SOURCE: Greaves, Richard. “Conscience, Liberty, and the Spirit: Bunyan and Nonconformity.” In John Bunyan and English Nonconformity, pp. 51-70. London: The Hambledon Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Greaves examines Bunyan's decision to pursue the path of nonconformity following the Restoration, noting that an important consideration in making this choice was his determination to continue preaching.]

‘I was caught in my present practice and cast into Prison’, and thus commenced ‘a long and tedious Imprisonment, that thereby I might be frighted from my Service for Christ, and the World terrified, and made afraid to hear me Preach’.¹ Bunyan's candid reflection on his decision to pursue the path of Nonconformity and the consequences of that resolution underscores the relative rapidity with which the determination was made. Unlike ministers ejected in August 1662, Bunyan had little time to ponder the ecclesiological tenets that he would subsequently adduce to justify the separatist way. Those principles were first seriously worked out in his writings only in 1671-72, in A Confession of My Faith, and a Reason of My Practice, though a synopsis appeared as early as 1665 in A Holy City. Faced with the initial outbreak of persecution that followed the election of the Convention in April 1660 and the return of Charles II in May, Bunyan knew only that conformity would terminate his preaching and force him to worship according to the structured patterns in the Book of Common Prayer. Unwilling to accept either of these conditions, he consciously chose the path of passive resistance, virtually insisting on a confrontation: ‘Had I been minded to have played the coward, I could have escaped’.²

Of the two considerations that persuaded Bunyan not to conform, the more important was his determination to continue preaching. ‘To preach Gods word, it is so good a work, that we shall be well rewarded, if we suffer for that’.³ The primary goal of his ministry at this time was not the edification of the faithful but the propagation of the Gospel in ‘the darkest places in the Countrey, even amongst those people that were furthest off of profession’.⁴ In this he was a true disciple of the sectarian tradition, as reflected in the 1650s, for example, in the concerted efforts of the Independents and Baptists in particular to preach in the ‘dark corners’ of the land.⁵ Bunyan's hortatory goal was a combination of burning personal conviction and missionary fervour. The man who preached ‘as if an Angel of God had stood by at my back to encourage me’ found that he inclined ‘most after awakening and converting Work’.⁶ Conformity would abruptly terminate this preaching, a prospect Bunyan could not accept, given what he believed was the unmistakable evidence that God had blessed his efforts. In fact, he enjoyed so much success in these early years that he constantly battled to curtail feelings of pride.⁷ Bunyan's insistence on his right to preach led to his arrest at Lower Samsell, Bedfordshire, on 12 November 1660.

During the first year and a half of his imprisonment Bunyan enjoyed sufficient freedom to continue his ‘wonted course of preaching’, exhorting the saints to be steadfast in their faith and ‘to take heed that they touched not the Common Prayer, &c. but to mind the word of God’.⁸ Here, then, was the second principle upon which his Nonconformity was grounded, namely the refusal to worship according to the formal liturgy prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer. His sermons on this theme during his periods of liberty prior to April 1662 became the basis for one of his earliest prison works, I Will Pray with the Spirit, the first edition of which probably appeared in 1662. Taking as his text 1 Corinthians 14:15, he defined true prayer as ‘a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ, in the strength and assistance of the holy Spirit, for such things as God hath promised, or, according to the Word, for the good of the Church, with submission, in Faith, to the Will of God’.⁹ Because the enlightening work of the Spirit was the essential basis of true prayer, the Book of Common Prayer, which Bunyan deemed nothing more than a patchwork quilt of human inventions, was judged valueless. He went so far as to argue that Scripture expressly forbade its use, and that those who mandated its employment were akin to the Marian bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, ‘that blood-red Persecutor’.¹⁰ Bunyan clearly regarded the refusal of the ‘godly’ to accept the Book of Common Prayer as a fundamental basis of Nonconformity. ‘Look into the Goals in England’, he wrote around 1662, ‘and into the Alehouses of the same: and I believe, you will find those that plead for the Spirit of Prayer in the Goal, and them that look after the Form of mens Inventions only, in the Alehouse’.¹¹

When Bunyan was arrested in 1660, the magistrates were apparently interested only in his insistence on his right to preach, but when he appeared before Sir John Keeling and other justices at the quarter sessions in January 1661, both of the principles that had led him into Nonconformity were challenged. When Keeling pressed Bunyan to explain why he refused to attend services in a parish church, the latter retorted that the Word of God did not command worship according to the Book of Common Prayer, which ‘was made by other men, and not by the motions of the Holy Ghost, within our Hearts’.¹² Unable to shake Bunyan's conviction of the necessity of Spirit-prompted extempore prayer, the justices shifted the interrogation to the authority by which he claimed the right to preach. Bunyan retorted with references to 1 Peter 4:10-11 and Acts 18, insisting that all who were the recipients of the Spirit-endowed gift of exhortation had the right to preach.¹³ In short, Bunyan's principal justification for Nonconformity was his insistence that the ultimate authority in religious matters was the working of the Holy Spirit through the Bible and in the believer as distinct from the claims of the state to govern religious behaviour. Like Martin Luther, whose commentary on Galatians had been a powerful influence in his conversion, Bunyan rested his case on the sanctity of the conscience duly enlightened by the Spirit. This intensely personal approach to Nonconformity was the hallmark of his first six years in prison.

Not until the eve of his release from the Bedford county gaol in 1672 did Bunyan offer a written exposition of his concept of the church as the communion of visible saints. At root these ecclesiological principles had been worked out well before 1660,¹⁴ subsequent to which they continued to provide the foundation for most of the Nonconformist churches. Even the Presbyterians, once they had been permanently ousted from the state church, embraced these ideals in practice. The true church, for Bunyan, was a fellowship of believers separated from the carnal world and gathered in freedom to pursue the holy life. The traditional concept of a parish church was unacceptable because ‘visible Saints by calling’ could associate in ‘Church communion’ only with those who professed faith and holiness, not with the ‘openly prophane’.¹⁵ To ensure the maintenance of a holy community of visible saints required both strict admission requirements and the imposition of discipline to reform wayward members and excommunicate the recalcitrant. A prospective member had to provide a ‘relation’ of personal faith, undergo examination about her or his religious experience and personal conduct, and declare a willingness to be subject to the laws and government of Christ as exercised in the church. The sacrament or ‘ordinance’ of baptism was not a requirement for membership in the Bedford congregation.¹⁶ While this concept of the church was manifestly at odds with the principles embodied in the restored Church of England and would have necessitated the pursuit of Nonconformity, Bunyan did not use the idea of the church as the communion of visible saints, separated from the world by its profession of personal faith and holy life, to justify his repudiation of the established church at the Restoration. More pressing to Bunyan in 1660-61 was the right of those imbued with the gifts of the Holy Spirit to preach and of all the ‘godly’ to pray as the Spirit moved them. Bunyan's crisis at the Restoration was fundamentally personal, not ecclesiological.¹⁷

The period that extended from Bunyan's arrest in 1660 to the publication of Grace Abounding in 1666 was characterized both by a strongly eschatological outlook that culminated with the exposition of millenarian themes in The Holy City in 1665, and by substantial spiritual introspection that ranged from his assertion of the sanctity of the individual conscience to the composition of his spiritual autobiography. Apart from writing Christian Behaviour (1663), a practical guide to social conduct for the faithful, Bunyan devoted these years to predominantly personal concerns that were a direct outgrowth of his incarceration. Particularly after the strictness of his imprisonment increased in April 1662, his ties with the Nonconformist community were sharply curtailed. He engaged in visitation activities on behalf of the Bedford church in September and October 1661, but his name does not appear again until November 1668, though the records for these years are sparse, and in fact blank for the period between March 1664 and October 1668. Nevertheless, Bunyan's name is not mentioned in connection with either the visitation assignments of November 1661 or the selection of Samuel Fenne and John Whiteman as co-pastors in January 1664.¹⁸ Similarly, these years were essentially free of disputes with other Nonconformists. This was a time for Bunyan to ponder his own religious experience, which itself was at the root of the trouble in which he now found himself. He reflected too on God's plan for the future. For Bunyan, what Christopher Hill has called ‘the experience of defeat’¹⁹ was largely framed by these considerations.

Contemplating eschatological themes was a direct outgrowth of the fear of death that troubled Bunyan as he faced imprisonment. His first prison work, Profitable Meditations, reflected on the day of judgment; as yet his eschatological thinking was highly simplistic compared to the more mature Holy City published four years later. In the interval Bunyan clearly did some reading in millenarian literature, at least some of which was replete with citations from the patristics and learned language which he self-consciously lacked.²⁰Profitable Meditations is significant as an indication of Bunyan's early success in overcoming his fear by affirming the ultimate triumph of the saints:

I know, O Death, thou maist my body spoil,
And bring it down: yet I do not thee fear:
For that shall last with thee no longer while,
Than my Jesus in the Clouds appear.(21)

Coupled with the certainty of vindication was an assurance that those who persecuted the saints would receive their due chastisement:

And then he will with Trumpets royal voice
Raise up his Dead, and gather them on high;
Then we shall live who have made Him our choice,
When thou in fiery flames with Hell shalt lie.(22)

The Prison Meditations that appeared two years later reinforced the sense of spiritual well-being that stemmed from the conviction of suffering for a righteous cause. Instead of regretting the sermons that got him into trouble, Bunyan rejoyced that he had preached while he had had the opportunity.²³ Now, he reflected, I

… can with very much content
For my Profession die,

secure in the knowledge that he had a good conscience.²⁴ Gaol had become a school in which ‘we learn to dye’ with the assurance of immortality.²⁵ The intensely personal nature of these poems is repeatedly revealed, and Grace Abounding offers corroboration of the profound spiritual experience which he underwent in these years. Traditionally overlooked because of fascination with the earlier spiritual struggles that dominate most of the autobiography, the rich experience of the early prison years is no less crucial for Bunyan's later success as a minister. The confidence that he attained in the early 1660s was the basis for the exuberance of his subsequent ministry and writing. ‘I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as now; them Scriptures that I saw nothing in before, are made in this place to shine upon me; Jesus Christ also was never more real and apparent then now; here I have seen him and felt him indeed’.²⁶ But Bunyan offers us only a tantalizing glimpse—‘a hint or two’, he says—of what transpired,²⁷ perhaps because the experience was too mystical to be conveyed in words. From the poetic lines of the Prison Meditations we know that out of this experience came a conviction that those of ‘true Valour’ and a ‘high and noble Mind’ will

… conquer when they thus do fall,
They kill when they do dye:
They overcome then most of all,
And get the Victory.(28)

For Bunyan the experience of persecution led in eschatological terms to the assurance that temporal defeat was in fact the means through which the spirit triumphed.

Thus persuaded, Bunyan pursued his millenarian studies for two more years. Although he was not inclined to speculate on a divine timetable for the inauguration of the millennium, others were, and excitement mounted in some Nonconformist circles as 1666 approached. This can only have reinforced Bunyan's predilection to ponder eschatological themes. Indeed, they pervade his 1665 works, including One Thing Is Needful and The Resurrection of the Dead. The former included a dramatic vision of the returning Christ, resplendent in glorious attire, who would condemn persecutors to their own ‘Prison with its locks and bars’.²⁹ In The Holy City Bunyan indicated that Christ would return at the end of the millennium, and interpretation generally espoused by the Fifth Monarchists, to whom Bunyan had perhaps been attracted in the 1650s. The millennium itself, which Bunyan described as a thousand-year period during which the heavenly city—the church—would be constructed, would be instituted when an angel confined the devil to the bottomless pit. Persecution of the church would thereupon cease, the period of tribulation having served its purpose: ‘The Church in the fire of Persecution is like Esther in the perfuming Chamber, but making fit for the presence of the King’.³⁰ Thus in the broad context of the divine schema Bunyan visualized a purpose for the suffering of the Nonconformists. He found some consolation too in his belief that such suffering characterized the age that preceded the millennium, whose institution was seemingly imminent: ‘It is now towards the end of the world’.³¹

As Bunyan explained his personal affliction in the context of millenarianism, he had to grapple with the role of governments and more precisely of monarchs in the divine plan. On the one hand, the Nonconformists obviously suffered because of state persecution, sanctioned by a sovereign who had failed to honour the promise of liberty to tender consciences made at Breda in 1660. Bunyan must have been tempted to castigate Charles as an agent of the Antichrist. On the other hand, the early 1660s in particular saw a recurring pattern of political activity aimed at the overthrow or substantial modification of the regime. Although the number of overt rebellious acts was few, these were years of unrelieved plotting, with the state's efforts to uncover the conspiracies enormously complicated by widespread and often unsubstantiated rumours.

Like numerous other Nonconformists, Bunyan repudiated the first attempt to overturn the Restoration government; it had been launched in London by a band of Fifth Monarchists led by Thomas Venner in January 1661. ‘That practice of theirs, I abhor’, Bunyan insisted, adding that ‘I look upon it as my duty to behave myself under the King's government, both as becomes a man and a christian’.³² His profession not only rings true but accords with the general tendency of Bedfordshire Nonconformists to shun disruptive political action. An examination of the principal centers of plotting in England in the 1660s in relation to areas of Nonconformist strength reveals discontinuity rather than correlation. This suggests that apart from dissidents in the London area (where Nonconformity was strong), the proclivity to radical political activity was greater among Dissenters in areas where they were heavily outnumbered. Radical activity was at least in part a response to feelings of endangerment and insecurity. In Bedfordshire the number of Nonconformists was substantial enough to undermine the government's hopes of crushing them, thereby permitting Dissenters to follow a more moderate course of passive resistance. The Tong plot of 1662, the northern rebellion in 1663, and the 1665 Rathbone conspiracy, for example, did not involve Bedfordshire.³³

In The Holy City Bunyan admonished monarchs for being enamoured with ‘Mistres Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, the Mistris of Witchcrafts’, but he judiciously cast the blame for this on the Great Whore herself. When ‘this Gentlewoman … [is] laid in her grave, and all her fat ones gone down to the sides of the pit; these Kings will change their mind, and fall in love with the true and chaste Matron, and with Christ her Lord’.³⁴ Rather than exhorting his readers to overthrow monarchy, Bunyan tried to teach them that sovereigns would ultimately embrace Christ, even if they were the last ones to do so. This left open the possibility that some would surely perish long before their fellow monarchs turned from their persecutorial ways. In any event, a cosmic struggle would occur before the rulers submitted to Christ: ‘They will be shaking the sharp end of their weapons against the Son of God, continually labouring to keep him out of his Throne, and from having that rule in the Church, and in the World as becomes him who is the head of the body, and over all principality and power’.³⁵ Bunyan sharply tempered this apparent call to arms by insisting that the church is not a rebellious institution bent on destroying either monarchs or their wealth.³⁶ Incarcerated in a Bedford gaol, he perceived the struggle solely in spiritual terms.

Bunyan's own spiritual battles in the 1650s were, in his mind, but a part of the greater cosmic encounter against the forces of the Antichrist. For him to culminate this period of introspection by recounting his own spiritual autobiography in the hope that it might sustain others in their religious life was therefore natural. Of the major themes of the early 1660s, he gave little attention in Grace Abounding to eschatological concerns apart from the immediate fate of his own soul. However, the work not only marks the culmination of Bunyan's introspection and the affirmation of the sanctity of the individual conscience, but redirects his emphases toward the needs of others. The preface commences with a virtual apology for his recent inability to exhort the saints: ‘I being taken from you in presence, and so tied up, … I cannot perform that duty that from God doth lie upon me, to you-ward, for your further edifying and building up in Faith and Holiness’.³⁷ Here, then, was a work unmistakably directed to the needs of those he had converted in the late 1650s and very early 1660s.

The years from 1666 to 1670 are the most obscure in Bunyan's career. The 1664 Conventicle Act expired on 1 March 1669, and though some religious persecution continued in the interval prior to its re-enactment in April 1670, Nonconformists enjoyed a degree of freedom in this period, in part because of legal uncertainty concerning Nonconformity.³⁸ In July 1669, however, a judicial opinion stated that the statutes of 13 Eliz. I, c. 12 and 14 Car. II, c. 4 concerning the qualifications of ministers who preached at religious assemblies were still in force.³⁹ The king thereupon issued a proclamation ordering justices of the peace to enforce these laws.⁴⁰ Bunyan benefitted by the confusion. Although Charles did not formally prorogue Parliament until 1 March 1669, it had last met in August 1668 without renewing the Conventicle Act. The following November Bunyan had sufficient freedom to undertake visitation and admonition responsibilities for the Bedford church. The royal proclamation in July apparently curtailed his activities, but between October 1669 and June 1670 he was again active in the congregation's work.⁴¹ As the magistrates began to enforce the 1670 Conventicle Act, he apparently was more closely confined, for the church records do not mention him again until April 1671. From that time until his formal release in March 1672 he enjoyed considerable liberty and was extensively involved in the congregation's affairs.⁴²

A possible clue to Bunyan's activities in the late 1660s is found in the candid observation of the Bedford church in November 1668 that many of its members had ‘in these troublous times withdrawne themselves from close walking with the Church’, whereas others were ‘guilty of more grosse miscarriages’.⁴³ Bunyan had written Grace Abounding in part to shore up those who wavered, and after its completion he commenced work on a book designed to exhort Nonconformists to persevere in the ‘race’ for heaven. He tailored the thesis of The Heavenly Footman for the conditions of the late 1660s: ‘There are but very few that do obtain that ever-to-be-desired Glory: In so much that many Eminent Professors drop short of a welcom from God into his pleasant place’.⁴⁴ The analogy of the Christian life as a race was an outgrowth of Bunyan's personal experience and the Biblical foundations on which it rested. In his Profitable Meditations he had written:

I am encourag'd in the heav'nly Race,
Because Christ dy'd and spilt his Blood for me.(45)

The Heavenly Footman applied this theme to the conditions of Nonconformity in the late 1660s. Although the work itself was not published until 1698, Bunyan composed it relatively early in his career. He refers to ‘that little time which I have been a Professor’ as well as to two of his earliest works, A Few Sighs from Hell (1658) and The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded (1659).⁴⁶ A reference to those who run ‘a Quaking, … a Ranting; … after the Baptism, … after the Independency: … for Free-will, and … for Presbytery’ suggests the period between the great activity of those sects in the 1650s and Bunyan's concern with sectarian issues beginning in 1671.⁴⁷ The references to Ranters in this book may have been sparked by his recollection in Grace Abounding of his early encounter with these extreme Antinomians.⁴⁸ Allusions to persecution, both past and present, also appear. Bunyan exhorts his readers to bear in mind the punishments inflicted on the saints of old, and he admonishes them not to risk losing an eternal crown for fear of ‘the loss of a few trifles’.⁴⁹ The latter was probably a reference to the penalties imposed by the 1664 Conventicle Act, which included both fines and imprisonment.⁵⁰ The evidence, then, suggests that Bunyan commenced The Heavenly Footman after he completed Grace Abounding.

Before he could finish the new work, Bunyan thought of depicting the race for a heavenly crown in allegorical terms as a pilgrimage.

And thus it was: I writing of the Way
And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day,
Fell suddenly into an Allegory
About their Journey, and the way to Glory.(51)

By the time he returned to The Heavenly Footman, he was already thinking of the Christian life more as a challenging journey than as a race. Although he carried the race motif through to the conclusion, his new perspective is hinted at various times, as in the mixed metaphor of the closing words: ‘Run apace, and hold out to the end. And the Lord give thee a prosperous Journey’.⁵² As Roger Sharrock has argued, ‘the grand central metaphor of The Pilgrim's Progress’—the struggle to reach a goal by traversing arduous terrain—was already present in The Heavenly Footman.⁵³ So too were some of the physical images of the allegory: by-paths, quagmires, leaving friends and neighbours, sin as a burden which one carries, and the need of the runner to ‘go close by’ the cross.⁵⁴

If, then, The Heavenly Footman was begun in 1666 or shortly thereafter, the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress belongs to the same period. Both works reflect the needs of Nonconformists at this time, tempted as they were to drop out of the heavenly race or forsake the pilgrimage because of the threat of persecution. Yet Bunyan claimed he had no intention to publish the allegory, presumably because it seemed somewhat frivolous at a time when persecution was increasing: ‘I did it mine own self to gratifie’.⁵⁵ Nevertheless the conditions facing Nonconformists in the late 1660s provided precisely the milieu that made the theme of a demanding race or a tortuous pilgrimage relevant. So too did the proximity of the completed spiritual autobiography, since The Pilgrim's Progress is in its most basic sense an allegorical depiction of Bunyan's spiritual struggles.

The conditions which Dissenters faced in the late 1660s coupled with internal evidence from the allegory provide the opportunity to date the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress more precisely. Three-fourths of the way through the allegory Bunyan wrote: ‘So I awoke from my Dream. And I slept, and Dreamed again’.⁵⁶ Because there is no artistic or thematic reason for this break, some scholars have argued that the awakening signified the end of his imprisonment in 1672 and his completion of the work as a free man.⁵⁷ More plausibly, however, the break occurred in either the autumn of 1668 or the autumn of 1669, when Bunyan began periods of relative liberty. The initial draft of the first part must have been completed no later than April 1671, when he received considerable freedom, and possibly as early as October 1669. Two further clues in Bunyan's ‘Apology’ for the book support this dating: He wrote it, Bunyan admitted, ‘to divert my self … from worser thoughts’,⁵⁸ a probable reference to his fears of dying in prison. Moreover, his statement that he spent only ‘vacant seasons’⁵⁹ writing the allegory is compatible both with his need to make ‘long Tagg'd laces’ to support his family and with his involvement in the serious problems of the Bedford church beginning in 1668. Bunyan's decision to circulate the work among his friends, the time needed for probable revisions, and his reticence to publish the work account for its appearance only in 1678.⁶⁰

In the period from 1670 to 1675 Bunyan's concerns shifted dramatically. At no other time in his career was he so intensely involved in Nonconformist affairs, particularly those concerning the implementation of an effective organizational structure in Bedfordshire and doctrinal and ecclesiological issues important to Dissenters.

The difficulties experienced by the Bedford church in the late 1660s underscored the need for better organization, especially the designation of more local units—virtually cells—and approved preachers (or ‘teachers’). On Bunyan's forays from prison beginning in late 1668, he had ample opportunity to assess the problems at first hand. As we will see in Chapter 4, while he was still in gaol he had the opportunity to develop an organizational structure with fellow Nonconformists. At least nine men who figured prominently in the organizational plan were in the county gaol with Bunyan at some point between about 1666 and 1672. Subsequent to his appointment as a pastor of the Bedford congregation in January 1672 and his release from the county gaol in March, Bunyan and his colleagues took advantage of the Declaration of Indulgence, issued on 15 March, to apply jointly for licences to preach and for places to meet. In addition to Bedford, the application represented the interests of Nonconformist churches at Keysoe, Cranfield, Stevington, and Newport Pagnell, including twenty-one satellite meetings, twelve of which were connected with the Bedford church. In addition to providing closer supervision of and support for church members, such meticulous organization made it extremely unlikely that the revival of persecution could stamp out Nonconformity in Bedfordshire and the contiguous counties.

The organizational efforts brought to the fore such crucial ecclesiological questions as the requirements for church membership and the role of baptism. About 1671 Bunyan dealt with these issues in A Confession of My Faith, which he published the following year. Amplifying what he had written in The Holy City, he argued, as we have seen, for a church constituted solely of visible saints, without baptism as a condition of membership. Bunyan was thereupon attacked by the General Baptist John Denne in Truth Outweighing Error (1673) and the Particular Baptist Thomas Paul in Some Serious Reflections (1673), which included an epistle by William Kiffin. Bunyan retorted in Differences in Judgment About Water-Baptism, No Bar to Communion (1673), which carried a supportive statement by Henry Jessey, another advocate of open-membership views. In turn the Particular Baptist Henry Danvers repudiated Bunyan in a postscript to his Treatise of Baptism (1673), to which Bunyan replied in Peaceable Principles and True (1674). Meanwhile, Danvers' Treatise sparked an enormous pamphlet war between paedobaptists such as Richard Baxter and Obadiah Wills and Baptists such as John Tombes and Thomas Delaune. Bunyan, however, was not involved in the wider dispute.⁶¹

In practical terms Bunyan's position on baptism and church membership affected his church's relations with London Nonconformists. When Bedford members desired to transfer to a London congregation, the church took special care to recommend a congregation with compatible views. Those which met their standards included the churches of Henry Jessey, George Griffith, Anthony Palmer, George Cokayne, and John Owen.⁶² Of these men, only Jessey considered himself—like Bunyan—to be fundamentally a Baptist. Although Bunyan is rightly regarded as an open-membership Baptist, his closest relations in the Nonconformist community were with the Congregationalists. However, a rupture with the Congregationalist church of Francis Holcroft in Cambridge occurred around 1670 when the Bedford congregation insisted on admitting John Waite of Toft, who had been excommunicated by Holcroft's group.⁶³

While Bunyan was sorting out his relations with other Nonconformists, he became embroiled in a doctrinal controversy with the former Puritan Edward Fowler. Regarded by Bunyan as a man who could, ‘as to religion, turn and twist like an eel on the angle; or rather like the weather-cock that stands on the steeple’, the Latitudinarian Fowler had provoked Bunyan's ire by his book, The Design of Christianity (1671). Its thesis—that Christ's work was intended to reform people's lives and restore the righteousness they once possessed in Adam—repudiated the doctrine of justification solely by the imputed righteousness of Christ. Bunyan asserted his position in A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith (1672), in which he also castigated the Quaker William Penn. Fowler or his curate responded in the vituperative tract, Dirt Wip't Off (1672).⁶⁴ This, the most argumentative phase of Bunyan's career, came to an end with some parting but oblique shots against Fowler and Penn in Light for Them That Sit in Darkness (1675).⁶⁵ These doctrinal controversies left Bunyan convinced of ‘the Accursed Condition of those among the Religious in these Nations whose notions put them far off from Jesus’.⁶⁶

With the passing of the period of bitter doctrinal and ecclesiological disputes in 1675, Bunyan moved into a serener phase of his career in which his dominant concerns were pastoral in nature. His writings in this period reflect the evangelical themes of his ministry. The Strait Gate (1676), an exposition of Matthew 7:13-14, not only recapitulated the theme of The Pilgrim's Progress about the difficulty of attaining heaven but underscored the reorientation of Bunyan's efforts: ‘Now we discourse not about things controverted among the godly, but directly about the saving or damning of the soul’.⁶⁷ In this work he insisted that few would be saved, a theme to which he returned in Saved by Grace (1676), where attention shifted primarily to the elect and the basis of their redemption. Despite the fact that Bunyan thought the number of the elect was relatively small, the warmth of the Gospel message triumphed over the logical implications of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in his most popular sermon, the evangelical Come, & Welcome, to Jesus Christ (1678). His pastoral preoccupations were similarly reflected in the catechism he wrote for the saints, Instruction for the Ignorant (1675). At times reflecting the personal and experiential qualities that are the hallmark of Bunyan's writing, the catechism is unusual in the emphasis it places on self-denial.⁶⁸

Despite the challenges and rewards of the pastoral ministry and opportunities to preach in London to sizeable crowds,⁶⁹ these were not trouble-free years for Bunyan. Undoubtedly jealous of his popularity, Church of England officials prosecuted him. Following the revocation of the 1672 licences to preach early in 1675, a warrant for Bunyan's arrest was issued on 4 March on the grounds that he had illegally preached at a conventicle. What effect this had on him is not known; he may have gone into hiding or been fined and even briefly imprisoned under the terms of the 1670 Conventicle Act. By April the church-wardens had presented his name for refusing to attend the parish church and he was excommunicated. When he refused to appear in the archdeacon's court to answer for his conduct, a writ was issued for his arrest. About December 1676 he again entered prison and remained there until the following June. The renewed persecution appears to have prompted him to dust off the manuscript of The Pilgrim's Progress, perhaps make some final revisions, and submit it to the printer Nathaniel Ponder. It was entered in the Stationers' Register on 22 December.⁷⁰

The most sensational event in England in 1678 was not the publication of The Pilgrim's Progress but the revelations of the Popish Plot. In the climate of fear that ensued, Bunyan—like any good pastor—utilized the concerns of the day as a setting for his religious message. The result, a sermon on Revelation 14:7, was expanded and published as A Treatise of the Fear of God; it contained a particularly scathing attack on hypocrites. The posthumous work Israel's Hope Encouraged probably belongs to this period too, for it refers to the time after the disclosure of the Popish Plot as one when people feared their throats would be cut and their children slaughtered.⁷¹ The time was therefore propitious to ponder the lot of the wicked. Already basking in the success of The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan set about to describe ‘the Life and Death of the Ungodly, and of their travel from this world to Hell’.⁷² The result was The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), a work that must be placed in the historical context of the Popish Plot and the recriminations and concerns which it sparked. Those circumstances were clearly in Bunyan's mind as he wrote: ‘England shakes and totters already, by reason of the burden that Mr. Badman and his Friends have wickedly laid upon it’.⁷³

As Bunyan moved into the 1680s his evangelical, pastoral interests remained strong and are manifested in such publications as The Greatness of the Soul (1682), A Holy Life (1683), and A Discourse upon the Pharisee and the Publicane (1685). A successful author, he confronted not only readers who clamoured for more allegorical works but imitators anxious to exploit his popularity. Out of these circumstances came the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress (1684), with its reflections on Nonconformist life and principles. Echoes of Bunyan's earlier controversies with traditional Baptists such as Danvers, Paul, and Denne are evident. As Roger Sharrock has suggested, the characters of Fearing and Feeble-mind represented persons of tender conscience for whom the open-membership churches were particularly appealing.⁷⁴

Bunyan's trips to London in this period rekindled his old flame for doctrinal controversy. He published his final work in this genre, Questions About the Nature and Perpetuity of the Seventh-Day-Sabbath, in 1685. The principal object of his attack was Francis Bampfield, whose congregation of Seventh-Day Baptists shared Pinners' Hall, Broad Street, with the Congregationalist church of Richard Wavel. Bunyan had preached to Wavel's flock in 1682, and the expanded version of that sermon had been published as The Greatness of the Soul. Although Bampfield himself went to prison in February 1682, his congregation continued to meet and survived his death two years later. Bunyan found sabbatarian views sufficiently objectionable to attack them in his tract. His tone, however, was moderate, befitting his desire that sabbatarian Baptists not ‘take it ill at my hand that I thus freely speak my mind’.⁷⁵

London Nonconformists were likewise the occasion of Bunyan's foray into the seventeenth-century disputes concerning the role of women in religious affairs. Some precedent existed in Baptist circles for women to meet separately for spiritual exercises. The ladies of Thomas Lamb's General Baptist church had done so as early as the 1640s, and in 1645 they convened for lectures on Tuesday afternoons at Bell Alley, Coleman Street. One of those who spoke to them was the infamous sectary Mrs. Attaway, a member of Thomas Lamb's General Baptist congregation in London. In the early 1680s a ‘Mr. K.’ (possibly Benjamin Keach, William Kiffin, Daniel King, or Hanserd Knollys) supported the right of women to meet together for prayer.⁷⁶ When they learned of Bunyan's opposition to this practice and pressed him for his reasons, he responded with A Case of Conscience Resolved (1683). Such meetings, he argued, contravened biblical principles, were unnecessary because there were enough men to convene and direct worship, and were blemishes on the church because they manifested female ‘unruliness’. Women must ‘keep their places’.⁷⁷ The second part of The Pilgrim's Progress, which followed a year later, does not indicate that Bunyan retreated from the traditional role of male superiority, and should not be interpreted as an attempt by Bunyan to place women on a plane equal to that of men.

The most striking change that marks this period of Bunyan's life concerns his political outlook. The bitter struggle to exclude the duke of York from the line of succession, the campaign to remodel the corporations, the renewal of persecution, and the execution in 1681 of Stephen College, a supporter of the earl of Shaftesbury,⁷⁸ boded ill for the Nonconformists. Against this background Bunyan returned to matters of state in The Holy War (1682), a technically sophisticated but not altogether satisfying allegory. The relative obliquity of the allegory was a necessity ordained by the trying political conditions, while the multiple levels of meaning provided Bunyan with an opportunity to address levels of need ranging from the concerns of the individual soul to the endangered Dissenting community. As king of Mansoul, Diabolus clearly was a reminder of Charles II, even as such new burgesses and aldermen as Mr. Atheism and Mr. False Peace were caricatures of the Tory-Anglicans who ruled the land. In contrast, Bunyan's expectations of good governors were reflected in his account of Emanuel's work after he had gained control of Mansoul. Despite the persecution of the early 1680s, Bunyan did not include a call to arms in The Holy War. Instead, in the critical supplement to the allegory, Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers (1684)—a work regularly overlooked by students of Bunyan—he made it clear that in times of persecution the saints could do no more than patiently suffer and pray to God for deliverance from evil rulers. In this tract Bunyan expressed one of his profoundest insights: the necessity for Christians to suffer actively for righteousness by willingly embracing affliction.

The posthumous work Of Antichrist, and His Ruine almost certainly dates from this period, for it espouses the doctrine of Christian suffering enunciated in Seasonable Counsel and deals with some of the same political issues found in The Holy War. Although Bunyan implicitly but forcefully denounced Charles II in the allegory, in Of Antichrist he cautiously expressed loyalty to the king and attributed a special apocalyptic function to monarchs in general. When the Antichrist was overthrown, it would be at the hand of earthly sovereigns divinely ordained for that task. Before this could transpire, Bunyan contended, the church must undergo much severer persecution, even to the point that few visible churches will be left in the world.⁷⁹ Thus the conviction that massive suffering was imminent for the Nonconformists heavily influenced Bunyan's outlook in the early 1680s. Yet as a minister he not only warned of impending persecution but encouraged the godly to remain steadfast in their convictions. Perhaps the quieter tone of the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress was in part an attempt to calm Dissenters in the face of suffering: ‘Be ye watchful, and cast away Fear; be sober, and hope to the End’.⁸⁰

The last phase of Bunyan's career commenced in the summer of 1686 when James II adopted a policy of cooperation with Nonconformists as part of his scheme to provide offices and other opportunities to Catholics. In addition to issuing a Declaration of Indulgence in April 1687, the king determined to remodel the corporations and commissions of the peace, thereby making way for Nonconformists and Catholics and thus undoing the Tory-Anglican dominance Charles had imposed. The story that Bunyan was offered ‘a Place of Publick Trust’⁸¹ cannot be corroborated, but he certainly did not oppose some cooperation with the king, for at least six members of his church accepted positions in the remodelled Bedford Corporation in the spring of 1688.⁸² Bunyan's position vis-a-vis James is consistent with the views expressed in Of Antichrist, and His Ruine about the role of sovereigns in toppling Satan. Bunyan's unfinished commentary on Genesis, on which he was probably at work in these last years, did not espouse tyrannicide but called on the saints to ‘stand their ground’, pray for their rulers, and accept persecution as a divine means to purge the church.⁸³ But Bunyan must have been chary of the general drift of James' policies, for the commentary unmistakably opposes absolute monarchy.⁸⁴

Bunyan's final years were extremely busy because of his preaching and writing. The strongly evangelical emphasis that commenced in earnest in 1675-76 continued without abatement to the end. The publications of these years—such as Good News for the Vilest of Men (1688), The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate (1688), The Water of Life (1688), and The Acceptable Sacrifice (1689)—are of a piece with The Strait Gate and Come, & Welcome. Nor did Bunyan the pastor forget the needs of children, for whom he wrote his emblem collection, A Book for Boys and Girls (1686). This work, suggests Graham Midgley, ‘shows Bunyan at his best and most adventurous as a poet, and expresses more completely the many sides of his personality’.⁸⁵ Bunyan probably compiled it over a period of years and it thus reflects the changing circumstances of his later life.

Bunyan's relations with other Nonconformists in his final years were peaceful. His popularity in London remained high and undoubtedly contributed to the demand for his printed sermons. He preached the posthumously published Desire of the Righteous Granted in 1685 or 1686 to the open-membership congregation of Stephen More in Southwark, and delivered his Last Sermon in John Gammon's church in Boar's Head Yard, off Petticoat Lane. Good News, an invitation to the most immoral persons to convert, may also have been preached in London. Bunyan never retreated from his conviction that baptism must not be a necessary condition of church membership, but in these last years his tone was more conciliatory, perhaps because he was more mature or possibly because he had come to recognize the greater dangers that stemmed from Catholicism and the drift toward an arbitrary monarchy. In his poetic work A Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency and Government of the House of God (1688) he insisted on a reasonable degree of toleration within the church:

For those that have private opinions too
We must make room, or shall the Church undo;
Provided they be such as don't impair
Faith, Holiness, nor with good Conscience jarr.(86)

The sacraments have their symbolic value, but strife abounds when

… Moles are Mountains made, or fault is found,
With every little, trivial, petty thing.(87)

The only requirement for fellowship with the church was ‘a Certificate, To shew thou seest thy self most desolate’.⁸⁸

Here was the core of the Christian life—the experiential basis of faith, without which religious profession was barren and lifeless. For Bunyan this experience of living faith was possible only through the agency of the Holy Spirit. The conviction of the Spirit's inner work—in preaching and in prayer—had initially persuaded him to choose the path of Nonconformity, and the same conviction sustained him throughout his ministry. Although the various periods in Bunyan's career must be distinguished if we are to understand his development and the proper historical context of his works, his belief in the inner working of the Spirit and its implications for the Christian pilgrimage provided a unifying theme for his life as a Nonconformist.

Notes

1. GA, §§ 279, 317.

2. ‘A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan’, ad cal. GA, p. 105.

3. Ibid., pp. 105-106.

4. GA, § 289.

5. See Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), chap. 1.

6. GA, §§ 282, 289.

7. GA, §§ 296-302.

8. ‘Relation’, p. 129.

9. MW, ii, p. 235.

10. MW, ii, pp. 249-50, 253.

11. MW, ii, p. 284.

12. ‘Relation’, pp. 107-12, 114.

13. Ibid., pp. 117-18.

14. See Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1957).

15. MW, iv, p. 154.

16. MW, iv, pp. 160-66. See Richard L. Greaves, John Bunyan (Appleford, Berks., 1969), pp. 136-44.

17. In GA, § 324, Bunyan observes that as he faced imprisonment his major concern was his ability to endure if the incarceration proved to be lengthy and to face death ‘should that be here my portion’.

18. Minutes, pp. 37-39.

19. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York, 1984).

20. MW, iii, p. 71.

21. MW, vi, p. 26, stanza CXXX.

22. MW, vi, p. 26, stanza CXXXI.

23. MW, vi, p. 43, stanza 8.

24. MW, vi, pp. 44-45, stanzas 17, 19.

25. MW, vi, pp. 45, 48, stanzas 24, 45.

26. GA, § 321.

27. GA, § 320.

28. MW, vi, p. 50, stanzas 59, 60, 62.

29. MW, vi, p. 93, stanza 26. The Resurrection of the Dead also had an evangelical purpose; see J. Sears McGee's introduction to MW, iii, pp. xlv-liv.

30. MW, iii, pp. 80-82, 128-29, 139, 169-70.

31. MW, iii, p. 165. The best brief overviews of The Holy City are found in McGee's introduction to MW, iii; and Aileen Macleod Sinton [Ross], ‘Millenarianism in the Works of John Bunyan’ (Ph.D diss., University of Alberta, 1986), chap. 3.

32. ‘Relation’, p. 120.

33. Greaves, DUFE, chaps. 4, 6; Greaves, EUHF, chap. 1.

34. MW, iii, pp. 167, 169.

35. MW, iii, pp. 166-67.

36. MW, iii, pp. 96-97.

37. GA, § 38.

38. PRO SP 29/258/43.

39. PRO SP 29/262/115.

40. Frank Bate, The Declaration of Indulgence 1672: A Study in the Rise of Organised Dissent (London, 1908), pp. 64-65.

41. Minutes, pp. 39-52.

42. Ibid., pp. 67-72.

43. Ibid., p. 39.

44. MW, v, p. 147.

45. MW, vi, p. 9, stanza XXVIII.

46. MW, v, pp. 152, 153, 178.

47. MW, v, p. 152.

48. MW, v, pp. 152, 156; GA, §§ 44-45.

49. MW, v, pp. 164-65, 169-70.

50. See, e.g., Wigfield, pp. 167-71; A True and Impartial Narrative of Some Illegal and Arbitrary Proceedings … in or near the Town of Bedford (London, 1670), pp. 3-9.

51. PP, p. 1.

52. MW, v, p. 178; cf. p. 157: ‘Take heed that you have not an Ear open to every one that calleth after you, as you are in your Journey’. Cf. the similar passage in PP, p. 10. Also cf. MW, v, p. 166.

53. Sharrock, JB, p. 72.

54. MW, v, p. 159.

55. PP, p. 1.

56. PP, p. 123.

57. See, e.g., Sharrock's commentary in PP, p. 333.

58. PP, p. 1.

59. PP, p. 1.

60. PP, p. 2.

61. See Greaves, SAR, chap. 6. For Denne, Paul, Kiffin, Jessey, and Tombes see BDBR, s.vv.

62. Minutes, pp. 66, 71, 79. Cf. p. 92 for a 1690 letter concerning relations with Matthew Meade's church. For all these men see BDBR, s.vv. For Owen see also Peter Toon, God's Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (Exeter, 1971), and for Griffith see Greaves, SAR, chap. 3.

63. See chap. 5, infra. The historical controversy over Bunyan's denominational affiliation is surveyed by Joseph D. Ban, ‘Was John Bunyan a Baptist? A Case Study in Historiography’, The Baptist Quarterly 30 (Oct. 1984): 367-76.

64. Greaves, Bunyan, pp. 82-85.

65. MW, viii, pp. 86, 91, 94, 101, 108, 133ff.

66. MW, viii, p. 160.

67. MW, v, p. 69.

68. MW, viii, pp. xxx-xlii.

69. Doe, pp. 873-84.

70. MW, viii, pp. xix-xxiv. For Ponder see BDBR, s.v.

71. Offor, i, p. 585.

72. Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1988), p. 1.

73. Ibid., p. 2.

74. Sharrock, JB, p. 141.

75. MW, iv, p. 389. See Greaves, SAR, chap. 7.

76. For all these people, including Mrs. Attaway, see BDBR, s.vv. See also Dorothy Ludlow, ‘Shaking Patriarchy's Foundations: Sectarian Women in England, 1641-1700’, in Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant History, ed. Richard L. Greaves (Westport, Conn., 1986), chap. 3; N. H. Keeble, ‘“Here is her Glory, even to be under Him”: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan’, in Laurence, pp. 131-47.

77. MW, iv, pp. 328-29. For a fuller explanation of this work see MW, iv, pp. xxxvii-xliv.

78. BDBR, s.v.

79. Offor, ii, pp. 61, 66, 74, 88. See chap. 5, infra, for a full discussion of Bunyan's views on church-state relations. For views of the Antichrist by Bunyan's contemporaries, see Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971).

80. PP, p. 306.

81. ‘Continuation’, p. 163.

82. MW, xi, pp. xvi-xviii.

83. Offor, ii, p. 456.

84. Ibid., ii, pp. 497-98; Tindall, p. 266.

85. MW, vi, p. lvii.

86. MW, vi, p. 311.

87. MW, vi, p. 310.

88. MW, vi, p. 281.

Abbreviations

Add. MSS: Additional Manuscripts

BDBR: Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Richard L. Greaves and Robert Zaller, 3 vols. (Brighton, Sussex, 1982-84)

BL: British Library

Brown: John Brown, John Bunyan (1628-1688): His Life, Times, and Work, rev. Frank Mott Harrison (London, 1928)

CR: A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934)

CSPD: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

Doe: The Works of That Eminent Servant of Christ, Mr. John Bunyan, ed. Charles Doe (London, 1692)

DWL: Dr. Williams's Library, London

GA: John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinner, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1962)

Greaves, DUFE: Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York, 1986)

Greaves, EUHF: Richard L. Greaves, Enemies Under His Feet: Radical and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664-1677 (Stanford, Cal., 1990)

Greaves, SAR: Richard L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Nonconformists in Stuart England (Macon, Ga., 1985)

Greaves, SOK: Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688-1689 (Stanford, Cal., 1992)

Hill, JB: Christopher Hill, A Turbulent Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford, 1988)

HW: John Bunyan, The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest (Oxford, 1980)

Keeble, JB: N. H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus, Tercentenary Essays (Oxford, 1988)

Laurence: Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim, John Bunyan and His England, 1628-88 (London, 1990)

Minutes: The Minutes of the First Independent Church (now Bunyan Meeting) at Bedford 1656-1766, ed. H.G. Tibbutt (Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, vol. 55)

MW: The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, general ed. Roger Sharrock, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1976-)

Offor: The Works of John Bunyan, ed. George Offor, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1852-53)

PP: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey and Roger Sharrock (Oxford, 1960)

PRO SP: Public Record Office, State Papers

Rel. Bax.: Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696)

Sharrock, JB: Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan (London, 1968)

Tindall: William York Tindall, John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (New York, 1934)

Turner: Original Records of Early Nonconformity, ed. G. Lyon Turner, 3 vols. (London, 1911-14)

Wigfield: W. M. Wigfield, Recusancy and Nonconformity in Bedfordshire: Illustrated by Select Documents Between 1622 and 1842 (Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, vol. 20: 145-249)