United States or Malaysia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His two escapes from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder; his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential deliverance from death; the graphic account of his difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at Elstow Church, and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green these and other minor touches which give a life and colour to the story, which we should be very sorry to lose, are later additions.
Whether this may refer to his former cottage at Elstow, of which there is great doubt, or to the house he occupied in Bedford after his release, they were equally about a mile from the jail. He certainly means that the two parts were not written in the same place, nor is there a shadow of a doubt as to the fact that in prison the great allegory was conceived and written. Well might Mr.
Abbot, a neighbouring clergyman, who had daily watched the labours of the workmen, luckily saw it, and saved it from destruction. He constantly wore it, until, drawing near the end of his pilgrimage, in 1817, he took it off his own finger and placed it upon that of his friend Dr. Bower, then curate of Elstow, and at present the dean of Manchester, charging him to keep it for his sake.
In his sixteenth year he lost his mother, and soon after he joined the army, then engaged in the Civil War; but his military experience lasted only a few months. Returning to Elstow, he again worked at the forge, and married. After various alternating religious experiences, in 1655 he became a member of the Baptist congregation at Bedford, of which he was ere long chosen pastor.
Bunyan's life is an epitome of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of the English Reformation. He was born in the little village of Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son of a poor tinker.
Word Of The Day