The Riches of Bunyan | Page 4

his own soul, and into the
freshness of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his
perpetual originality and unsating freshness. Now, when men say
repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and
providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its
consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable, against
usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and memory
of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as carolling
forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly plaints. With
God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates of his heaven
brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be reformers; but it
cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by some who, in the
prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth, "fret themselves, and
curse their King and their God, and look upward." Poverty cannot
degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor persecution crush, nor dungeon
enthral the free, glad spirit of a child of God, erect in its regenerate
strength, and rich in its eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful
and elastic temperament colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan
sent out even from the precincts of his prison. With a style sinewy as
Cobbett's, and simple and clear as Swift's; with his sturdy, peasant
nature showing itself in the roundness and directness of his utterance,
how little has he of their coarseness. He was not, on the one hand, like
Cobbett, an anarchist, or libeller; but yet, on the other hand, as little
was he ever a lackey, cringing at the gates of Power, or a train-bearer in
the retinue of Fashion. Still less was he, like Swift, the satirist of his

times and of his kind, snarling at his rulers, and turning at last to gnaw,
in venomous rage, his own heart. And yet he who portrayed the
character of By-ends, and noted the gossipings of Mrs. Bats-eyes,
lacked neither keenness of vision, nor niceness of hand, to have made
him most formidable in satire and irony.
His present station in the literature of Britain affords an illustration,
familiar and obvious to every eye, of God's sovereignty, and of the
arrangements of Him "who seeth not as man seeth." Had Pepys, or any
other contemporary courtier that hunted for place and pension, or
fluttered in levity and sin, in the antechambers of the later Stuarts, been
asked, who of all the writers of the times were likely to go down to
posterity among the lights of their age, how ludicrously erroneous
would have been his apportionments of fame. Pepys might, from the
Puritan education of his boyhood, have named Owen, Bates, and
Baxter; or from the Conformist associations of his later years, have
selected South, or Patrick, or Tillotson, as the religious writers who had
surpassed all rivalry, or named a Walton or Castell, as having taken
bonds of fame for the perpetuity of their influence. Had he known of
Clarendon's preparations to become the historian of the Commonwealth
and Restoration, or of Burnet's habits of preserving memoirs of the
incidents and characters around him, he might have conjectured their
probable honors in after-times. But in poetry he would have classed
Dryden the royalist far above Milton the republican apologist of
regicide; and might, aping the fashions of the palace, have preferred to
either the author of Hudibras together with the lewd playwrights who
were the delight of a shameless court--hailing the last as the most
promising candidates for posthumous celebrity. How little could he
have dreamed that among these Puritans and Non-conformists, whose
unpopular cause he had himself deserted, and whom his royal masters
Charles and James had betrayed, amerced, exiled, and incarcerated; in
those conventicles so closely watched and so sternly visited, which
these persecuted confessors yet by stealth maintained; aye, and in those
dungeons, whither the informer so often from these conventicles
dragged them, British freedom had its truest guardians, and British
literature some of its noblest illustrations. How little thought he that
God had there, in his old and glorious school of trial, his "hidden ones,"
like Bunyan, whose serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious

over wrong and neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many
contemporary celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries
of every land inhabited by an English race, one of the names "men will
not willingly let die." How little could gilded and callous favorites of
the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile
Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were but
rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they had been
immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer withdrew
from man to commune with the King of kings.