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With us the fire has gone out; in the place of it we have but smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical mind in search of 'something deeper and truer than satisfied the last century, is turning back to Catholic verities. What Bunyan had to say may be less than the whole truth: we shall scarcely find the still missing part of it in lines of thought which we have outgrown.
But in the Holy War we have Bunyan himself as fully and as exclusively as we have Dante in the Divine Comedy. In the first edition of the Holy War there is a frontispiece conceived and executed after the anatomical and symbolical manner which was so common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in the English edition of Jacob Behmen.
But amidst it all Talbot saw nothing except the man who had gone forth to die for her, and in all his words heard nothing except the utterance of that which proved the very intensity of his feelings. "Oh yes," continued Brooke, "there are lots of authorities to be quoted in favor of mirthfulness. I've already mentioned Bunyan and Watts. I'll give you all the rest of the old divines.
That Bunyan intended to have continued this commentary there can be no doubt, not only from the abrupt termination of his labours, and the blank paper following the manuscript, but from an observation he makes on the sabbath the sabbath of years, the jubilee, &c., "of all which, more in their place, IF GOD PERMIT." See Genesis 2:3. Ed. London, by B. W., for Benj.
Those convicted and under sentence might sue out a pardon under the Great Seal at any time within a year from the proclamation. Was Bunyan legally convicted or not? He had not pleaded directly to the indictment. No evidence had been heard against him. His trial had been a conversation between himself and the Court. The point had been raised by his friends.
Bunyan confesses to us that he got all his Latin from the prescription papers of his doctors, and we know that he got all his perfect English from his English Bible. And then he got his humour and his pathos out of his own deep and tender heart.
Their earliest apologist, Barclay, in his theses on the Scriptures, says, 'They are the doctrines of Christ, held forth in precious declarations, spoken and written by the movings of God's Spirit. Whoever it was that asserted the heresies, to Bunyan the investigation of them, in the light of Divine truth, was attended with great advantages.
Bunyan was, indeed, a rigid Calvinist, but then he was also a member of a Baptist congregation, so that his works had no place on David Deans's shelf of divinity. Madge, however, at some time of her life, had been well acquainted, as it appeared, with the most popular of his performances, which, indeed, rarely fails to make a deep impression upon children, and people of the lower rank.
Now that is not the treatment the Bible gives to this so essential Christian grace, as any one may see at a glance who takes the trouble to turn up his Cruden. Hope has a great place alongside of faith and love in the Holy Scriptures, and it has a correspondingly large and eloquent place in Bunyan.
In his third book, published in 1658, at "the King's Head, in the Old Bailey," a few days before Oliver Cromwell's death, Bunyan left the thorny domain of polemics, for that of Christian exhortation, in which his chief work was to be done.
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