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was held. The proposal to make it 'public' and to hear 'debate' indicate the pacific ideas of the leaders, and General Harrison was reported to be in sympathy with the movement, with a few other Baptists. But the Calvinistic Baptists were prompt to protest against the measure; they, with their brethren, the General Baptists, believing that the Prince of Peace will establish his kingdom without the sword. Just as the Protector's life was drawing to a close these misguided men chose Thomas Venner as their leader. He was a wine-cooper, and created an insurrection. He became nearly insane at the thought of monarchy restored in Charles II., and determined to destroy royalty as opposed to Christ. He rallied followers and armed them, adopted a banner on which was the lion of the tribe of Judah, with the motto, 'Who shall rouse him up?' and then proclaimed Jesus as King. The military were called out, and in a fight these men were slain or taken prisoners; Venner and fourteen others being hanged and quartered for treason. The fact that Venner and fifty men issued out of the Baptist meeting-house in Coleman Street has associated this mad proceeding with the General Baptists as a people, but very unjustly. Venner was not a Baptist; on the contrary, he threatened them that if he succeeded he would show them whether infant baptism were in the Bible, possibly as they had found it there so often, by the light of fagots. Mr. Lamb, the pastor of the Coleman Street Church, at once united with the London Baptists in issuing a strong appeal to the world, showing that they were bound in conscience to render to Cæsar his right, and had no sympathy with Venner's doings. This is clear enough from the fact that only fifty men issued out of the meeting-house with Venner, and yet Lamb's Church was by far the largest' Baptist Church in London. The British public believed the disclaimer of the Baptists, but not so the perfidious monarch; urged by his minister, Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, who hated the Baptists for their espousal of the Parliamentary cause, he made this insignificant piece of rant the pretext for a series of abuses upon. the Independents, Quakers and Baptists, which will disgrace his name for ever. While some few Baptists believed in the doctrine of Christ's millennial reign, there is no satisfactory evidence that one of the fifty men were of their number, or that a single Baptist took part in the plot. Harrison was committed to the Tower for supposed complicity with it, but Carlyle, who studied this period with great thoroughness, gives it as his opinion that Harrison (was) hardly connected with the thing except as a well-wisher.' Froude sees the matter in much the same light, for he says: With the Fifth Monarchy men abroad, every chapel, except those of the Baptists, would have been a magazine of explosives. The Baptists and Quakers might have been trusted to discourage violence, but it was impossible to distinguish among the various sects.' 6

WE

CHAPTER IV.

BRITISH BAPTISTS.-JOHN BUNYAN.

E must now look at the Baptists after the Restoration, the most noted of whom is JOHN BUNYAN. He was born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the famous year in which Charles I. was forced to yield the Petition of Right.

JOHN BUNYAN.

His education was next to nothing, yet he was favored above the boys of his village, for he attended the grammar school founded by Sir William Harper at Bedford; how long is not known, but at the best his educational attainments were cuite scanty. Nature had given him a warm, light, frolicsome heart, which held him ready for any sort of glee and mischief, and under reversed circumstances subjected him not only to the pensive, but the desponding. He early feared God and longed to love him, but his giddiness and love of fun drew him into sin,

This great The religion

until he became addicted to wrong-doing, principally lying and swearing. Because his father and himself were tinkers, and Gipsies in England have been tinkers from time immemorial, he was long supposed to be of this alien blood. But the records of his family are now traceable to about A. D. 1200, and the name itself, as then known, Buignon, indicates that the family was of Norman origin. descendant of that house was a man of intense feeling on all subjects. of his times was of the most earnest nature, emotionai, deep, almost fanatical, and when Bunyan's heart began to yearn after the Lord Jesus, his whole nature was inflamed. If we should take his own version of his case literally, he would compel us to believe that he was a sad scamp in youth and a desperate villain in early manhood. He tells us, however, that he was never drunk nor unchaste, and certainly he was never a thief nor a highwayman. He broke the Sabbath, loved dancing, ball

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playing, bell-ringing and rough sports generally, and for these, with lying and profanity, his passionate self-accusings threw him into a deep and terrible sense of guilt. His agonies and conflicts continued for months; he dreamed frightful dreams and saw alarming day visions, heard warning voices and read his doom written in letters of fire. Meanwhile, he was a soldier in the civil war, and at its close married a poor, but godly, orphan girl. Froude says that his marriage speaks much for his character, for had he been a dissolute, idle scamp, it is unlikely that a respectable woman would have become his wife when he was a mere boy.' At any rate, his soul-conflict not only continued, but deepened, until his sufferings became unbearable, and he concluded that he was too wicked to be saved and must be lost. One day, when walking alone in the country, a flood of light broke upon his mind with these words: 'He hath made peace through the blood of his cross;' when, he says: 'I saw that the justice of God and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other. I was ready to swoon, not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace.' Soon after this, 1653, Mr. Gifford immersed him in the river Ouse, when he became a member of the Baptist Church at Bedford, as we shall see more fully in the next chapters; and in 1655 he entered the ministry of the Gospel.

Lord Macaulay speaks thus: The history of Bunyan is the history of a most excitable mind in an age of excitement.' While this consideration does not throw light upon the source and sweep of Bunyan's genius, it may and does suggest a weighty reason why it took the hue and channel that it selected for its expression, both in his personal history and in the sixty works of his pen. The sixty years of his natural life ran through a long list of the most remarkable events in English annals. In his day the High Commission and the Star Chamber brought before his mind the most vital question of human rights. This Court was empowered on mere suspicion to administer an oath, by which the prisoner was bound to reveal his inward thoughts, opinions and convictions, and thus accuse himself on pain of death. Every day filled Bunyan's ears with some new, romantic and blood-stirring event. He held his breath and turned pale when he heard that Charles lost not only his crown but his head as a traitor, when Cromwell drew the sword for British liberties and progress, when Cavaliers and Roundheads flew in every direction, when the Commonwealth was nourished with the blood of his brethren, and when Naseby, Edgewood and Marston Moor decreed, that no irresponsible tyrant should ever mount the throne again. He was familiar with the mad plots of Oates, Dangerfield and Venner, with the Conventicle Act, the ejection of two thousand men of God from their pulpits in a day, the faithlessness of the second Charles, the hypocrisies of James, the butcheries of Claverhouse, the infamous mockery of justice in Jeffreys, and the fall of the perfidious Stuarts. The smoke of burning martyrs filled the air over his head, and he saw the blows for freedom which were struck by Hampden and Pym, Sidney and Russell. Howard, the great philan

thropist, a hundred years afterward, walked the same streets and country roads that Bunyan trod, and, it is said, caught his spirit of prison reform largely from the 'Den' in which Bunyan had lain. The great singers of his day were Herbert and Milton, Dryden and Shakespeare. And the mighty preachers were Howe and Henry, Charnock and Owen, Tillotson and South, Sherlock and Stillingfleet Bunyan's observation was keen and extensive; he lived in the very heart of England, was an actor in some of its most exciting scenes, and it is impossible but that the spirit of the times moved him at every step. In his day, English literature had become thoroughly imbued with all the elements of poetry and fiction; nay, even of romance. These had come down through high Italian authorship. Not only had the colloquial English descended through Wyckliff, and its higher literature through Chaucer, but they had been largely blended in the Bible, with which Bunyan was most familiar; so that simple, idiomatic Saxon English was prepared to his hand; being full of image and awe, of wonder and grandeur, which he could express to the popular mind in a very racy style. Unconsciously he felt the force of his mother-tongue; it stimulated his genius, became the groundwork of his thought and the model of his utterance; a choice which places him side by side with Shakespeare and the English Bible, as one of the great conservators of our powerful language.

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In a burst of unreasoning loyalty the English people, in 1660, placed Charles II. on the throne, without exacting proper guarantees for that liberty which they had bought with their own blood. He had given his word on honor to protect all his subjects in their religious freedom; and then, like a true Stuart, he sold that honor to his lust of power. Hardly was he seated on the throne when Venner's petty insurrection furnished a pretext for vengeance upon all his opponents, and especially those in the dissenting sects, no matter how much they proved their loyalty. Amongst the first victims of his tyranny we find Bunyan, charged with 'devilishly' and perniciously' abstaining from going to church, as a common upholder of meetings contrary to the laws of the king,' and with teaching men to worship contrary to law.' He was sentenced to Bedford jail for three months, and at the end of that time to be transported if he refused to conform. But his judges kept him in prison for six years: and when released he instantly began to preach again, whereupon he was imprisoned for another six years. Being released still again, he began to preach at once, and was arrested for the third time, but was detained only a few months. His judges were harsh with him, but his real oppressors for these twelve weary years were the king and Parliament, who made it a crime for any one to preach but a priest of the Church of England. It was long supposed that he was imprisoned mostly in the town jail of Bedford, on the bridge over the river Ouse, but it is now clear that his long imprisonment was in the county jail, where his anonymous biographer of 1700 says, that he heard him preach to sixty dissenters and three ministers. There is good ground for believing, however, that he passed

a considerable period in the jail on the bridge, and that he wrote his 'Pilgrim's Progress' there.

While we are obliged to reprehend the base injustice which kept this grand preacher pining in a prison, however leniently treated, the fact is forced upon us, that the wrath of man was made to praise God; for had not his zealous servant been compelled to this solitude, we should not have had that masterpiece of literature. His 'Holy War' and other productions would have brought down to us a literary name for him of no mean order, but his 'Pilgrim' is a book for all people and all time. Bunyan's great power is in allegory and this form of it is unique, because its facts and dress are not fantastic, but are inherent in man's common sense and moral nature. His 'Pilgrim' is full of truth-this he drew from the Bible; of

history, which he took from Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs;' of terse English, which he learned from Spenser and Chaucer; of human nature, which he borrowed from himself and his circumstances; of hallowed conviction, which he caught from the Holy Spirit; and of uncrippled boldness, which was inspired by his love of soulliberty. In earlier times some treated this great book with sneer and scorn, but in later days the first critics have vied with each other to exhaust upon it the language of eulogy. Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Macaulay and Froude have pronounced it equally fit for the plowman and the philosopher, the peer and the peasant; and the Queen of England thinks Christian,' its great character, a pattern for her grandchildren to copy in the palace. The glorious truth which made the heart of Bunyan beat quicker under the tinker's doublet has since given heart's-ease' to many a throbbing bosom which heaves under the purple. And the humbler walks

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