an intense and passionate spirituality, and a social instinct of a quite peculiar, as it was of a very influential, character. Both in Bunyan and in Baxter we trace the influence of these characteristics, but in the former especially. In the life of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress we see them in their most simple and unmixed form. Bunyan is, above all, the spiritualist of Puritanism; while, at the same time, the circumstances of his social position serve to reveal more expressively than we have yet seen, the workings of the system upon the ordinary social existence of those midland counties in which it abounded.

Bunyan's life is a spiritual story, with a very slight setting of external incident and adventure. Its interest is found in the vehement and critical inward struggles which he has himself depicted, and not in any succession of events or any rare development of mental powers. His Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners-in which he has, with his own very vivid and homely power, set forth the divine dealings with his soul is nothing else than his autobiography. He had no other life to tell of in comparison; for all his outward activity as a preacher-broken by his long imprisonment and all his creative fertility as a writer, were the mere expressions of the spiritual passion in which he lived and moved and had his being. In so far, however, as Bunyan's life does take us into the outer world of England in the days of the Protectorate and the Restoration, it serves, as we have said, to bring before us the everyday social aspects of Puritanism, which are apt to escape us in lives of more public prominence.

We have before us a Puritan life comparatively divorced from all excitements of military, or political,

or ecclesiastical struggle. With the great events of his time, with which Cromwell and Milton and Baxter come into such close contact, he had nothing to do. He was, in fact, only a youth of twenty-one when the King was beheaded, and when the first great series of events which crowned the Puritan struggle with triumph was completed; and with this series of events we could not connect him at all, were it not for a well known anecdote of his own about the siege of Leicester. Far away, then, from the centre of movement, and in the background, as it were, of that stirring time, runs the career of Bunyan. And yet not the less, but all the more, on that account, he serves to illustrate it in one of its most characteristic features. He is not a prominent actor upon the stage; but his figure in the background is typically expressive of the spirit which animated and governed a host such as him, in everything but his genius. While Puritanism was developing its lofty aims in the high places of the kingdom, it was no less colouring by its influence every village and civic community. While it was legislating for Europe, and writing State-papers in behalf of the persecuted Protestants abroad, it was moving the hearts and ordering the lives of the poor women of Bedford, and of the tinker's son in the neighbourhood; and its working in the one case, no less than in the other, is necessary to enable us to understand its full meaning, and to appreciate its comprehensive and pervading power.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village within a mile of Bedford, in the year 1628, the year in which Charles called his third Parliament-that famous Parliament of the Petition of Right, in which Cromwell

made his first speech. He was, he tells us, "of a low and inconsiderable generation; his father's house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families of the land." His father was, in short, a tinker, and Bunyan himself was bred to the same calling. The father, however, does not seem, any more than the son, to have pursued his trade in the usual vagabond-manner we associate with the name. For Bunyan tells us that he was sent to school" to learn both to read and to write, the which I also attained according to the rate of other poor men's children, though to my shame I confess I did soon lose what I had learned, even almost utterly." His boyhood was wild and thoughtless-very much what we might conceive the life of a gipsy-tinker boy to be. He revelled in coarse and profane language, and was careless of the truth, or of any fear of God. In his own strong simple way he tells us it was his delight "to be taken captive by the devil at his will, being filled with all unrighteousness," the which "did so strongly work both in my heart and life, that I had but few equals in both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the name of God."

This, we are to remember, is Bunyan's account of his boyhood, as he looked back upon it from his later religious point of view. It would be a mistakeand yet it is one into which many of his biographers have fallen-to suppose from the manner in which he speaks of himself here and elsewhere, that his youth was peculiarly wicked beyond that of the class to which he belonged. There is clear evidence to the contrary in his own statements. A habit of profane swearing, and a wild and reckless indulgence in Sunday pastimes, are the facts of wickedness with which his sensitive conscience charges his early years. From

licentiousness his own strong declarations expressly free him; and there is no evidence that he was addicted to drunkenness or any form of dishonesty which we readily associate with his supposed gipsy race and tinker occupation. The truth is rather that, from his boyhood, Bunyan was of a strongly religious turn of mind. The great ideas of life and death, heaven and hell-those spiritual contrasts which afterwards he was to embody in such rare variety and picturesqueness of form-had smitten his impressionable imagination from his youth, and clung to him. They did not for many years work themselves into the fibre of his spiritual being, so as to become its living and effectual springs of action; but they were there, dormant and ready to start forth into powerful consciousness. If practically he now lived without God-and his habit of profane swearing showed how far religion was from having any real influence over him- he was yet so far from being without thoughts of religion, that such thoughts haunted him as living things, moving in the shadowy background of his being, and mingling in it every now and then with a fearful though unpractical effect. They possessed him. They peopled his dreams, and in their constant presence and intimacy made familiar to him the strangest fancies; "for often," he says, "after I had spent this and the other day in sin, I have been greatly afflicted while asleep with the apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who, as I then thought, laboured to draw me away with them, of which I could never be rid. Also I should, at these years, be greatly troubled with thoughts of the fearful torments of hellfire; still fearing that it would be my lot to be found at last among those devils and hellish fiends who are

say,

there bound down with the chain and bonds of darkness unto the judgment of the great day. These things, I when I was but a child—but nine or ten years old— did so distress my soul, that then, in the midst of my many sports and childish vanities amidst my vain companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted in my mind therewith; yet could I not let go my sins. Yea, I was also then so overcome with despair of life and heaven, that I should often wish either that there had been no hell, or that I had been a devil, supposing they were only tormentors; that if it must needs be that I went thither, I might rather be a tormentor than be tormented myself."

Although such thoughts did little more than torment him, they never altogether left him. He never appears, amid all his practical recklessness, to have risen above them for any length of time. Every accident served to recall them, and religion rose before his mind as a haunting image, even when he sought to banish it away. There was a tenderness in his heart towards it, while he was yet despising and trampling it under foot. He says, for example, that while taking pleasure in his own wickedness, it was a great grief to him when he saw those who made a religious profession doing wickedly. It made his "spirit tremble." "As once above all the rest, when I was in the height of vanity, yet hearing one to swear that was reckoned for a religious man, it laid so great a stroke upon my spirit that it made my heart ache."

He recalls various incidents in this early period of his life of a providential character. Once "he fell into a creek of the sea, and hardly escaped drowning." Another time he fell out of a boat into the river Ouse, "Bedford River," as he calls it, "but mercy yet pre