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Updated: May 10, 2025
O that it may more and more abound. Ed. These home-thrusts at conscience, so constantly met with in Bunyan's works, should have the effect of exciting us to solemn self-examination. May we never be contented with the porch, but enter and enjoy the riches of Divine grace. Ed. The gradual spread of the gospel, like the leaven, must eventually leaven the whole.
In conversation with my excellent pastor, who afterwards for many years bore the honour of a D.D., he acknowledge his obligation to me for detecting the plagiarism before the sermon was published, and explained to me that, when very young, he had read Bunyan's Heavenly Footman with intense interest, and made a full analysis of it, in the shape of notes, which, having committed to memory, he preached to a very delighted and deeply impressed congregation; that after a lapse of many years, looking over the outlines of his early sermons, he was struck with it, and believing it to be his own composition, had again used it with such extraordinary success, as led his deacons and members to request him to print it.
Bunyan's singular powers are those of description, not of invention.
The printer had inserted 'the cause'; Bunyan's manuscript was 'a cause. See marginal note, in his Differences in Judgment. Ed. This is a much more extensive evil than many would credit. I have met with these very expressions not only among the poor but the rich. It is an awful delusion. Ed.
Bunyan's inventive faculty was a spring that never ran dry. He had a manner, as I said, like De Foe's, of creating the illusion that we are reading realities, by little touches such as 'I do not know, 'He did not tell me this, or the needless introduction of particulars irrelevant to the general plot such as we always stumble on in life, and writers of fiction usually omit.
The latter was succeeded by a young man named John Burton, of very delicate health, who was taken by death from his congregation, by whom he was much beloved, in September, 1660, four months after the restoration of the Monarchy and the Church. Burton thoroughly appreciated Bunyan's gifts, and stood sponsor for him on the publication of his first printed work.
See the principles which Bunyan has with such inimitable felicity embodied and exhibited in their names, the principles within them from which they have acted till they have become a habit and then a character, that character which they themselves are and will remain. See the variety of John Bunyan's characters, a richer and a more endless variety than are the features of their faces.
Now, whatever faults that tall man had who took up so much of Faithful's time and attention, he was a saint compared with the men and the women who have just passed before us. Talkative, as John Bunyan so scornfully names that tall man, though he undoubtedly takes up too much time and too much space in Bunyan's book, was not a busybody in other men's matters at any rate.
The record of the next few years is like a nightmare, so terrible is Bunyan's spiritual struggle. One day he feels himself an outcast; the next the companion of angels; the third he tries experiments with the Almighty in order to put his salvation to the proof. As he goes along the road to Bedford he thinks he will work a miracle, like Gideon with his fleece.
That genius became hallowed and sanctified by prison discipline, by an intense study of the Sacred Scriptures, and by his controversies with great men of various sects and parties. In the 'Holy War' Bunyan's peculiar genius shines forth in its most beauteous lustre; the whole is new, genuine, flowing forth from his own deep and rich experience.
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