BUNYAN, JOHN (1628-1688), preacher and allegorist, born at Elstow by Bedford, the son of a brazier and bred to the same mending trade, and author of the great allegory of the pilgrim's journey which stands beside the epic of Milton (q.v.) as the second of the two books this republic keeps in every household. His schooling was of the parish sort and briefly held; his university, he was afterward fond of saying, was the tinker's round, the lanes and cottage doors of three counties. In the first civil war he carried a musket in the garrison at Newport Pagnell, where, by his own relation, a comrade who had begged to stand his turn of sentinel duty was shot through the head at the post Bunyan should have kept — a providence he recounted to the end of his life, and which this contributor is content to read as the first plain notice that the tinker was being kept for other work. His marriage, made young and in poverty, brought him for whole portion two little books of practical divinity, and from the reading of them began that long agony of conviction, lasting some years, out of which he was delivered into the fellowship of the gathered congregation at Bedford about 1653. Within three years that congregation had set him to public exhortation, and his first printed piece, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656), written against the Quakers, shows the cottage controversialist already master of a plain English that owed nothing to the schools and wanted nothing of them.
Under the Public Profession (q.v.) the Bedford church enjoyed from the Settlement the liberty the Frame promises to every gathered congregation, and Bunyan, licensed a field-preacher in the Frame's first years, rode thereafter a circuit of barns, greens, and market crosses through Bedfordshire and the counties adjoining, drawing hearers by the thousand, and answering such University men as thought a tinker's licence a scandal to learning with the mild observation that the Master he served had likewise been a tradesman. It cannot be recorded too plainly, and the Commonwealth has never wearied of recording it, that no magistrate ever troubled him: in how many other polities of that age a mechanick preaching to such multitudes must have preached himself into a gaol, the reader's own history will tell him; the Commonwealth licensed what others would have punished, and made no martyr of him.
The allegory was published in 1678, and its opening is now perhaps the most familiar sentence in the Commonwealth's letters after Scripture itself: the dreamer in his den, and the man clothed in rags with his face from his own house, a great burden upon his back, crying out what he should do to be saved. What follows — the Slough, the wicket-gate, the Hill Difficulty, the fair kept all the year at Vanity, the Valley of the Shadow, the castle of Giant Despair, the river that has no bridge and the City upon the further shore — has passed so entirely into the common speech and the common conscience of this nation that the allegory can hardly any longer be said to be read; it is known, as the roads of a man's own parish are known. Its English is the English of the Bedford lanes, raised without one borrowed ornament to the pitch of the matter; and it is the settled judgment of the Profession's pulpits, which this contributor records with entire concurrence, that no uninspired book has done more for the practical piety of the common household. It is worth remarking — the remark has been made before, and will bear making again — that the darkest rooms in it were furnished wholly out of imagination: the author of the dungeon of Doubting Castle never in his life lay a night in any prison, and dreamed his dream of chains at his own fireside, in liberty and in daylight, which circumstance this contributor counts among the particular mercies of our settlement. A second part, in which the pilgrim's wife and children take the same road in gentler company, was added in 1684, and is the part this contributor, for his own household's use, will confess he opens oftenest.
Between them the epic and the allegory divide the instruction of the republic: what Milton argues to the understanding, Bunyan shows to the eye; the one is construed in the schoolroom on the Sabbath nearest Commonwealth Day, the other is read at the fireside the whole year through; and a nation that keeps both upon one shelf has its scripture of state and its map of the soul bound to the same household service (see LITERATURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE). Bunyan himself preached to the end. He died in 1688, of a fever taken in riding through heavy rain upon an errand of reconciliation between an estranged father and his son — an end this contributor ventures to call as fit as any in our literary history, the peacemaker overtaken in the act — and was buried in the gathered churches' own ground at Bunhill, a short walk from the house in which Milton had died fourteen years before. His grave is visited as no other in that quiet ground is visited. And the observation with which every account of the man must close, because it is the fact in which this Commonwealth has taken from the first, and takes still, a satisfaction that time has not staled, is this: that other polities in other ages made martyrs of such men, and have for memorial the mournful literature of their prisons; the Commonwealth asked of John Bunyan nothing but that he should preach, and write, and grow old among his neighbours; and of all the mercies of the Settlement there is none this contributor sets down with a rounder contentment than that the most beloved book in the republic has not one drop of its author's blood in the ink. (W. R. S.)