(Continued from p. 44).
WE took leave of Bunyan in our last article in the company of the godly women at Bedford. We saw him wrestling with the temptation of putting his faith to the test by working a miracle. That line of attack failed, but Satan assailed him from another quarter and plied his mind with such questions—What if he was not elected, and what if the day of grace was passed for him? In his “Grace Abounding” he tells of the troubled sea through which he passed ere he reached the shore. These struggles were followed by a consuming desire to be numbered among the called of God. No people on earth, he felt, were like them—“Oh! how I now loved those words,” he writes, “that spoke of a Christian’s calling! as when the Lord said to one, Follow me; and to another, Come after me. And oh! thought I, that He would say so to me too, how gladly would I run after Him.” It was while he was in this state of mind that he unbosomed himself to the “poor people of Bedford.” In their desire to be helpful to him they laid his case before their minister, Mr Gifford, a man, who was one of the trophies of sovereign, redeeming grace. Mr Gifford invited Bunyan to his house and as he heard the minister confer with others about the dealings of God with their souls, he received more conviction, and from that time began to see something of the vanity, and inward wretchedness of his wicked heart, for as yet he knew no great matter therein, as he confesses. “Now it began to be discovered unto me,” he writes, “and also to work at that rate for wickedness as it never did before. Now I evidently found that lusts and corruptions would strongly put forth themselves within me in wicked thoughts and desires, which I did not regard before; my desires also for Heaven and Life began to fail. I found also, that whereas before my soul was full of longings after God, now my heart began to hanker after every foolish vanity; yea, my heart would not be moved to mind that was good; it began to be careless, both of my soul and Heaven; it would now continually hang back, both to, and in every duty; and was as a clog on the leg of a bird to hinder her from flying.” His distressed soul was now swept with a tempest, and he would not believe Christ had love for him. He told the people of God whom he knew of his state of mind. They pointed to the promises, but he says:—”They had as good have told me that I must reach the sun with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely upon the promise; and as soon as I should have done it, all my sense and feeling was against me; and I saw I had a heart that would sin, and that lay under a law that would condemn. These things have often made me think of the child which the father brought to Christ, ‘who, while he was yet a-coming to him, was thrown down of the devil, and also so rent and torn by him that he lay and wallowed, foaming.'”
All this time he was never more tender, he tells us, as to the act of sinning. He durst not take even a pin that did not belong to him, otherwise his conscience would smart. But notwithstanding all this, he makes the following observation: “Though I was such a great sinner before conversion, yet God never much charged the guilt of the sins of my ignorance upon me; only He showed me I was lost if I had not Christ, because I had been a sinner. I saw that I wanted a perfect righteousness to present me without fault before God; and this righteousness was nowhere to be found, but in the person of Jesus Christ. But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my affliction; that, I saw, at a dreadful rate, always putting forth itself within me; that I had the guilt of, to amazement; by reason of that I was more loathsome in mine eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes, too.”
He now was sorry God had created him, as he feared he was a reprobate. He looked upon unconverted men as “the most doleful of all the creatures.” He envied the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the beasts of the earth, for there was no hell awaiting them, and he could have rejoiced if his condition had been as theirs.
He continued in this state of mind for a long time, until one day, in listening to a sermon on the words—“Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair.” When the preacher came to his application, he said—“If it be so, that the saved soul is Christ’s love when under temptation and desertion; then poor, tempted soul, when thou art assaulted and afflicted with temptation, and the hidings of God’s face, yet think on these two words, ‘My love,’ still.” At first Bunyan thought, “What shall I get by thinking on these two words?” But the thought had no sooner passed through his mind than the words began to kindle in his soul, until at length they made him to look up. He began now to question himself: “Is it true?” and the words came to him: “He wist not that it was true which was done unto him by the angel.” The effect produced in his heart had better be told in his own words: “Now was my heart filled full of comfort and hope, and now I could believe that my sins should be forgiven me; yea, I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God, that I remember I could not tell how to contain till I got home. I thought I could have spoken of His love and have told of His mercy to me, even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood me: wherefore, I said in my soul, with much gladness, ‘Well, I would I had a pen and ink here. I would write this down before I go any farther, for surely I will not forget this forty years hence.’” But though this was his feeling at the time, he adds—“But, alas! within less than forty days, I began to question all again; which made me begin to question all still.”
This season of great joy was followed by a solemn warning preceding “a very great storm which came down” on him, and which handled him, as he himself confesses, twenty times worse than anything he had met with before. After the experience of great joy referred to above, the words of our Lord to Peter kept sounding in his ears—“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you.” “Sometimes it would sound,” he says, “so loud within me, yea and as it were call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man had, behind me, called me; being at a great distance, methought he called so loud. It came, as I have thought since, to have stirred me up to prayer and to watchfulness; it came to acquaint me that a cloud and storm was coming down upon me; but I understood it not.”
When at length the storm broke, “it came stealing upon him.” First, his comfort went, then darkness seized upon him; these were followed by floods of blasphemies against God and against Christ, and the Scriptures. “These suggestions,” he says (“with many other which at this time I may not, nor dare not utter, neither by word or pen), did make such a seizure upon my spirit, and did so overweigh my heart, both with their number, continuance, and fiery force, that I felt as if there were nothing else but these from morning to night within me; and as though, indeed, there could be room for nothing else; and also concluded, that God had, in very wrath to my soul, given me up to them, to be carried away with them, as with a mighty whirlwind.” Still, he felt a strong dislike to these blasphemies. The thought of the sin against the Holy Ghost now troubled his wearied spirit. During the time of this severe soul conflict he could not attend on any of the ordinances of God “without sore and great affliction.” Bunyan’s spiritual experience referred to above is dwelt on, not because we consider it an experience which an heir of Heaven must pass through, but because it explains, as nothing else can explain, the marvellous spiritual experience set before us in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
(To be continued).