SOURCE: Knott, John R. “‘A Suffering People’: Bunyan and the Language of Martyrdom.” In Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, edited by Francis J. Bremer, pp. 88-123. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993.

[In the following essay, Knott discusses the role of martyrdom in Bunyan's works as well as his belief that the persecution faced by Christians was a battle for truth that was part of God's plan.]

A visitor to John Bunyan in the County Gaol of Bedford, where he was imprisoned from 1660 to 1672, reported that his library consisted of two books, the Bible and the “Book of Martyrs.”¹ Foxe's Acts and Monuments was one of a handful of books, including Luther's commentary on Galatians, that deeply influenced Bunyan. His frequent references to it, often citing the volume and page, sometimes quoting or paraphrasing, demonstrate a close familiarity with the text. Yet the influence is more pervasive than specific references reveal and can be found throughout his career. Through the Acts and Monuments Bunyan was exposed to the classic protestant view of church history as the struggle of true and false churches as well as to numerous models of resistance to persecution. It suggested ways of framing his experience and that of the persecuted church in his own time. Reading Foxe in the early years of his imprisonment, Bunyan could empathize with the Marian martyrs and see himself as one of their spiritual heirs. The Acts and Monuments offered him dramatic and persuasive affirmation of New Testament lessons about the centrality of suffering in Christian experience and, with the Bible, gave him ways of talking about it.

Early and late, Bunyan's writings show a fascination with the drama of martyrdom. The acts of martyrs presented the demands of Christianity in their most extreme form and gave testimony of the power of faith that captured his imagination. In Light for Them that Sit in Darkness (1675) Bunyan writes: “How have the Martyrs despised death … having peace with God by Jesus Christ, scorning the most Cruel Torments that Hell and Men could devise and invent.”² In Come, and Welcome, to Jesus Christ (1678) he links coming to Christ with forsaking the world and draws his illustrations from Foxe's accounts of early Christian martyrs as well as from the Bible (Abraham, Daniel, Stephen). He quotes the declarations with which Ignatius and Romanus embrace their torments and shows Eulalia expressing pleasure at Christ's victories, “as they was pulling her one Joynt from another,” and Agnes telling her executioner that she will draw the sword into her breasts, “that then I, being married to Christ my Spouse, may Surmount and escape all the darkness of this World.”³ Such exempla served Bunyan the preacher as startling instances of the love of Christ with which to challenge a congregation.

Bunyan was particularly drawn to the Marian period, which provided a closer analogue for the experience of those he addressed and compelling scenes of faith triumphant over persecution. A hundred years after Foxe wrote this period had receded into a legendary past. In Of Antichrist and His Ruin, published posthumously but probably written in the early 1680s, Bunyan represents it as a time when God was close, ready to comfort the persecuted and to rain burning coals upon the persecutors, as if punishing them with their own fires:

In the Maryan days here at home, there was such sweet songs sung in the fire, and such providences, that coals of burning fire still dropped here and there upon the heads of those that hated God; that it might, and doubtless did make those that did wisely consider of God's doings, to think God was yet near, with, and for, a despised and afflicted people.⁴

Bunyan's “still” distances the Marian era from a diminished present, and his idealizing vision erases Foxe's grisly detail, the slow fires and the blackening limbs, to emphasize the sweetness of suffering for one's faith. In A Holy Life (1684), he looked back nostalgically to the early days of Puritanism and especially to the “Marian days” that preceded them as a time in which one could see “another life than is now among men, another kind of conversation than now is among professors.”⁵ In Seasonable Counsel (1684), another work of the same period of heightened enforcement of the laws restricting worship by Nonconformists, Bunyan seized upon striking examples of Marian martyrs defeating affliction by rejoicing, to show that God's support makes such victories possible. Hawkes and Bainham “could shout for joy, and clap their hands in the very flames for joy”; God can make “Paul sing in the stocks, and good Rowland Taylor dance, as he goeth to the burning stake.”⁶

Seasonable Counsel offers Bunyan's most sustained exploration of the nature and purpose of the sufferings endured by Christians. Nonconformist worship had been restricted since the collapse of Puritan power and the restoration of Charles II in 1660, first under Elizabethan laws and then, beginning with the Act of Uniformity of 1662, under the series of new acts designed to enforce worship according to the Book of Common Prayer and to prohibit other forms of religious assembly that came to be known as the Clarendon Code.⁷ The Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670 subjected to severe penalties those meeting for unauthorized worship in groups of more than four. The Five Mile Act made it illegal for an ejected minister to live within five miles of where he had formerly served as pastor. These and other penal laws were enforced more or less aggressively depending upon political circumstances and the efforts of Charles II and James II to secure greater toleration. There were periods of relief, notably after Charles's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, but until 1688 Nonconformists lived with the likelihood of persecution for acting upon their religious beliefs. In the early 1680s increasing numbers were arrested for involvement in conventicles. They might have their property seized for failing to pay the large fines levied, be left in prison indefinitely, or be sentenced to banishment. In Israel's Hope Encouraged, published posthumously, Bunyan pictured exaggerated fears of such punishments as the work of Satan's subtlety: “He can make the loss of goods, in our imagination, ten times bigger than it is; he can make an informer a frightful creature, and a jail like hell itself; he can make banishment and death utterably intolerable.”⁸ Bunyan's object was to control such fears by helping his audience to understand the persecution with which they had to reckon as an episode in the long history of suffering for truth and a part of God's plan. If one could see it in this fashion, it would more nearly be endurable.

In Seasonable Counsel, repeating a favorite argument of the Marian martyrs, Bunyan argues that “the people of God are a suffering people” and that their trials are sent by God to test and strengthen them.⁹ Periods of persecution are to be welcomed, because “the best Christians are found in the worst of times” (36). His message is one of reassurance, that God will console and reward those who can detach themselves from worldly preoccupations and trust their souls to him.¹⁰ Bunyan sought to portray the afflictions of his audience, typically loss of property and imprisonment, as part of the grander drama of persecution and martyrdom. Thus he makes the threats they face seem part of a continuum leading to martyrdom: “The ruin of an estate, the loss of liberty, a Gaol, a Gibbet, a Stake, a Dagger” (93). He reminds them of modern massacres of protestants in Ireland, Paris, and Piedmont “where the godly in the night, before they were well awake, had, some of them, their heart blood running on the ground” (25). His strategy was to establish a sense of the present as a time of crisis that demanded an absolute commitment to God. He cultivated in his audience a state of mind akin to that of the martyr, a readiness “to chuse to be gone, though through the flames, [rather] than to stay here and die in silken sheets” (20).

Bunyan, like Foxe and many others, used images of physical torment to insist upon the abuses of the flesh suffered by martyrs and demonstrate their capacity to endure them. Making these abuses concrete encouraged an imaginative identification with the experience of martyrdom and prepared the faithful to confront their own, lesser forms of suffering. In Seasonable Counsel Bunyan invokes Hebrews 11, adding torture to the familiar list of afflictions (“they were Tortured, had cruel mockings and scourgings: they were stoned, were sawn asunder, were slain with the sword” [22]), and claims that Christ enabled the “good men of old” to bear such suffering with patience and rejoicing. In another place he asks: “Is thy body to be disfigured, dismembred, starved, hanged, or burned for the faith and profession of the Gospel?” (82). Bunyan multiplies images of the abused body here to suggest the power of persecutors over the bodies of the persecuted and consequently the intensity of the suffering the Christian must be prepared to face. Yet Bunyan's continuing emphasis upon real or imagined torture, even dismemberment (in recurrent images of bodies “sawn asunder” or torn to pieces by wild beasts), enables him to insist upon God's power to restore and even transform the abused body. The contrasting image is that of the glorified body of the saint.

In the prison verses he published as One Thing is Needful (1665), Bunyan imagines martyrs in heaven with restored bodies:

Those bodies which sometimes were torn,
And bones that broken were,
For God's Word, he doth now adorn
With health and glory fair.(11)

The body must be resurrected, Bunyan argues in The Resurrection of the Dead (1665), a work of the same period in which he continues his quarrel with Quakers and Ranters, because “it is the body that feels the stocks, the whip, hunger and cold, the fire and rack, and a thousand calamities.”¹² Such physical suffering, for which Bunyan showed a remarkable empathy, is transcended by the resurrected body he imagines raised by God “in all its features and members, inconceivably beautifull.” The resurrected body will be free from infirmities (“There shall be no lame legs, nor Crump-shoulders, no blare-eyes, nor yet wrinkled faces”) and incorruptible. This was his version of what it would mean for Christ to fashion our “vile” bodies “like unto his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21).¹³

Bunyan needed to convince his audiences of the larger significance of their sufferings, to show them that they were part of the same struggle of the godly against persecuting power as the faithful of Hebrews, Paul and Stephen, and the long line of Christian martyrs who imitated the apostles. In his Prison Meditations (1663) he assimilated his own experience to this perspective:

Here [in prison] we can see how all men play
          Their parts, as on a Stage,
How good men suffer for God's way,
          And bad men at them rage.(14)

He returned to the metaphor in Seasonable Counsel: “a man when he suffereth for Christ, is set upon an Hill, upon a Stage, as in a Theatre, to play a part for God in the World” (62). To play such a part one needed the kind of faith that would make it possible to embrace suffering and an understanding of the larger drama that gave it significance. It helped to have models, of the sort that Bunyan drew from the Bible and from Foxe's pages. Insofar as he generalizes the role, he describes it as that of the martyr, defined in Seasonable Counsel as one who not only suffers for the truth but suffers “after a right manner,” that is, “in that holy, humble, meek manner as the Word of God requireth” (30).

In Seasonable Counsel Bunyan insists that God appoints who will suffer, and when and how they will suffer, and also controls the persecutors: “Gods bridle is upon them, Gods hook is in their nose: yea, and God has determined the bounds of their rage” (73). He uses familiar biblical metaphors of refining and pruning to justify persecution as a trial meant to purify and strengthen Christians,

To refine them as Silver, and to purge them as gold: and to cause that they that bear some fruit, may bring forth more: we are afflicted, that we may grow.

(73)

Suffering, then, is discipline imposed by God, and a means to spiritual growth.¹⁵ One should accept its inevitability for the godly (“persecution always attends the word, that of the Tongue, or that of the Sword”) and seek to understand its purpose.¹⁶

Bunyan speaks to the fears of the individual Christian (“But I am in the Dark” [18]) by urging him to trust his soul to God and by showing how God will comfort him and give him a “holy boldness” before his persecutors, like that of Peter before the Sanhedrin. Part of his strategy of reassurance in Seasonable Counsel was to portray what he calls God's “comforting, supporting, imboldning, and upholding presence” (23). Consciousness of this presence enables the faithful to bear suffering with patience, even with rejoicing, like Paul or such Old Testament precursors as Daniel. Bunyan sought to shift his audience's attention from the afflictions they faced, from the facts of material loss and prison life, to the power of God to enable the Christian to turn suffering into triumph:

Is it not a thing amazing to see one inconsiderable man, in a Spirit of faith and patience, overcome all the threatnings, cruelties, afflictions, and sorrows that a whole World can lay upon him?

(77)

His task was to convince the fearful Christian of the reality of this power of God, as against the visible power of his persecutors, and to “kindle in his soul so goodly a fire of love to, and zeal for God, that all the waters of the World shall never be able to quench” (77).

In a posthumosly published work, Paul's Departure and Crown, Bunyan presented a case study of exemplary suffering. In the words of his text (2 Tim. 4:6-8), Paul describes himself as ready to depart, having “fought a good fight,” and anticipating a “crown of righteousness.” Bunyan shows Paul acting out his own teachings about suffering through his willingness to “embrace the cross for the Word's sake,”¹⁷ for example, by going to Jerusalem when his enemies are sworn to kill him. His readiness, for Bunyan, depends upon a heart “unclenched from the world” and an eye fixed upon the heavenly glory that is the reward of the sufferer. If Paul offered a model for individual suffering, he could also illustrate the role of the martyr in the life of the church, exemplifying the suffering of the saints that strengthens the church by confirming the gospel and recovering truths that have been “lost in antichristian darkness.” The trial of the saints by persecution becomes the trial of the Word:

What is this furnace of earth but the body of the saints of God, in which the Word is tried, as by fire in persecution. … While their flesh did fry in the flames, the Word of God was cleansed, and by such means purified in these their earthen furnaces, and so delivered to us.¹⁸

Those who burned the Marian martyrs thought they were purifying the body of the church. Bunyan's arresting metaphor, which gives a new twist to biblical metaphors of refining, makes the actual bodies of the martyrs the furnaces in which the Word itself is purged. The implication is that such violent means are necessary to burn away the dross of tradition and restore the Word to its original purity. In his later works Bunyan focused increasingly on the collective suffering of the true church, seen as a means of waging war against the power of Antichrist.

In his early commentary on Revelation, The Holy City (1665), Bunyan portrayed the drama of “the Gospel-Church returning out of her long and Antichristian Captivity” and the glorious restoration of this church that he expected at the millennium, the thousand-year rule of the saints on earth.¹⁹ Bunyan regarded the millennium as imminent but unlike some who produced commentaries on Revelation, he did not try to predict when it would arrive. Nor did he deal with the means by which it would begin, except by trying to lay the specter of political insurrection, reassuring the “Governours of this World” that it would not be by “outward force or compulsion” directed against them.²⁰ Bunyan was more interested in representing the perfection the millennium would bring and the long struggle of the church with Antichrist, understood in typical protestant fashion as Roman Catholic power, that preceded it. He drew upon the prophets as well as upon Revelation in representing the figure of the suffering church, “rent and torn among the briers and thorns of the Wilderness” (80) but to be adorned as a bride and recovered “to her Primitive Purity” (98). And he invoked familiar and powerful Old Testament images of God restoring the scattered remnant to the fold: “He that scattered Jacob, will gather him, and keep him, as a Shepherd doth his Sheep” (193).

Bunyan anticipated the emphasis on persecution of his later works, particularly those of the 1680s, in passages describing the destructiveness of persecutors and the trials of the godly. The “venemous Dragons, fierce Lions, and ravenous Wolves” of Jeremiah and Isaiah become persecutors “in their spirit of outrage against the Church and People of God” (169).²¹ Bunyan celebrates Isaiah's prophecy that the grass will flourish, and flocks lie down, where dragons formerly made the land barren.²² He would give Apollyon the wings and the roaring of a dragon, and the mouth of a lion, in Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress; in Part II, with Apollyon gone, the Valley of Humiliation has become “fat Ground” where sheep graze. As in later works, Bunyan associates persecution with trial, in The Holy City expressed through the image of refining fire. The “People of God,” he says, “are thrown into the burning Fiery Furnace of Affliction and Temptation, and there they are tried, purged, and purified” (139). This becomes the “King of Babylon's Furnace,” from which Jerusalem “comes out a City of Gold.” The extended passage in which Bunyan develops this image, drawing upon Job and Daniel as well as various prophetic books, becomes a soaring meditation on the value of trial.

If Bunyan found the images that he elaborates in The Holy City in the Bible, he derived his sense of church history largely from Foxe. Although he projects the millennium into a vague future, he conveys a strong sense of the progress already made in reforming the church, praising “our famous and holy Worthies,”

that before us have risen up in their place, and shook off those Reliques of Antichrist that intrenched upon the Priestly Office of our Lord and Saviour, even worthy Wickliff, Hus, Luther, Melancton, Calvin, and the blessed Martyrs in Q. Maries dayes.

(134)

Bunyan saw their “Altar-work” in reforming worship as yielding to the “Temple-work” of gathering churches of believers in his own time, to be followed by the “City-work” of restoring the New Jerusalem.²³ He regarded the saints of his day as seeing beyond “what the holy and goodly Martyrs and Saints did in the days that were before us, Hus, Bilny, Ridly, Hooper, Cranmer, with their Brethren” (154). Like Foxe, Bunyan understood the work of reform as restoring the ideal of the primitive church, shaped for him by Foxe's accounts of the acts of the martyrs as well as by the New Testament. Unlike Milton and others in the thick of the battle against prelacy, he was not bothered by the fact that some of these were bishops. Bunyan's fullest representation of the idea of the suffering church can be found in several posthumously published commentaries of the 1680s, written after he had witnessed more than twenty years of persecution of Nonconformists. In The House of the Forest of Lebanon Bunyan treats Solomon's house, which he distinguishes from the temple, as a type of the church in the wilderness. His tireless allegorizing of detail from the description in 1 Kings 7 provides the framework for his commentary, but he draws upon Revelation and various Old Testament books to dramatize the afflictions of the church and the power of the truth to beat back the dragon and his angels. He portrays the church both as the woman in the wilderness, weeping and in pain, and as a strong building able to outlast the assaults of Antichrist: “yet some of the pillars stood, they were not all burnt, nor cut down.”²⁴ One of Bunyan's themes is the capacity of the church to endure, another the way God answers suffering with comfort. He construes the golden vessels of Solomon's house as two cups signifying the extremes of Christian experience. The woman drinks from “the cup of blood, of fury, of trembling, and of astonishment” but also from the sweet cup of consolation and salvation.²⁵ Bunyan quotes at great length from a letter printed by Foxe in which the Italian martyr Pomponius Algerius, burned in Rome in 1555, insists that the “cold winter” of prison is to him “a fresh spring-time in the Lord” and recounts a vision in which he sees the martyrs, horribly mutilated in ways he details, cured of their wounds and alive in heaven.²⁶ The letter gives exuberant expression to one of the favorite themes of Foxe's martyrs, the capacity to find spiritual joy in physical affliction (“O how delectable is this death to me!”). Bunyan describes Pomponius Algerius as “in the church in the wilderness” when he wrote the letter, drinking of both the bitter cup and the sweet.

In his unfinished commentary on Genesis, Bunyan traced the lineage of persecutors from Cain. With his descendants, Nimrod in particular, Cain represents the cruelty of tyrants and their rage against the church, stirred up by Satan. Bunyan stresses that God will hear the cries of the victims for vengeance: “O the cries of blood are strong cries, they are cries that reach to heaven.”²⁷ The flood becomes for Bunyan “a type of those afflictions and persecutions that attend the church,” the ark a type of the remnant gathered together by God and preserved from the “rage and fury of the deluge.”²⁸ The subsiding of the flood, dried by wind that is a type of the “breath of the Lord's mouth” that slays the wicked, offers a dramatic demonstration of the power of God to deliver the righteous. Bunyan consistently emphasizes the survival of the church, through persecutions that will “kill and crucify” some. Seth replaces Abel, “a living saint … to maintain that truth which but now his brother bled for.”²⁹

It was in Of Antichrist and His Ruin that Bunyan offered his most sustained commentary on the historical drama of persecution and deliverance. As in The Holy City, he mingled the apocalyptic visions of Scripture with detail from Foxe's account of the progress of the true church. Bunyan saw the “lying legends, and false miracles” of medieval saints' lives that Foxe sought to expose as kept alive “in the body of Antichrist, which is the church and synagogue of Satan.” His case against Antichrist (whose works are seen as including “unscriptural councils,” outrages committed upon the bodies of the saints to promote “blasphemous rites and ceremonies,” and Constantine's introduction of riches into the church) depends heavily upon Foxe.³⁰ Bunyan celebrates the Marian martyrs and praises Henry VIII, Edward, and Elizabeth for their victories in the war against Antichrist.³¹ Yet the dominant vein of the work is biblical and apocalyptic. Characteristically, Bunyan draws heavily upon the Old Testament, the experiences of David and those of the Israelites in Egypt, and, especially, in the Babylonian captivity. Daniel is a critical book for him. He invokes two symbols of persecution that recur in his work, “the burning fiery furnace, and the den of lions”; as they supported the “horrible” religion of the Babylonians, “so popish edicts are the support of the religion of Antichrist now.”³² Bunyan calls up the imagery of Revelation to represent Antichrist, and the whore of Babylon drunk on the blood of saints and martyrs, and that of Thessalonians (2 Thess. 2:7-8) to assure his readers that the Lord shall “consume him with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy him with the brightness of his coming.”³³ Yet while Bunyan proclaims his confidence that Antichrist will be destroyed, and exults in Revelation's prophecies of the destruction of Babylon, he focuses upon the present suffering of the church, seen as in the last stages of the reign of Antichrist.

As he does elsewhere, Bunyan justifies suffering for truth as ordained by God. Antichrist came into the world, he argues, that the church “might be tried, and made white by suffering under his tyranny, and by bearing witness against his falsehoods.” Saints overcome by suffering, “when they are imprisoned, banished, and killed for their faithful testimony.”³⁴ Bunyan's principal strategy for dealing with suffering in this work, however, is to read the worsening afflictions of the church in the early 1680s as signs of the coming ruin of Antichrist, improvising upon Revelation. Thus “when God's church is absolutely forlorn, and has no hiding place any longer in the world,” Antichrist will begin to fall. When Babylon has become the “habitation of devils,” a place of “implacable madness of spirit,” then the desert will blossom.³⁵ Bunyan found the best example of the truth that deliverance follows the darkest time in the slaying and resurrection of the two witnesses of Revelation 11. He understands these witnesses “mystically,” as referring to the “succession of good men” who form the continuing church, and their death as signifying the damage done the spirit of Christianity, so that there will for a time scarcely be found “a true visible church of Christ in the world.”³⁶ Bunyan took hope from the biblical pattern of deliverance from apparent disaster; David triumphed over Saul soon after the destruction of his refuge of Ziklag. In Of Antichrist and His Ruin Bunyan imagined deliverance coming through the Spirit of God working in magistrates and especially in protestant kings. Like the kings of the Medes and Persians who broke the Babylonian yoke of the Israelites, they would destroy the power of Antichrist, which he identified with the penal laws under which the Nonconformists were persecuted.³⁷ Yet this remains a generalized hope, located in an indefinite future and divorced from any suggestion of political action by the oppressed. Bunyan consistently urges patient suffering and obedience to kings and magistrates. In Of Antichrist and His Ruin he distances himself from those who plotted against the government, among them some of his acquaintances:

I do confess myself one of the old-fashion professors, that covet to “fear God, and honour the king.” I also am for. … praying for them that despitefully use me, and persecute me.³⁸

In the preface to this work he urges “quietness and patience” under affliction; Christians should not try to “work their deliverance” but leave this to the disposition of God.³⁹ In his later works Bunyan renders persecutors and their actions with a biblical harshness, but he explicitly discourages resistance to civil authority, focusing instead on the necessity and value of suffering.⁴⁰ The frame of mind he cultivates in his audience is that of the martyr who patiently accepts what is done to him: “suffer with Abel, until your righteous blood be spilt.”⁴¹

Bunyan's emphasis on passive suffering is striking, particularly in his later works. He could value bold speaking in defense of scriptural truth but interprets Scripture, in Seasonable Counsel, as requiring that one suffer in a “holy, humble, meek manner” (30). Even allowing for the influence of censorship, which may explain why a work such as Of Antichrist and His Ruin was not published in his lifetime, one must conclude that Bunyan's commitment to patient endurance of persecution was deeply rooted. Foxe, publishing his work in Elizabethan England with the approval of state and church, was much more inclined to praise boldness in the martyrs whose stories he told. Their aggressiveness in denouncing the false doctrine and corrupt practices of their examiners mattered at least as much to him as their capacity for patient suffering.

Bunyan's rendering of his own experience in Grace Abounding and A Relation of the Imprisonment, both prison works, shows him writing about persecution and suffering in ways that he had learned in part from Foxe. The preface to Grace Abounding takes the form of a pastoral letter that recalls the prison letters of the Marian martyrs. As Felicity Heal has observed, Bunyan begins with a Pauline salutation (“Children, grace be with you, Amen”) and establishes his situation (“I being taken from you in presence”) and his pastoral concern in language that echoes Paul's.⁴² One might add that Bunyan also proceeds, Pauline fashion, from greeting to thanksgiving (“I thank God upon every remembrance of you”) and offers his own version of a Pauline benediction: “God be merciful to you, and grant that you be not slothful to go in to possess the land.” His preface is rich in the affective language characteristic of the Pauline epistle. Bunyan speaks as spiritual father to his “children,” drawing those to whom he has ministered into a particularly intimate sense of community in the Word.

Bunyan's use of Paul's experience as an analogue for his own is a striking feature of Grace Abounding as a whole and one of the ways in which it recalls the writings of those, like Foxe's protomartyr John Rogers, who described their experience of the Marian persecution.⁴³ Yet one cannot help but be struck by how strongly Bunyan's imagination was gripped by the Old Testament. In the preface he invokes not only Paul but Samson and Moses and David, who recurs in the body of the work (with Job) as an example of the kind of spiritual wrestling in which Bunyan was engaged. The central figure of the preface is that of the “Journeyings” of the Israelites through the wilderness from Egypt to Canaan, the paradigm for the difficult spiritual journey to which Bunyan summons his readers (“The Milk and Honey is beyond this Wilderness” [4]).

Bunyan created his own version of the Pauline epistle in his preface, fashioning a “Scripture language” which he fuses with the concrete experience of his readers (“Have you forgot the Close, the Milk-house. the Stable … where God did visit your Soul?” [3]). He found in the frequent Old Testament references to lions a metaphor for the danger and persecution of his prison existence: “I stick between the Teeth of the Lions in the Wilderness” (1). Bunyan knew David's prayer (“Save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me: Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces” [Ps. 7:1-2]) as well as the New Testament characterization of the devil as walking about “as a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). The metaphor enabled him to suggest both inner and outer afflictions, both the assaults of fears and temptations and the oppression of those responsible for his imprisonment, and also, by a startling inversion, the good that could come of such afflictions. Bunyan represents himself as finding honey in the carcass of the lion, like Samson, and sharing it with his readers.⁴⁴ He speaks in the preface as from “the Lions Dens,” but he speaks with the assurance of someone who knows that God will deliver those, like Daniel, of sufficient faith. The lions remain, but they have lost their terrors for him, and he suggests that they can for his readers as well if they will only remember “the very beginnings of Grace with their Souls.”

In the narrative of Grace Abounding Bunyan takes his readers into a world in which the terrors of doubt and despair frequently appear overmastering. His spiritual anguish seems unbearably intense because he renders it in bodily terms, as excruciating physical torment. Bunyan represents himself “as tortured on a Rack for whole dayes together” (42) when he believes that he has yielded to the temptation to “sell Christ.” Elsewhere he describes himself as “racked upon the wheel” (46) and “tore and rent in heavy case, for many days together” (45) by the thought that he has lost grace. Bunyan imagines himself suffering tortures of the sort he associated with martyrdom, but without the deeply grounded faith and the sense of divine support that would enable him to endure them. At one despairing moment he says: “If now I should have burned at a stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me. Alas, I could neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him” (26). The irony is that even the most extreme suffering he can imagine has no meaning without the assurance of grace. Christ should stand between his soul and “the flame of devouring fire” (55), Bunyan writes, but instead has turned “lyon and Destroyer” (56).⁴⁵

Bunyan eventually overcomes his sense of alienation, of course, and in his newly strengthened faith can visualize himself in heaven by Christ, now understood as his “Righteousness and Life” (73). He imagines his deliverance from spiritual torment as a release from figurative bondage: “Now did my chains fall off my Legs indeed; I was loosed from my affliction and irons, my temptations also fled away” (72). Yet one of the chief consequences of this deliverance is an ability to accept the fact of his actual imprisonment. He was “cast into Prison,” Bunyan says, “to confirm the Truth by way of Suffering, as I was before in testifying of it according to the Scriptures, in a way of Preaching” (86). Before, Bunyan felt helpless under debilitating mental torment, a form of suffering that only seemed to confirm the horrors of damnation; in prison, he embraces suffering as part of God's design for him and a way of witnessing to the truth. New texts press upon him, urging prayer that he might be strengthened “unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness” (97),⁴⁶ and promising “Blessed are ye … when men shall revile you, and persecute you” (93).⁴⁷

Bunyan's acceptance and apparent understanding of suffering offers the most telling evidence that he has found the assurance reflected in the preface. His fears that his sentence of banishment will be carried out are real enough for him to imagine himself miserably abandoned by Christ in exile (“at last it may be to die in a ditch like a poor forlorn and desolate sheep” [99]), but he controls them by recollecting the sufferings of the heroes of faith of Hebrews 11 and Paul's courage in going to Jerusalem knowing “that bonds and afflictions abide me” (99). Bunyan's imaginings in periods of despair are haunted by thoughts of death. When he tries at one point to hold onto a consoling thought, he feels himself “driven with force beyond it, like a man that is going to the place of execution, even by that place where he would fain creep in, and hide himself, but may not” (50). This imagined scene conveys a real sense of terror, like that other one in which Bunyan sees himself judged by the elders of the city of refuge while he stands trembling at the gate “with the avenger of blood at my heels” (66). Yet Bunyan's attitude toward death undergoes a remarkable transformation as he works through fears of execution so vivid that he imagines himself “on the Ladder, with the Rope about my neck” (100).

Bunyan's worst fear is that he will play his part on this stage badly, with tottering knees and a pale face, thus betraying his lack of the constant faith that sustained the martyrs with whom he instinctively identifies. The thought that his last words would offer a splendid opportunity for a sermon to a transfixed multitude offers some consolation, but the real transformation comes with his sudden resolve to “stand to” God's Word whether he experiences the comfort he craves or not. This takes the form of his famous declaration that if God “doth not come in”:

I will leap off the Ladder even blindfold into Eternitie, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy Name

(101).

This leap, so strongly imagined that it seems real, turns Bunyan from fearful victim into decisive actor on God's stage, witnessing to his faith with a startling and irrevocable physical act.

Bunyan the narrator (and preacher) presents this “trial” as another episode in his spiritual education, offering his readers a “use” of his experience: “I am comforted everie time I think of it, and I hope I shall bless God for ever for the teaching I have had by it” (101). Yet the leap itself is the true climax of his narrative. Through it Bunyan acts out a martyr's death in his imagination, demonstrating the strength of his faith in the boldest, most public fashion conceivable to him. The way he imagines martyrdom here is strikingly different from anything he could have found in Foxe, who represents martyrs as able to hold still in the flames (or to raise their arms in gestures of faith) because they are assured of divine support and of the reward that awaits them. Bunyan created a new version of the drama of martyrdom with his blindfold leap into eternity, unsure of whether Christ would be there to catch him yet certain of his resolution to “venture all for God” (99). It is an electrifying moment, of a kind that seems wholly appropriate to an emotionally charged narrative in which Bunyan so often feels his spiritual condition in physical terms.

Bunyan shows that he could “play a part for God in the World” on another kind of stage in A Relation of the Imprisonment, a series of five letters to the Bedford congregation evidently written between 1660 and 1662 but not published until 1765.⁴⁸ He describes the events from his arrest for preaching in Lower Samsell in November of 1660 to his unsuccessful effort to appear at the Assizes in January of 1662 in terms that recall the accounts of examinations for heresy that he knew from Foxe.⁴⁹ Bunyan contended with civil rather than with religious authorities, over the right to preach rather than over such doctrinal issues as transubstantiation, but the confrontation he represented strongly resembles those recorded by Foxe's protestant martyrs who reported their examinations for heresy. Like them, Bunyan reconstructed dialogue from memory and added framing commentary that characterized the struggle as one between God and the enemies of truth (the devil's “vassals”), unfolding according to God's will: “Let the rage and malice of man be never so great, they can do no more, nor go no farther than God permits them” (113). The outlines of the drama Bunyan presents are familiar from Foxe: a solitary hero of faith taking his stand upon the Word, examiners who become progressively more annoyed and hostile as their sensible arguments are rejected, an impasse resolved only by an act of judgment. Bunyan faced prison rather than the stake, with the threat of banishment if he did not submit, but he played his role as if he were choosing martyrdom. Like the protomartyr John Rogers, he continued to preach despite the danger of arrest, conscious that he was setting an important precedent at the beginning of a time of persecution. He shows himself dismissing the advice of a friend to cancel the meeting at which he is subsequently arrested, arguing that if he flees he might make others “afraid to stand,” and declaring his willingness “to suffer upon so good an account” (106). Bunyan saw his imprisonment as a form of witnessing, praying that it might be “an awakening to the saints in the country” (113). When the Clerk of the Peace (Paul Cobb) comes to him in prison to urge him to submit after he has served the twelve weeks to which he was sentenced at the Quarter Sessions, Bunyan cites Paul and Christ and declares that rather than act against his conscience he is “willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me” (125).

We see Bunyan consciously acting the role of martyr here, as earlier when he asserts that he will stand to the truth “to the last drop of my blood” (112). By embracing suffering, in his case indefinite imprisonment and the possibility of banishment, he dramatizes his faith and provides a compelling example for a congregation whose will to resist pressures to conform he hoped to strengthen. Another way of doing this was to establish a sense of divine presence, of the sort that one typically finds in accounts of Foxe's martyrs. Biblical texts come to him in the course of arguments (“God brought that word into my mind” [115]), suggesting that the Holy Spirit is tutoring him. When he returns to prison after his friends make an abortive attempt to gain his release, he asserts that “I did meet my God sweetly in the prison again, comforting and satisfying of me that it was his will and mind that I should be there” (113). After being sentenced at the Quarter Sessions, he finds his heart “sweetly refreshed” by his examination and claims that “his [Christ's] peace no man can take from us” (119). Such insistence upon the sweetness of experiences one would expect to be bitter, like the rejoicing in suffering that one finds so frequently in Foxe, spoke to the fears of those less strong in their resolve than Bunyan.

Bunyan gave the events surrounding his jailing the appearance of a classic confrontation between persecutors and potential martyr and at the same time recorded the kind of detail that grounds it in the social and political realities of the Bedfordshire of the early 1660s. His antagonists treat him as a “breaker of the peace” who must be ruled if public order is to be maintained, using the Elizabethan Conventicle Act of 1593 to silence him.⁵⁰ Their repeated insistence that he follow his calling of tinker comes across as a form of social intimidation. At the examination following his arrest both Justice Wingate and his friend Mr. Foster chide Bunyan for not following his calling, and Foster dismisses those he gathers for worship as “none but a company of poor simple ignorant people” (111). Bunyan is consistently put down when he claims to be called to preach as well as to practice his trade. When he tries to justify himself by appealing to Scripture at the Quarter Sessions (“As every man hath received the gift, even so let him minister the same unto another” [117]), Justice Kelynge treats the text as referring to Bunyan's “gift” of tinkering. Kelynge had previously dismissed Bunyan's talk of having the “presence of God among us” at the proscribed meetings as “canting.” He is willing to argue Scripture with Bunyan to a point but becomes increasingly overbearing and abrupt, finally cutting off Bunyan's praise of his meetings by imposing sentence.

In reconstructing his series of encounters with authority Bunyan showed a dramatist's eye for telling exchanges. One cannot know exactly how much shaping he did, but it is clear that his reporting was selective. He describes Kelynge as asking where he had his authority, “with many other such like words” (117), and says of his dialogue with Paul Cobb in prison: “We had much other discourse, which I cannot well remember” (123). His secondhand account of his wife Elizabeth's appeal to judges Hales and Twisdon at the Midsummer Assizes of 1661, “the which I took from her own Mouth” (125), draws out the drama of the encounter. The sympathetic Hales receives her petition “very mildly” while the consistently hostile Twisdon, responding to a petition thrown into his coach, “snapt her up, and angrily told her that I was a convicted person, and could not be released, unless I would promise to speak no more, &c” (126). Bunyan represents his wife as coming to the chamber to make her plea “with a bashed face, and a trembling heart” (126), then shows her repeatedly challenging the court despite intimidating comments by Chester and Twisdon (“she thought he would have struck her”) and rising to a moment of great dignity when she picks up on a comment that Bunyan is a tinker: “Yes, said she, and because he is a Tinker, and a poor man; therefore he is despised, and cannot have justice” (128).⁵¹ Bunyan concludes the account on a note of pathos, with his wife weeping when she sees that no arguments will work.

Bunyan was writing for his congregation, making a record of his own and his wife's confrontations with “the adversaries of God's truth” for their edification. Like many of Foxe's martyrs, and others in the mid-seventeenth century who reconstructed their examinations or trials, he was preserving acts of witnessing by recording them for an intended godly audience (“The Lord make these profitable to all that shall read or hear them”). The Bunyan that we see in A Relation of the Imprisonment appears less aggressive in contending with authority than some of Foxe's heroes or than his contemporary George Fox, more patient than contentious under examination, but unwilling to compromise his determination to continue preaching. He praises Paul Cobb for his “civil and meek discoursing” (104) yet remains unmoved, recalling Foxe's account of Wicklif's counsel not to be dissuaded from preaching by threats of excommunication and insisting that he will be judged by the Scriptures, and by the “church of God” as expressed in Scripture. The self-portrait that Bunyan creates reveals a patient, composed defender of the Word, unshaken by the persuasion or the threats of those determined to put him back in his social place and ready to “lie down” and suffer what he imagines as a martyr's fate.

Recent commentary on The Pilgrim's Progress has had much to say about the subjectivity of the “way” Bunyan's pilgrims travel, the sense in which their faith or lack of faith determines whether they are in the way or not and where they are along it. Or whether they can be said to progress at all.⁵² My interest here is in Bunyan's perception of the way as one that necessarily entails suffering, as a way of the cross, and in the implications of this perception for the dramatic development of the work.⁵³ In The Heavenly Footman Bunyan elaborated on what was to become the central metaphor of The Pilgrim's Progress in expounding his text, “So Run, that ye may Obtain” (1 Cor. 9:24). In the course of trying to arouse the “slothful and careless people” he addresses in the epistle, he insists that “there is no Man that goeth to Heaven but he must go by the Cross.”⁵⁴ The cross is the traveler's “standing way-mark,” a sign of the “tribulation” and “Persecution” inevitably suffered by the godly.⁵⁵ In arguing the need for perseverance, Bunyan imagines an immensely long and wearying journey, “with Briers and Quagmires and other incumbrances,”⁵⁶ a projection of ordinary experiences of the road colored by Isaiah's description of the wilderness. Then he takes his readers into a different kind of imagined world, one of persecution met by heroic endurance:

The Saints of old, they being willing and resolved for Heaven, what could stop them? Could Fire and Faggot:, Sword or Halter, stinking Dungeon, Whips, Bears, Bulls, Lions, cruel Rackings, Stoning, Starving, Nakedness, &c.⁵⁷

Bunyan cites Hebrews 11, but the torments he evokes owe as much to Foxe as to the Bible. He presents a composite image of martyrdom, here and in another passage in which he moves from the afflictions “run through” by Paul to win the “prize” to the horrific torments of the early Christian martyrs whose stories Foxe had found in Eusebius:

It [the prize] made others endure to be Stoned, Sawn asunder, to have their eyes bored out with Augers, their Bodies broiled on Gridirons, their Tongues cut out of their mouths, boiled in Cauldrons, thrown to the wild Beasts, burned at the Stakes, whippt at Posts, and a thousand other fearful Torments.⁵⁸

Bunyan's readers were in no danger of being thrown to wild beasts, or even of being burned at the stake, but by using the martyrologist's shock tactic of cataloguing grotesque abuses of the flesh he might hope to spur them to lesser acts of endurance. He complains that “There are but few when they come at the Cross, cry Welcome Cross, as some of the Martyrs did to the Stake they were Burn'd at.”⁵⁹ If he could bring his readers to identify with the role of martyr, to the point of being prepared to embrace suffering, he might hope to persuade them to abandon the “shifts and starting-holes” (“I have Married a Wife, I have a Farm, I shall offend my Landlord”)⁶⁰ by which they avoided his call to the demanding journey he described. His object was to help them find the “Will, and Courage” to undertake it.

Christian makes renunciations of the sort Bunyan urged in The Heavenly Footman when he heeds the warning to “Fly from the wrath to come” (10), but he only gradually understands what kinds of suffering his pilgrimage will involve. In The Pilgrim's Progress the way leads early to a natural hazard that metamorphoses into a psychological one, as the quagmire Bunyan imagined in The Heavenly Footman becomes the Slough of Despond, and moves by stages to the episode that epitomizes the kind of persecution Bunyan evoked in the earlier work, the martyrdom of Faithful in Vanity Fair. In describing heaven to Pliable at the outset of his journey Christian shows what seems a precocious awareness of the persecution experienced by the faithful. It is as though he has been reading Foxe on the early martyrs:

There we shall see Men that by the World were cut in pieces, burnt in flames, eaten of Beasts, drownded in the Seas, for the love they bare to the Lord of the place; all well, and cloathed with Immortality, as with a Garment.⁶¹

This is the kind of lurid imagining that Bunyan indulged in The Heavenly Footman, here associated with a particular state of mind appropriate to the pilgrim. The comment serves to place Christian in the long line of sufferers for truth, yet it also reveals how little he understands about the actual form his own trials will take. When Worldly Wiseman conjures up a vision of the ordeals of the way (“Wearisomeness, Painfulness, Hunger, Perils, Nakedness, Sword, Lions, Dragons, Darkness; and in a word, death” ([18]), Christian appears to shake off the threat (“methinks I care not what I meet with in the way, so be I can also meet with deliverance from my burden”) but in fact yields quickly to the appeal of an easier way that will avoid the dangers. Evangelist has to step in to tell him that he must “abhor” Worldly Wiseman's “labouring to render the Cross odious to thee” (22). The episode teaches an important lesson early, that the way of the cross is the only true way. To take sensible advice about how to avoid danger and suffering is to set one's feet on the way to destruction.

The lions of Hill Difficulty suggest the kind of danger Bunyan associated with the way of the cross. Lions recur in his work as a symbol of the potential violence of persecution, and some of his most powerful images of the physical torments of martyrdom play on the fear of dismemberment by wild beasts. Mistrust's story of fleeing the lions triggers Christian's dread of being caught by them as they range for their prey in the night: “how should I escape being by them torn in pieces?” (45). He trembles with fear as he walks between the roaring lions, assured by the Porter of Palace Beautiful that they are chained. This straightforward “trial of faith” tests Christian's courage and his trust in divine protection.⁶² His success in overcoming the danger takes him beyond the state of mind in which he was susceptible to Worldly Wiseman's cautions.

The episode is the first of a number that demonstrate the need for the pilgrim, like the martyr, to conquer the fear of death. Christian's continuing vulnerability to this fear, which takes the form of “a great darkness and horror” (157) when he enters the river at the end of his journey, is one of the chief sources of the drama of Part I. As a Christian soldier primed for battle, he quickly masters fear in his fight with Apollyon, although he needs the help of the grace that enables him to recover his sword and deliver the decisive scriptural thrust. Christian thanks God for having delivered him “out of the mouth of the Lion” (60), in his case a persecuting tyrant turned into a monstrous embodiment of demonic power. He learns that he can resist Apollyon's “hellish” rage to destroy only by trusting in the promises of the Word. The texts that Christian cites were classic justifications of suffering and martyrdom as means to victory, particularly Romans 8:37 (“Nay, in all these things we are more then Conquerors, through him that loved us” [60]).⁶³

A disorienting fear of death is the central danger of the Valley of the Shadow, which Bunyan represents as a “very solitary place” where hellish sights and sounds threaten Christian's psychological balance. The first image of the Valley we get comes from those who have turned back, telling Christian of hobgoblins and dragons and “a continual howling and yelling, as of a People under unutterable misery; who there sat bound in affliction and Irons” (62). Such suffering terrifies because it is without apparent meaning or limit, unlike suffering endured in imitation of Christ or Paul and in hope of a crown of glory. This evocation of suffering contributes to the sense of confusion and disorder that hangs over the place. The human voices, if that is what they are, blend into the phantasmagoric scene in which Christian soon finds himself, beset by “hideous noises,” reaching flames, and an approaching company of fiends. He can dispel the terrors and keep to the way, Bunyan shows, only by praying and reciting Scripture that affirms God's power to bring light out of darkness. The actual return of light reveals, at the end of the Valley, the victims of the long history of persecution by Pope and Pagan: “blood, bones, ashes, and mangled bodies of men, even of Pilgrims that had gone this way formerly” (65). By introducing this image of martyrdom Bunyan links the persecutions of Roman empire and Roman church with the demonic forces of the Valley and at the same time suggests that they have lost their threat. Pagan is dead and Pope a grinning old man in a cave. What is missing here is any sense of the victory of individual martyrs and the regeneration of the church through their deaths. Bunyan supplies this in the episode of Faithful's martyrdom.

Evangelist's preparation of Christian and Faithful for their experience in Vanity Fair provides the strongest statement in The Pilgrim's Progress of the relationship between pilgrimage and suffering. Bunyan boldly raises the stakes with this episode. Christian and Faithful have come through trials, for which Evangelist praises them, but they have not “resisted unto blood” (86); they must now “run” for the incorruptible crown. Evangelist's warnings distill the Pauline message about the inevitability of suffering for the faithful, echoing Acts: “you must through many tribulations enter into the Kingdom of Heaven,” “in every City, bonds and afflictions abide in you” (86).⁶⁴ His predictions that one or both of them must seal their testimony with blood echoes the formulation of John Rogers and other Marian martyrs. The promise he holds out is the one that sustained all Christian martyrs: “be you faithful unto death, and the King will give you a Crown of life” (Rev. 2:10).

Bunyan's Vanity Fair was shaped by his knowledge of legal proceedings, and no doubt by his experience of the commercial hubbub of the annual Stourbridge fair, but it has a universality that makes one feel that it could be one of Paul's cities of “bonds and afflictions.”⁶⁵ The reception of Christian and Faithful suggests the world of primitive Christianity as well as that of contemporary Bedfordshire, with its hostility of the establishment to sectarians whose behavior appeared to challenge civil as well as religious order. They meet with mockery and reproaches (like Christ or Paul), a generalized examination at which their strangeness is the central issue, imprisonment, and beating. Bunyan shows them suffering abuse, including the indignity of being displayed in chains, with a Christlike “meekness and patience.” Like Bunyan himself in A Relation of the Imprisonment, they seem prepared to “lie down” and suffer whatever is to be done to them.

The trial of Faithful loosely follows contemporary court practice and builds upon a tradition of personifying vices that Bunyan is likely to have known from Richard Bernard's The Isle of Man.⁶⁶ Bunyan delighted in the possibilities for satire that allegorical naming afforded, here and in the trials of the Diabolonians and of the Doubters in The Holy War. Lord Hategood exemplifies both the injustice and the class bias of the court and would have reminded readers of such implacable enemies of Dissent as Judge Jeffreys. Pickthank, witnessing against Faithful for having “bespattered most of the Gentry of the Town” (95), could be one of the informers who harried Nonconformists. Yet if Bunyan used the trial scene to expose the persecution he knew firsthand, he avoided the kind of detail that would have limited it to a particular historical moment. Individual characters may be sharply realized, as Pickthank is, but the indictment is atypically general, charging the prisoners with causing “Commotions” in the town and winning others to “dangerous Opinions”; the judge commends the severity of Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, all regarded as notorious persecutors, in his charge to the jury; the only crime mentioned by the jury is heresy, and the penalty they demand is “the most cruel death that could be invented” (97).⁶⁷ The trappings of the court are those of Bunyan's day, but the attitudes could be those of persecutors in virtually any time. In defending himself against the accusations of the witnesses, Faithful displays “bold” speaking and a defiant stance of a sort that one could find in Foxe's heroes, or early Christian martyrs brought before Roman proconsuls, or the apostles themselves:

And as to the King you talk of; since he is Beelzebub, the Enemy of our Lord, I defie him and all his Angels.

(93)

Bunyan gives the episode a mythic character, making it embody central elements of a drama that originated with the primitive church and assimilating contemporary persecution of Nonconformists to this larger drama.

Bunyan's stylized treatment of Faithful's execution turns him into an idealized figure exemplifying the martyr's constant faith under torment in all ages of the church.⁶⁸ The cruelties that Bunyan shows him suffering invite comparison with Christ and the apostles, including Stephen, and with the host of protestants who were burned:

First they Scourged him, Then they Buffetted him, then they Lanced his flesh with Knives; after that they stoned him with Stones, then prickt him with their Swords, and last of all they burned him to Ashes at the Stake.

(97)

By having the chariot carry Faithful immediately to heaven, Bunyan transforms the scene into an emblem of the martyr's victory and reward. Christian plays martyrologist, memorializing Faithful with his song and demonstrating his new understanding of the fundamental Christian paradox that one dies to live:

Sing, Faithful, sing; and let thy name survive; For though they kill'd thee thou art yet alive.

(98)

The sudden appearance of Hopeful shows another way that Faithful lives and symbolically enacts the belief that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church: “Thus one died to make Testimony to the Truth, and another rises out of his Ashes to be a Companion with Christian.”

Bunyan's narrative reaches a preliminary climax with the death of Faithful. Evangelist's warnings and exhortations point to this experience, which reveals the injustice and cruelty of persecution and the exemplary suffering of a protestant saint as nothing else in The Pilgrim's Progress does. Yet Bunyan was too interested in other kinds of trials, and in the longer journey that represented the continuing struggles of a more representative life, to let Christian take Faithful's shortcut to the New Jerusalem. The most significant of the remaining trials, Doubting Castle, shows another face of the persecution that the Christian could expect to encounter and effectively renders the psychology of despair.⁶⁹ The episode demonstrates that Christian remains vulnerable to doubt and can lose the way at any point, as critics have noted, but it also represents the prison experiences common to many Nonconformists and, with a few differences, to the Marian martyrs whose prison ordeals were reported by Foxe. The “dark Dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirit of these two men” (114) and the treatment of Christian and Hopeful by the giant suggest the worst of these experiences. Prisoners often had to endure an overwhelming stench, the darkness of confinement in the dungeon of the prison, even beatings and periods of being deprived of food.⁷⁰ The “continual howling and yelling” of the Valley of the Shadow that Christian hears as that of a people who “sat bound in afflictions and Irons” (62) offers a nightmarish vision of such prison experience, reduced to an inarticulate howl of despair.

Bunyan may have gotten the idea for the giant and his castle from folktales or chap-book romances,⁷¹ but he made him a caricature of the more tyrannical and abusive jailers in the prison experience of Nonconformists. His giant displays the rage and violence of the stock persecutor, not only beating the pilgrims but threatening to tear them in pieces. Hopeful encourages Christian by recalling the memory of his courage under persecution before: “Remember how thou playedst the man at Vanity Fair, and wast neither afraid of the Chain nor Cage; nor yet of bloody Death” (117). Doubting Castle calls for a similar exercise of courage and faith. Bunyan's powerful images of physical suffering suggest the force of the assault upon spiritual health Nonconformists could expect in prison and teach the lesson that faith is the only stay against despair.

Christian and Hopeful make their miraculous escape with the key of promise, as Christian is saved once more by the recollection of Scripture, when the reality for many Nonconformists was indefinite imprisonment, often ending in death from the fever or plague to which those in crowded, unsanitary prisons were especially susceptible. The experience of Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair, along with other ordeals, enabled Bunyan to evoke suffering of a variety of kinds, all of which contribute to the sense of the extreme difficulty of the pilgrim's journey through the world's wilderness. One important effect of this suffering is to intensify the joys of Beulah and the New Jerusalem. When Christian and Hopeful ask what they must do in the New Jerusalem, the Shining Ones respond that they must receive comfort for their toil and “joy for all your sorrow”:⁷²

You must reap what you have sown, even the fruit of all your Prayers and Tears, and sufferings for the King by the way.

(159)

The sufferings “by the way” form one of the major themes of The Pilgrim's Progress. By giving them meaning and making visible the rewards they would earn, Bunyan appealed strongly to the experiences and the yearnings of his immediate audience.

If the sufferings of Part II of The Pilgrim's Progress are less dramatic than those of Part I, they still lie at the heart of the journey. Christiana's angelic summoner tells her that “The Bitter is before the sweet” (180) and that she must endure “Troubles,” as did Christian. She leaves the Interpreter's House resolved, as she and her family sing, “To take my Cross up day by day, / And serve the Lord with fear” (209). Part II offers a different kind of education in suffering, focused on the collective experience of persecution. At one point Interpreter leads Christiana and her family into the slaughterhouse to watch a sheep patiently accepting death: “You must learn of the Sheep, to suffer: And to put up wrongs without murmurings and complaints” (202). The passage, which echoes Paul's characterization of Christians as “sheep for the slaughter” (Rom. 8:36), could be read as an unconscious revelation of Bunyan's attitude toward women; Christiana is taught to be a sheep, her husband to be a Christian soldier.⁷³ In Seasonable Counsel and elsewhere Bunyan makes it clear that all Christians should be prepared to suffer patiently, but the lesson is particularly appropriate to Part II, given Bunyan's emphasis on the life of the suffering church. Christiana herself, who recalls the woman in the wilderness of Revelation, bears much of the burden of this emphasis.

The trials faced by Christiana and her growing company of fellow pilgrims have less to do with the terrors and uncertainties of the individual Christian than those of Part I and more to do with the experience of the church in a threatening environment. In the Valley of the Shadow Christiana thinks of Christian in the same place, “all alone in the night” (242). Her comment is prompted by sensations of the sort he experienced and by similar, if less intense, fears, but Christiana can share her experience with Mercy and be comforted by the reassurance of Great-heart. The presence of Great-heart, offering protection as well as guidance in the Valley of the Shadow and at critical points in the journey, reflects Bunyan's growing interest in the role of the Nonconformist pastor in nurturing a spiritual community, one that he had come to play with great energy himself. Great-heart comments more than once upon the folly of setting out on a pilgrimage without a guide. The pilgrims learn to recognize their dependence upon him and the importance of participating in the life of the Christian community.⁷⁴

The appearance of Giant Maul at the end of the Valley of the Shadow, where Christian had encountered the ineffectual figure of Pope, suggests the revival of fears of Rome after the Popish Plot, as do the forays of the “devouring” monster from the woods outside Vanity Fair, described in the language of Revelation.⁷⁵ Great-heart's defeat of both typifies the role he plays as defender of the faithful and illustrates the extraordinary power with which Bunyan invests that role. The shift from Evangelist to Great-heart implies a new role for the Nonconformist pastor as heroic protector of the flock. The giant fights of Part II reflect the renewed persecution of Nonconformists in the early 1680s and Bunyan's confidence in the ability of the true church to withstand this with the help of strong spiritual guidance. The lions of Hill Difficulty represent a greater threat of persecution than in Part I because backed by Grim (Bloody-man).⁷⁶ His usurpation of “the Kings High-way,” together with the comment that the way had become grassy with disuse, suggests the effectiveness of penal laws that restricted Nonconformist worship. Yet Great-heart, as idealized minister to the threatened flock, responds in the fashion of a romance hero, killing the giant and clearing the way. The women tremble as they pass but as in the Valley of the Shadow and other places of peril appear to suffer less than Christian at comparable stages of his journey.

Great-heart's ferocity, here and in similar encounters, suggests the vigor of Bunyan's confidence that God will deliver the faithful from the “power of Satan” and also the strong desire to see God's vengeance on persecutors that surfaces frequently in his work. Great-heart tells the cannibalistic Slay-good, who threatens the King's highway in the neighborhood of Vanity Fair, that he has come “To revenge the Blood of Pilgrims” (267) and does so by cutting off his head and displaying it as a “Terror” to those who might try to imitate him, as he subsequently displays the head of Giant Despair on a pole by the side of the highway. Such incidents constitute Bunyan's dramatic equivalent of Foxe's accounts of God's terrible judgments upon persecutors. They suggest a similar need to demonstrate that those who suffer for truth will be vindicated.

The giants of Part II have an analogue in the army of Bloodmen in The Holy War, published two years earlier in 1682. The Bloodmen, with their fury against the town of Mansoul, embody the history of persecution as well as contemporary attacks upon Nonconformists.⁷⁷ Their captains include Cain, Esau, and the Pope, whose “Scutcheon was the stake, the flame, and the good man in it” (229). In their ferocity the Bloodmen are like mastiffs ready to “fasten upon” anyone, “upon father, mother, brother, sister, Prince, or Governour, yea, upon the Prince of Princes” (230). They are captured and bound over for the “great and general Assizes” (234) of the Last Judgment, as if to suggest that their sins are too consequential to be dealt with at a local trial.

Diabolus himself takes on some of the attributes of a persecutor. He rules Mansoul tyrannically and after being displaced by Emmanuel battles to recover the town with “Hellish rage,” unleashing Captain Cruel and Captain Torment, among others. Bunyan expresses the ravages of his army of Doubters in terms of physical abuse, showing them making “great havock,” dashing children to pieces, and raping women. They so wound Conscience, “and his wounds so festered, that he could have no ease day and night, but lay as if continually upon a rack” (205). The captains of Emmanuel, having retreated into the castle at the center of Mansoul, play the role of the persecuted church in the “barren wilderness” that the town has come to resemble.

In the subsequent trial and punishment of the Doubters, after Diabolus has withdrawn once more from Mansoul, Bunyan reversed the injustice done Faithful in Vanity Fair by means of a similar if more elaborate kind of allegorical courtroom drama. The device of the trial of the enemies of faith, for which he could have found precedent in Bernard's Isle of Man and Richard Overton's The Araignement of Mr. Persecution, enabled him to take a symbolic revenge for the abuses of the legal system under which Nonconformists suffered. He provided a counterpoint to Faithful's martyrdom by showing the convicted Doubters, like the Diabolonians earlier, crucified for their offenses. One, Election-doubter, parodies Faithful's act by declaring that he will “die a martyr” for his “Religion” (240). One can explain the harshness of the punishments as reflecting Bunyan's conviction that one must suppress ruthlessly those worldly impulses that threaten faith, yet the scenes themselves convey a shockingly fierce sense of exultation in the defeat of satanic power.⁷⁸ Bunyan shows Lord Wilbewill relentlessly hunting down and punishing the followers of Diabolus. One is sentenced “to be first set in the Pillory, then to be whipt by all the children and servants in Mansoul, and then to be hanged till he was dead” (243); others are described as dying in prison. In such scenes Bunyan visited the fate of the persecuted upon the persecutors in an ironic reversal of roles, enacting the divine vengeance in which he needed to believe. Great-heart's decisive acts in Part II of The Pilgrim's Progress express a similar confidence that the persecuting power will be defeated, in this case through the leadership of the pastor acting as an instrument of God.

Christiana and her company can endure their trials and keep to the way because they learn to follow Great-heart and because they draw strength from each other and from the communities of Christians that they encounter in their journey. In Part II Bunyan evoked the ideal that stands behind all such holy communities, the primitive church, particularly in the experience of the pilgrims at the Inn of Gaius and in the house of Mr. Mnason at Vanity Fair. Gaius and Mnason exemplify the charity of the primitive church with their hospitality and encouragement. Honest greets the pilgrims with the “holy Kiss of Charity” (248) urged by Paul.⁷⁹ In their sojourns with both Gaius and Mnason the pilgrims become part of vital communities practicing a simple Christianity, nurtured by communal feasting and pious discourse. These communities play a role comparable to that of the scattered churches of Acts, as centers of faith in a predominantly hostile world. The pilgrims' dangerous journey through this world recalls the journeys of Paul in Acts, although they do not share his evangelical and pastoral mission.

Gaius draws Christiana and her children, through Christian, into the larger “Family” of those who “have stood all Tryals for the sake of the Truth” (260). Christian's “Relations,” as celebrated by Gaius, include martyred apostles (Stephen, James, Peter and Paul) and early Christian martyrs (from Foxe's redaction of Eusebius):

There was Ignatius, who was cast to the Lyons, Romanus, whose Flesh was cut by pieces from his Bones; and Policarp, that played the man in the Fire.

(260)

By naming these “men of great Virtue and Courage,” and their torments, Gaius establishes a heroic ideal for Christian's sons and the other pilgrims to emulate.

The examples of Christian and Faithful provide a more immediate stimulus to the pilgrims and a link with the heroic past. In Part II both take on the character of protestant saints. Great-heart points out the signs of Christian's battle with Apollyon: Christian's blood on the stones, pieces of Apollyon's broken darts, the trampled ground. The inscription on the monument to Christian's victory records how he “so bravely play'd the Man. / He made the Fiend to fly” (240). As they leave Vanity Fair, the pilgrims linger at the place where Faithful was martyred:

There therefore they made a stand, and thanked him that enabled him to bear his Cross so well, and the rather, because they now found that they had a benefit by such manly suffering as his was.

(279)

Bunyan does not create shrines, or relics, or invest these sites with the potentia associated with medieval saints, but he makes them quasi-sacred places that invite meditation upon two essential attributes of the pilgrim: the heroic resistance to evil illustrated by Christian, and Faithful's “manly suffering.”

By recalling such acts, and those of more distant exemplars such as Stephen or Polycarp, the pilgrims can learn to see themselves as part of the “Family” of the faithful who constitute the true, universal church. In the less demanding environment of Part II, they are not called upon to demonstrate heroism on the scale of Christian's or Faithful's. Apollyon is gone, and there are no more burnings in Vanity Fair. Only Stand-fast, praised by Great-heart in words that echo Evangelist's for having “resisted unto Blood, striving against Sin” (291), seems to belong to Christian's world. The best illustration of the kind of heroism appropriate to the pilgrims of Part II, and of the kind of community they become, can be found in the series of death scenes with which the work concludes. The deaths of Christiana, Standfast, and others of their generation are natural ones, acts of holy dying that seem a fit conclusion to lives that have become increasingly holy in the course of their pilgrimage. The manner of those who are summoned is disarmingly natural, particularly that of Christiana: “however the Weather is in my Journey, I shall have time enough when I come there to sit down and rest me, and dry me” (305). Yet the scenes themselves are highly stylized.⁸⁰ Those who cross the river receive a divine summons validated by a token (usually a verse from Ecclesiastes), make bequests, and speak last words to the attending community of friends. In fact, Bunyan's pilgrims imitate the pattern of courageous and holy dying established by Foxe's martyrs and take on some of their heroic qualities, with the key difference that these qualities have become attributes of Christians living out normal lives in a world perceived to be hostile.⁸¹

Foxe's martyrs usually receive a summons, give away possessions, offer parting advice in the form of letters, and speak a few last words at the stake. Some make arrangements for their families, as do Christiana and Stand-fast. Foxe shows most of them ready for their summons, some eager for it. They typically conquer the terrors of death by such actions as kissing the stake and continuing to pray aloud amid the flames. The calmness of Bunyan's pilgrims reflects this tradition. Stand-fast in particular suggests the martyrs' habit of reassuring the faithful as he speaks from the river of death: “This River has been a Terror to many. … But now methinks I stand easie” (310). Christiana's parting advice, including the admonition to Mr. Valiant-for-Truth to “be Faithful unto Death, and my King will give you a Crown of Life” (305), recalls the letters of the Marian martyrs. Her brief exhortations catch the characteristic tone of these letters: “Be ye watchful, and cast away Fear; be sober, and hope to the End” (306). Foxe reports George Marsh writing “a certain godly Friend”: “Only tarry ye the Lord's leisure; be strong; let your heart be of good comfort; and wait ye still for the Lord” (7.67). The last words of Foxe's martyrs, usually in the form of a cry to God, offered a pattern that Bunyan imitated. Where Foxe reports Ridley as saying “Lord, Lord, receive my spirit” (7.550), Bunyan has Stand-fast exclaim “Take me, for I come unto thee” (311). Bunyan elsewhere quotes the early Christian martyr Julitta, from Foxe, as saying “Fare-well life, Welcome Death.”⁸² In Part II Mr. Despondency varies the formula: “Farewell Night, welcome Day” (308). Mr. Ready-to-Halt (“Welcome Life” [307]) echoes Foxe's Laurence Saunders.⁸³

Foxe's stories of the Marian martyrs offered the most compelling evidence outside the Bible of individual acts of faith and courage and of the strength of a holy community in a period of persecution. His death scenes, with their realistic dialogue and abundant detail, provided Bunyan with a model of Christians, artisans as well as preachers and bishops, conquering death by submitting patiently to it. Bunyan offered only a glimpse of the pilgrims being welcomed to the New Jerusalem in Part II, choosing to concentrate on the fully human drama of their leave-takings. This was a kind of drama that Foxe had represented skillfully, although in his case it is intensified by the unnaturalness of the deaths and the pressure of a relentless authority. Bunyan's death scenes, by contrast, convey a remarkable sense of normality. One is struck by the dignity of the leave-takings and by the mingling of natural grief and rejoicing in the reactions of those left behind.

Christiana sets the tone for the concluding scenes with her quiet bravery and her composure. We see her courage earlier, when she meets Grim's challenge by declaring: “Now I am Risen a Mother in Israel” (219). She seems to be trying out a new identity at this point, without fully recognizing that she needs Great-heart to remove Grim from the way. In her final scene, she speaks out of a deeper faith and an assured sense of her role in the Christian community. Bunyan presents her summons as unavoidably sharp yet seemingly benign and providential in its working; her token is “An Arrow with a Point sharpened with Love, let easily into her Heart, which by degrees wrought so effectually with her, that at the time appointed she must be gone” (305). The bitter dissolves into the sweet. If Bunyan gives her an easier passage than he does Christian, who briefly experiences the “Terror” to which Stand-fast refers, he endows her with a commanding dignity and authority. In meeting her final trial, Christiana displays a new kind of heroism, stimulated by the examples of Christian and other predecessors in the way but tempered by the needs of the community. She sets the example for the others, paying homage to the strong (Valiant-for-truth, Stand-fast, and Honest) and exhorting the weak (Ready-to-Halt, Dispondencie, Feeble-Mind). At the end, she usurps the pastoral role of Great-heart, who fades in importance at the close of Bunyan's narrative. The other significant role goes to Stand-fast, who shows how the fear of death can be conquered and in his farewell speech from the river voices the sense of triumph and anticipation of any pilgrim at the end of the journey. The two roles complement each other. Christiana leads the way and shows her solicitude for the spiritual health of the community she leaves behind; Bunyan associates her, through her children and their families, with the continuity of the church (“I heard one say, that they were yet alive, and so would be for the increase of the Church in that Place where they were for a time” [311]). Stand-fast, here and earlier a surrogate for Christian, makes the climactic exit and points to the joys of the New Jerusalem.⁸⁴

The conclusions of both parts of The Pilgrim's Progress show the sufferings and uncertainties of the way replaced by the victorious and lasting joys of the New Jerusalem. We see the bitter yielding to the sweet in the lives of successful pilgrims. In Part II, especially, Bunyan found a convincing way of rendering the persecution and of anticipating the eventual triumph of the suffering church, a theme that engaged him in many of the works of the 1680s. One can find numerous signs of Foxe's continuing influence in this period, twenty years and more after Bunyan read the Acts and Monuments in prison, particularly in his conception of the history of the church and his sense of martyrdom as embodying the essence of the Christian experience. The conclusion of Part II, the most interesting evidence of this influence, illustrates how Bunyan could transmute Foxe's very human drama of martyrdom into his own powerful vision of the holy community in the presence of death.

Notes

1. John Brown, John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, rev. ed., F. M. Harrison (London, 1928), 154. W. R. Owens, ed., Grace Abounding (London, 1987), 126n., attributes the comment to the anonymous author of An Account of the Life and Death of Mr. John Bunyan, published in 1700. A copy of the three-volume 1641 edition of the Acts and Monuments thought to be Bunyan's is in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

2. Roger Sharrock, ed., The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan (Oxford, 1979), 3:98.

3. Ibid., 383-384.

4. George Offor, ed., The Works of John Bunyan (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1859), 2:45.

5. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, vol. 9 ed. by Richard L. Greaves, 9:345.

6. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, vol. 10 ed. by Owen C. Watkins (Oxford, 1988), 10:22, 81.

7. See Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution: 1660-1688 (Cambridge, 1957), especially chap. 1. In his introduction to vol. 10 of Misc. Works, Owen Watkins describes persecution of Nonconformists and debate about toleration in the early 1680s as background to Seasonable Counsel.

8. Offor, ed., Works, 1:531.

9. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, 10:95.

10. His text is 1 Peter 4:19: “Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.”

11. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, vol. 6 ed. by Graham Midgley (Oxford, 1980), 6:86.

12. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, vol. 3 ed. by Sears McGee (Oxford, 1987), 3:210.

13. Ibid., 210.

14. Misc. Works, 6:47.

15. See Owen Watkins's discussion of Bunyan's view of persecution in Seasonable Counsel. Misc. Works, 10:xxi-xxvii. Richard Greaves has placed Seasonable Counsel in the context of widespread Nonconformist praise of suffering. See “Bunyan and the Ethic of Suffering,” in Anne Laurence, W.R. Owens, and Stuart Sim, eds., John Bunyan and His England, 1628-88 (London, 1990), 63-76. Bunyan would have encountered traditional arguments justifying suffering in a continuation of Foxe's Acts and Monuments printed with the 1641 edition. This begins with A Treatise of Afflictions and Persecutions of the Faithfull, which describes persecution as inevitable, to be borne patiently, profitable, and even pleasant. Bunyan would of course have regarded all such arguments as grounded in the New Testament, characterized by Barrie White as “a textbook for martyrs, the product of a martyr community.” See “John Bunyan and the Context of Persecution, 1660-88,” John Bunyan and His England, 51-62.

16. A Holy Life, Misc. Works, 9:290.

17. Offor, ed., Works, 1:727.

18. Ibid., 725. Bunyan is commenting on Ps. 12:6: “The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.”

19. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, 3:79.

20. Ibid. See Sears McGee's discussion of The Holy City in relation to protestant commentary on Revelation. Ibid., xxxii-xlv.

21. Isa. 35:7-9; Jer. 51:34-39. Jeremiah compares Nebuchadnezzar with a dragon (Jer. 51:34).

22. Bunyan uses the same imagery from Isaiah in Of Antichrist and his Ruin. See Offor, ed., Works, 2:63-64.

23. See McGee, in Sharrock, Misc. Works, xxxviii-xxxix.

24. Offor, Works, 3:519.

25. Ibid., 529. Bunyan combines the “cup of consolation” of Jer. 16:7 and the “cup of salvation” of Ps. 116:13.

26. Ibid., 530.

27. On The First Ten Chapters of Genesis. Offor, ed., Works, 2:447.

28. Ibid., 473, 468.

29. Ibid., 475, 483, 454.

30. Offor, ed., Works, 2:51, 76-78.

31. Ibid., 45, 50.

32. Ibid., 50.

33. Ibid., 47.

34. Ibid., 46, 65.

35. Ibid., 60, 62-63. W. R. Owens discusses Of Antichrist, especially Bunyan's refusal to specify a time for the millennium and his loyalty to the crown, in “‘Antichrist must be Pulled Down’: Bunyan and the Millennium,” John Bunyan and His England, 77-94.

36. Ibid., 65-66.

37. Ibid., 50, 72-74.

38. Ibid., 74. Christopher Hill, looking for signs that Bunyan intended to urge political resistance, finds this statement ambiguous and sees other comments urging obedience as reflecting a fear of censorship. See A Tinker and a Poor Man, 328-330.

39. Ibid., 44.

40. On Bunyan's political passivity in the period, see Owen Watkins, in Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, 10:xix-xx; Richard Greaves, in Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, 9:xxiii-xxiv. See also Greaves, “John Bunyan and the Fifth Monarchists,” Albion 13 (1981):83-95, and “The Spirit and the Sword: Bunyan and the Stuart State,” Robert G. Collmer, ed., Bunyan in Our Time (Kent, Ohio, and London, 1989). In the latter Greaves discusses Bunyan's sense of the necessity of righteous suffering, as expressed in Seasonable Counsel and elsewhere, in the context of an exploration of his commitment to the principle of Christian obedience of rulers.

41. An Exposition of the First Ten Chapters of Genesis. Offor, ed., Works, 2:451.

42. Felicity Heal, “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: John Bunyan's Pauline Epistle,” Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 147-160. See also Margaret Olofson Thickstun, “The Preface to Bunyan's Grace Abounding as Pauline Epistle,” Notes and Queries 230 (1985): 180-182. Roger Pooley suggests that Bunyan uses metaphor in the preface as “the code of the persecuted.” See “Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self,” in John Bunyan and His England, 105-114. Roger Sharrock, ed., Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (Oxford, 1962), 1. All quotations from Grace Abounding and A Relation of the Imprisonment are taken from this edition.

43. See Dayton Haskin, “Bunyan, Luther, and the Struggle with Belatedness in Grace Abounding,” University of Toronto Quarterly 50 (1981): 300-313, for a discussion of Bunyan's use of Pauline patterns, as mediated by Luther's commentary on Galatians, to represent his spiritual experience.

44. The Treatise of Affictions printed with the 1641 edition of the Acts and Monuments cites Samson's experience as showing how God extracts “sweets” from the “tartest troubles.” See sig. B2.

45. Bunyan cites Revelation 6, which describes the “wrath of the Lamb” but makes no reference to lions.

46. Col. 1:11.

47. Matt. 5:11.

48. See Roger Sharrock, “The Origins of A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan,” Review of English Studies, new ser., 10 (1959): 250-256, and Sharrock, ed., Grace Abounding, xxii-xxvi. Sharrock discusses the circumstances surrounding the eventual publication of the work and speculates that it originated in letters from Bunyan to his congregation.

49. The five letters deal with Bunyan's examination by the magistrate who sent him to prison to await trial, Francis Wingate; his trial at the Quarter Sessions, presided over by Justice Kelynge; his discourse in prison with the Clerk of the Peace, Paul Cobb; his wife's appearance before the Assizes in his behalf; his unsuccessful efforts to have himself brought before the next Assizes.

50. Christopher Hill comments on the political context of Bunyan's arrest and trial. See A Tinker and a Poor Man (New York, 1989), 105-109. See also the introduction and notes to A Relation in W. R. Owens, ed., John Bunyan: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (London, 1987). Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 44-45, sees the manner of Bunyan's examination as typical of the way dissenters were treated in the period.

51. See Hill, 229.

52. See, among others, U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven, 1966), 106, 117, and passim; Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), chap. 4; John R. Knott, The Sword of the Spirit, chap. 6; Vincent Newey, “Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind,” and Philip Edwards, “The Journey in The Pilgrim's Progress,” both in Vincent Newey, ed., The Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views (Liverpool and Totowa, N.J., 1980).

53. The story of Christian's journey through the world's wilderness, with its attendant fears and afflictions, had a special resonance for readers in colonial America. In the verses with which he prefaced the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan boasted that the first part was received in New England with “loving countenance.” David Smith's study of Bunyan's works in America reveals that Grace Abounding was reprinted more than The Pilgrim's Progress before the nineteenth century and that The Holy War was also popular; at least twenty different works by Bunyan were reprinted between 1681 and 1830. See Smith, “Publication of John Bunyan's Works in America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 16 (1962): 630-631. David Hall comments on the appetite for works evoking the fate of sinners such as Bunyan's A Few Sighs from Hell, published in Boston in 1708. See Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 56. Smith sees Puritan faith in the millennium as one reason for what he characterizes as an “Immediate and sustained colonial interest in Bunyan's works.” John Bunyan in America (Bloomington, 1966), 4-5.

54. Sharrock, ed., Misc. Works, 5:159.

55. Ibid. Bunyan quotes from Acts 14:22 and 2 Tim. 3:12.

56. Ibid., 161.

57. Ibid., 164.

58. Ibid., 167. This catalogue of torments draws upon those that Pomponius Algerius describes in the letter that Bunyan quotes from Foxe. See Offor, ed., Works, 3:530.

59. Ibid., 162.

60. Ibid., 165.

61. J.B. Wharey and Roger Sharrock, eds., The Pilgrim's Progress, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1960), 14. Quotations from The Pilgrim's Progress are taken from this edition.

62. Sharrock, The Pilgrim's Progress, 320n. and 321n., sees the lions as representing civil and ecclesiastical persecution; he takes the fact that they are chained as pointing to a time when enforcement of the penal laws against Nonconformists was relaxed. Whatever topical allusions Bunyan may have intended, the chains function as a dramatic device that makes Christian's trial possible and as a reminder of God's power to restrain evil.

63. See the two preceding verses, Rom. 8:35-36: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

64. Acts 14:22; 20:23 (Paul says “abide me”).

65. See Sharrock, The Pilgrim's Progress, 327n., for a description of the Stourbridge fair.

66. Roger Sharrock, “The Trial of Vices in Puritan Fiction,” Baptist Quarterly 14 (1951):3-12, traces the morality tradition to which Bunyan's fictionalized trial scenes belong and compares his management of allegorical characters with Bernard's.

67. C.E. Dugdale, “Bunyan's Court Scenes,” Studies in English 5 (1941): 64-78, sees Faithful's trial as skeletal by comparison with the trials of The Holy War, in which standard courtroom procedure is more fully represented, and takes it as pointing to Roman Catholic persecution of protestant martyrs rather than to current oppression of Dissenters.

68. For a differing view of Faithful's trial and execution, see Brean S. Hammond, “The Pilgrim's Progress: Satire and Social Comment,” in Newey, ed., The Pilgrim's Progress, 120-122. In this collection, see also Newey's “Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind,” 29-30. Roger Pooley argues the influence of Foxe, and Hebrews 11, on Bunyan's rendering of the execution. See “Plain and Simple: Bunyan and Style,” in N. H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus (Oxford, 1988), 106-107. Sharrock, The Pilgrim's Progress, 328n., also notes the influence of Foxe. For a discussion of the influence of Acts and the example of Stephen on this episode, see Dayton Haskin, “Bunyan's Scriptural Acts,” in Collmer, ed., Bunyan in Our Time, 83-85.

69. John Stachniewski characterizes The Pilgrim's Progress as “exorcising persecutory fears” and sees Christian as impelled in his pilgrimage by a “terror of the inauthenticity of elect experience.” See The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford, 1991), 207ff.

70. See Cragg, Puritanism, chap. 4, passim.

71. See Harold Golder, “Bunyan's Giant Despair,” Journal of English and German Philology 30 (1931): passim; Sharrock, John Bunyan, 85; Nick Shrimpton, “Bunyan's Military Metaphor,” Newey, ed., The Pilgrim's Progress, 205-224.

72. See John 16:20 (“your sorrow shall be turned into joy”) and Hebrews 12:11 (“chastening. … yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby”).

73. For discussion of Bunyan's patriarchal sense of woman's subordinate role and its implications for Part II, see Margaret Olofson Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine (Ithaca, 1988), and N.H. Keeble, “‘Here is her Glory, even to be under Him’: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan,” in John Bunyan and His England, 131-147. I differ from both these critics in seeing Christiana as rising above whatever vulnerability and dependency she displays to embody a convincing dignity and heroism by the end of Part II.

74. See my “Bunyan and the Holy Community,” Studies in Philology 80 (1983): 200-225, for an extended discussion of the role of the church in Part II of The Pilgrim's Progress. I have adapted this article in portions of my discussion of Part II.

75. See Hill, A Tinker and A Poor Man, 200, 217-218.

76. Sharrock, The Pilgrim's Progress, 344n., takes Grim to represent “the evil power which puts into effect the penal laws against Nonconformists” and cites the persecutions of 1681-1684 as explaining the fact that the way is “almost all grown over with Grass.”

77. See Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man, 247. Sharrock and Forrest take the episode of the Bloodmen as referring to the persecution of Nonconformists after the Restoration and also to the forces of Antichrist in the last days. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest, eds., The Holy War (Oxford, 1980), xxxii, 275n. Quotations from The Holy War are taken from this edition.

78. Dugdale, “Bunyan's Court Scenes,” 73ff., defends the punishments as Bunyan's representations of “the struggles of an elect soul against religious errors and fleshly lusts” (p. 74).

79. Rom. 16:16.

80. See Sharrock, John Bunyan, 152-153. Sharrock notes the formulaic character of the scenes.

81. Sir Charles Firth noticed Foxe's influence in the farewell speeches of the pilgrims, although he did not develop the point. See Essays Historical and Literary (Oxford, 1938), 138.

82. In Come, and Welcome, to Jesus Christ. Misc. Works, 8:384.

83. I owe this parallel to Roger Pooley, “Plain and Simple: Bunyan and Style,” 107.

84. For a different reading of the ending see Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine, 103-104.