command. ‘And suppose they were the truly godly that made the first assault, can they be blamed? … Who bid the boar come here?’ The aggressors are the Antichristian persecutors. When God’s time is come, some professors will feed upon ‘the kingdoms and estates of the Antichristian party’.30
Bunyan was here interpreting the Biblical account of the raven and the dove which Noah sent out from the ark, and combining it with the avenging angels of Revelation 15. His attitude was ambivalent. He found this ‘sort of professors in his church’ rather distasteful; ‘all the saints are not for such work as the raven.’ But they will be acting on God’s command ‘and shall be tolerated’. So no doubt the sixteenth-century godly had squared their consciences when seeking alliances with land-grabbers like the Duke of Northumberland, the Earls of Leicester and Essex. The raven, ‘though he was in the ark [i.e. in the church] was not a type of the most spiritual Christian; nay rather, I think of the worldly professor, who gets into the church in the time of her affliction.’ The rest of the saints will ‘bend their spirits to a more spiritual and retired work.’31 If I interpret this aright, Bunyan is not excluding all possibility of revolution: the truly godly could not be blamed if they were provoked into making the first assault. But he might rightly wonder whether the radicals who supported Argyll and Monmouth, and some of whom were to support William of Orange, were truly godly. Meanwhile James II’s offers of toleration must not be spurned: toleration was more important for the saints than constitutional issues. So Bunyan tried hard to combine faithfulness to the Bible (as he interpreted it) with political realism. The overthrow of Antichrist, necessary and glorious though it is, will involve dirty work for somebody. Perhaps there is a role here for ‘prayerless professors’?
We cannot be sure what Bunyan was actually thinking about contemporary politics in relation to the millennium. The evidence is incomplete, unclear, perhaps contradictory. But I think this is less a matter of caution and reticence in face of censorship than of uncertainty and open-mindedness in Bunyan’s own position. The ends were clear and certain: the means might vary from month to month, as James’s increasingly desperate manœuvres slowly consolidated opposition to him among those who were not godly at all but who might act as God’s instruments. The truly godly, alas, could not themselves control events: Mansoul could not be saved by the unaided efforts of its citizens. As it turned out, ‘The Medes and Persians helped to deliver the church from … the King of Babylon.’32 William of Orange was not Prince Emanuel, nor was meant to be. The victory of 1688 was glorious and bloodless; but nobody expected it to usher in the millennium.