No More Learning

It had its fluctuations, but it was still important so
long as Charles I was on the throne. While sermons still stood
midway between the learned world and the mob, and it was hoped
that what suited the one would attract, instruct, or even amaze,
the other into goodness and obedience to the ordered system of
the national church, the pulpit in St Paul's churchyard managed
to hold something of its old position. 'In an age when men read
few books and had no newspapers, the sermon at Paul's cross or
the Spital was the most exciting event of the week? ' Times were
1 He was in prison for a short time, illegally, in 1665, and, again, for a year and
a half in 1685.
• Ante, vol. iv, chap. XII, p. 225.


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Henry Hammond
147
changing: books were multiplied, there was a large manufacture
of pamphlets to catch the popular ear and newspapers were just
beginning, with a supply of suitable, selected or invented facts;
but the sermon, spoken not read, died hard, and there was always an
audience till men began to turn their ploughshares into swords.
At Paul's cross, Laud preached on the anniversary of Charles's
coronation; in 1640, Hammond delivered the striking discourse
which he called The Poor Man's Tithing; in 1641, Frank
preached a famous sermon on obedience. This last marked the
beginning of the end. When bishops had suffered 'the tumults
about their houses and the riots upon their persons' and the
'whole clergy' met with daily insolences in your streets,' the
open pulpit had ceased to influence, it rather accepted the violence
which it should have set itself to redress, and free speech was
replaced by what the Londoners loved to hear. Paul's cross
ceased to give Englishmen literature when they wanted only
polemics. In May 1643, the cross was torn down by the mob.
A notable sermon by Steward, who was nominated dean in 1641,
was among the last that was preached there. It was a de-
nunciation of that Christianity which was of the lip not of the
life, which kept plantations for criminals and did nothing to spread
the gospel beyond the seas; when usury flourished (familiar
lament) in spite of the banishment of Jews, when men might say
'those words of Æschines, els mapadočiavě uuer, we are born
the Paradox and Riddle of our times, a Reformed Church without
a Reformation. Over against preachers such as these should be
placed notable puritans such as Stephen Marshall, whose noble
funeral eulogy of Pym is worthy to be placed high in the prose of
his age.
Not all the preachers were theologians or men of letters;
but few Caroline theologians were not famous preachers, and
many men of letters were found among the ministers and preachers
of the church. To these we may now pass. Henry Hammond,
who has been called “the father of English Biblical criticism,'
is now chiefly remembered by Keble's beautiful eulogy; but,
in his own time, no man had a more beneficent influence on
the religious literature of the age. His own works were voluminous:
his Paraphrase and Annotations on the New Testament (1653)
was an achievement in English theological scholarship; his
Practical Catechism (1644) occupies a position to some extent
between the Devotions of Cosin and of Lewes Baily (The Practice
of Piety, dedicated to Charles I when prince of Wales), and The
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Whole Duty of Man, with the origin of which he was undoubtedly
acquainted. But the most valuable of all his work, as literature,
are his sermons, models of the best Caroline prose in its simplicity,
restraint, clarity, distinction. In his absence of conceits, he shows
himself typically a Caroline rather than an Elizabethan. In his avoid-
ance of anything approaching rhetorical adornment, he forms a
marked contrast to the school in which we may place the gloomy
splendour of Donne and the oriental exuberance of Jeremy Taylor.
To write of charity, patience, toleration, befits him better than any
other man of his age; and, when theologians and statesmen were
wrangling over the limits of the church and the rights or wrongs
of the individual in religion, his was almost the first, and certainly
the clearest, voice to be lifted up in assertion of toleration as
a plain Christian duty and in denunciation of the persecuting
spirit as an enemy to religion and truth.
Parallel to Hammond's influence is that of another eminent
theologian who was never a party man. James Ussher stands
somewhat apart in principles from the dominant school of his time.
He was an Irishman, a distinguished son of the great Irish
university. In his own family, he had closer acquaintance with
Roman Catholicism than had his English contemporaries, and the
Calvinism of Dublin was much more definitely puritan than that
of Oxford or Cambridge. His experience, as learner, as divinity
professor, as bishop, was almost wholly Irish. Yet he, too, fell under
the influence of Laud, was his constant correspondent for twelve
years, was active in winning for him the chancellorship of Trinity
college, Dublin, and shared his aims of anti-Roman defence and
traditional reverence for Catholic antiquity. It was he who most
boldly advised Charles not to consent to Strafford's execution and
reproached him for yielding. Yet Cromwell ordered him a public
funeral. “Learned to a miracle,' as Selden calls him, Ussher,
perhaps, was the last of the Calvinists in high place. His influence
was very great, and it was all exercised in favour of peace and
charity. Of his sermons, it was as true as of his personal influence
that ‘he had a way of gaining people's hearts and touching their
consciences that look'd like somewhat of the Apostolical age
reviv'd. ' He was a voluminous writer, learned and exact; in
manner an Elizabethan, who did not mark any important step in
English letters. His contributions were to learning rather than
to literature. Men used his information and incorporated it
in their own works, but they did not copy his style ; and it is
significant, perhaps, that, while his contributions to historical


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Robert Sanderson
149
study, in regard to subjects so different as the Ignatian letters and
the early history of Ireland, have never lost their value, the only
book of his which can reasonably be described as popular was A
Body of Divinitie (1645), which was little else but a commonplace
book that by no means always represented his own opinions. The
prominent place which Ussher's name occupies in contemporary
accounts of the literature of the seventeenth century is a proof, if
one were needed, how much more influential, at the period of
crisis which led to the civil war, were personal than literary
influences. Learning pursued its way and scholars paid attention
to it and, after their manner, unduly exalted its achievements.
Men who had won the public ear kept it even when they had
ceased very definitely to teach their age. The 'gentle soul' of
Ussher made men love him and attach more importance to his
writings than they deserved: such may well be the view of
posterity, and it would not be wholly unfair.
Robert Sanderson, who lived to become a bishop at the
restoration, and is embalmed in the exquisite prose of Izaak
Walton, was another of the Elizabethans who made the church of
England notable for its preaching power. The famous saying
of Charles I is, perhaps, his chief title to distinction : 'I carry
my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience
to hear Dr Sanderson'; and, with it, Walton's inimitable
description of the talk 'in a corner under a pent house’ till the
rain forced them “into a cleanly house,' where they spoke 'to my
great comfort and advantage. ' Both show him a man of wisdom
and piety, ‘his learning methodical and exact, his wisdom useful,
his integrity visible. ' The sermons are plain sober things, with
‘no improper rhetoric,' indeed, as Walton notes, nor much of the
fire which belongs to the earlier masters of his school : didactic,
mildly argumentative, modestly learned, whether ad aulam
(preached at court), or ad clerum, or ad populum. The last-
named were preached and printed some thirty years before the
others, and they show how consistent were his position and method.
He wrote clearly and without affectation; but he does not rank
high among the prose writers of his time. He was at his best in
the revision of The Book of Common Prayer, where the General
Thanksgiving (perhaps erroneously) has been ascribed to him and
for which he certainly wrote the admirable preface which begins 'It
hath been the wisdom of the Church. ' It is significant, perhaps,
that he wrote as easily and simply in Latin as in English.
Next to Sanderson may very fitly be named 'his dear old friend


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Dr Sheldon,' one of those capable and strenuous men of business
who, from time to time, have seemed marked out early in life-as
Clarendon tells us was said of him—for the primacy of all England.
No man was more bitterly criticised during the later years of his
life than he, for he was a masterful exponent of the Clarendon
policy. His literary remains, which are almost exclusively letters,
still rest, for the most part in manuscript, in the Bodleian library ;
they are thoroughly in keeping, as regards manner and style, with
the acute sobriety of his character, and a most valuable volume
might be compiled from them. His only printed work is a sermon
preached before Charles II just after the restoration, markedly in
the style of Laud.
It is more than literature that links the names of Laud, Sanderson
and Sheldon. The latter, who, early in life, had opposed the great
archbishop in some of his university reforms and had been
prominent, for example, in resisting the appointment of Jeremy
Taylor to an Oxford fellowship, lived not only to carry on with a
certain rigid determination the policy of the earlier primate but to
assist in the preservation and publication of the memorials of his
life. The association had been earlier, and in friendliness :
for both Laud and Sheldon were concerned in the conversion from
Roman Catholicism of the most conspicuous controversialist of the
age of Charles I. This was William Chillingworth, who was an
Oxford citizen, Laud's godson, a scholar of Trinity, a logician and
disputant, a friend of the brilliant company which gathered at
Great Tew. In an immortal passage, Clarendon has described the
wits and theologians who were intimate with the fascinating Lucius
Cary, viscount Falkland. In his Oxfordshire house, he loved to
consort with scholars of Oxford, he who had been the disciple of
the last poets of the Elizabethan age, had himself written pretty
verses and, perhaps, more than dabbled in acute theological
difficulties. His mother Elizabeth (Tanfield) became a Roman
Catholic, and it was in her house that Lucius met Chillingworth,
when he, too, in search of an infallible guide, had abandoned his
protestantism. Their talk, there is evidence to show, was often of
Socinus and his rationalistic treatment of theology, and theological
interests became more and more supreme in Falkland's mind.
*His whole conversation,' says Clarendon, was one continued
convivium philosophicum or convivium theologicum'; and the
literary result was his Discourse of Infallibility, published after
the restoration, in 1660. The literary coterie at Great Tew did
not entirely abandon poetry: there was also, indeed, as of old
6
6


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William Chillingworth 151
in London, the session of the Poets. But the main interests were
theological. Lettice, lord Falkland's wife, was a typical product of
the religious revival associated with Charles l's days. Her Life by
her chaplain Duncon, one of the most interesting biographies of
the time, shows her exact and scrupulous in all the devotional
rules of the church ; yet, in her religious, almost ascetic, household,
the widest speculation was allowed her thoughtful and impression-
able husband. There were Morley and Hammond; the former
afterwards a notable bishop, the latter a preacher and devotional
writer of singular charm and sweetness ; Earle, author of Micro-
cosmographie, who said that he'got more useful learning by his
conversation at Tew than he had at Oxford’; Sheldon, Hales and
Chillingworth. It is not unnatural to suppose that the foundations
of The Religion of Protestants were laid at Great Tew: Falkland's
book shows indebtedness to the same thoughts of rational disbelief
in papal infallibility.
The Religion of Protestants a safe way to Salvation; or an
Answer to a book Entituled Mercy and Truth or Charity Maintained
by Catholiques ; which pretends to prove the contrary (1637) was
the summing up of a long controversy which was begun as early as
1630 by a Jesuit named Edward Knott. It is hampered by a
minute and complicated method, now of defence now of attack;
but, out of pages of singularly complicated and involved discussion,
there emerges a most clear and dogmatic assertion. Chillingworth's
religion is to be found only in the Bible, insomuch that he will
have no anathemas that he cannot find there, and his
desire is to go the right way to eternal happiness; but whether this way lie
on the right hand, or on the left, or straightforward; whether it be by
following a living guide, or by seeking my direction in a book, or by hearken-
ing to the secret whisper of some private spirit, to me is indifferent.
A ‘safe way to Salvation' was to be found in free enquiry. The
literary merit of Chillingworth, popular though his work became,
is not conspicuous: his style is that of the sledge-hammer, dealing
repeated blows. The arrangement of the book depends upon that
which it is its aim to attack; we have to wait some time before the
author emerges from the clouds that beset him; but, when his own
thought comes directly before the reader it is conspicuously clear,
and it is expressed very directly, in simple and forcible English,
with a limited vocabulary but with trenchant emphasis. He is logical
and he is tolerant, and there is in him, at his best, a remarkable
breadth of charity. He cries for liberty, liberty which the times
denied him and the search for which the puritan persecutor of his


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deathbed regarded as blasphemous : yet he is content to abide
within the English fold and to ratify its apostolic claim. And all
this comes out in clear-cut sentences, which men did not readily
forget.
The difference between a Papist and a Protestant is this, that the one
judges his guide to be infallible, the other his way to be manifest.
6
6
>
6
Another of those who frequented the 'academy' of Falkland
at Great Tew was the quiet but attractive John Hales, whose
friends, after his death, caught the literary world's ear with their
name for him of the ever-memorable. ' A scholar, a recluse, a
hesitating thinker and reluctant writer, he was yet a man whose
words and character influenced all who knew him, and Laud
left him, once Greek professor at Oxford, undisturbed at Eton,
where he was happily at home : 'a master of Polite, Various, and
Universal Learning. ' And, to this, he added the rare perfection of
character which made bishop Pearson say that it was 'near as easy
a task for every one to become so knowing, as so obliging' as he.
His friend ‘that Reverend and Worthy Person, Mr Farindon' tells
us that, in his youth, he was a Calvinist till, at the synod of Dort, he
said, 'There, I bid John Calvin Good night. ' His breadth, as con-
temporaries record it, anticipates Thomas Arnold, for he would bring
all Englishmen together by a common liturgy from which "all
doctrinal points on which men differed in their opinions' were to
be omitted. Yet Laud cherished and promoted him.
The Golden Remains of Hales (in the second edition, with
Additions from the Authour's own copy,' 1673) contains many
pleas for religious peace and arguments of the 'great and ir-
remediable inconvenience this free and uncontroulable venturing
upon Theological Disputes hath brought upon us. ' But he was a
positive teacher as well as one who dissuaded from extremes. His
sermons, which, with a number of lively letters to Dudley
Carleton, ambassador at the Hague, and a few fragmentary
thoughts somewhat after Pascal's manner, constitute the precious
volume, have a fine clarity and directness. The learning which
men admired in him is almost laid aside or comes in only where it
fitly illustrates the religious thought, unlike most of the sermons
of his contemporaries. He speaks very plainly, at Eton, of the
responsibility of riches, or, at the Hague, of the crime of duelling;
he tells men how to know and love and worship God, as one
whose simple object it was to find it out. His writing is straight-
forward and effective, as the writing of men is apt to be who, like


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John Hales
153
6
himself, will not ‘pen anything till they needs must. ' But, behind
it there lies, easy to be perceived, a depth of philosophic interest.
Hales looked much further behind life than men like Sheldon,
further, perhaps, than the piercing eye of Chillingworth ; he had a
basis of philosophy like Herbert or Traherne ; he saw differences
between earth and heaven, it may be, where they saw only
correspondences; yet, while, like the former, he was the friend of
courtiers and men of wit, he was, like the latter, a lover of
solitude in the soul. He saw life whole and was original as a
thinker in theology and philosophy: so he could not be a Calvinist.
a
He was transparently sincere, and he came to have that sort of
influence on the men who were making English literature as well
as English politics which has often been exercised from the cloister,
the college, or the country parsonage. The man who made the
funeral oration of Sir Thomas Bodley, studied Shakespeare and
belonged to Suckling's 'session of the Poets,' was a theologian
who taught the next age in many subtle ways. He taught it
breadth of view, and a passion for unity; he taught it to be
critical and yet religious ; and he taught it to pursue its specula-
tions in the study and the church rather than in the market and
the House of Commons.
But the name of Hales is not the only one to remind us that,
while fightings without and fears within vexed men's souls and
gave a new vehemence to their theological discussions, there were
still those who possessed their souls in peace. The ordered system
of the English church, when the fiercest storm of revolution and
reformation had passed by, was at work in town and country, and
in many a quiet village religious men were living peaceably in
their habitations. The school of poetry, typically Anglican in its
piety as well as in its humanity, was close-linked to the prose
writers of the age. Crashaw, in 1635, printed a copy of verses as
preface to Shelford's Five Pious and Learned Discourses a book
which Ussher thought popish ; and Quarles was Ussher's secretary,
'a very good man,' as Aubrey calls him, and one whose meditative
prose has been forgotten in the fame of his poetry. George
Herbert, of course, was conspicuous in both. But, before we speak
of him, we may briefly describe the literary work of the typical
English household pledged to religion, the home of the Ferrars at
Little Gidding.
Nicholas Ferrar was a man of affairs, like not a few of his time
and temper, before he entered holy orders. He was a member of
parliament, and active in the business of the Virginia company, a
>


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>
man who had travelled and mixed with his fellow-men. In ‘his travels
over the western parts of Christendom,' says Barnabas Oley, in his
Life of George Herbert, men noted ‘his exquisite carriage, his rare
parts and abilities of understanding and languages, his morals more
perfect than the best,' and sought to win him to the church of
Rome; but he was fixed in attachment to his own church, and
the collection of devotional books which he gathered abroad,
and the devotional system which he witnessed in Italy, 'rather
inflamed him with a holy zeal to revenge their charity by trans-
planting their waste and misplaced zeal to adorn our Protestant
religion. It was in the year of Charles I's accession that he
retired to the secluded bamlet of Little Gidding; in the next year,
he was ordained deacon by Laud, who, throughout his life, was in
touch with the best devotion as well as the best theology of the
day. For twenty-one years, his 'protestant nunnery,' composed of
the family of his brother and his brother-in-law, carried on its life
there, respected by all, visited with affectionate regard by Charles I
and, as bishop, by the somewhat shifty Williams. Nicholas
Ferrar died in 1637, but the house itself survived for nine years
more till house and church were 'ransacked' by parliamentary
troops in 1646. 'In this general devastation,' says Peckard,
'perished those works of Mr Nicholas Ferrar which merited a
better fate. '
The literary remains of Little Gidding are partly biographical
touching little histories of lives of exquisite charm-together
with the 'Story Books' which still exist in five manuscript
volumes, chiefly written by Nicholas Ferrar himself and all
bound by Mary Collet. The tales, which were a collection
of divine interludes, dialogues and discourses in the Platonic
way,' were the records of each day's literary recreation, a
mingling of piety with literature very well suited to the lives
of persons who had lived with great men and great books
before they came to give themselves wholly to the life of con-
templation and prayer. Of these volumes, only about one and
a half have, so far, been published. They are quaint minglings of
the romances of the age, just a touch of Sir Philip Sidney, or a
link here and there with Lyly, or an anticipation of Bunyan, with
the sober ordered devotion which traces all daily actions to their
source and judges all men and things by the standard of the
Gospel. They do not fear to deal with difficult matters, such as
'the conversion of a famous Courtesan,' but it is in a spirit as
placid as severe; and the style partakes of the same simplicity,
6


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The Ferrars
155
quietness and restraint. With none of the vivacity of Bunyan,
they have yet a certain sting, which reminds the reader of William
Law, when they speak of fashionable follies and frivolities. They
are worth more attentive study than they have yet received,
because they show that the Elizabethan romance writers had their
successors, and they illustrate the manner in which every branch of
literature was being made subservient, as the civil war approached,
to the dominating interest of religion.
Such lives as those of the Ferrars were imitated in many parts of
England; and an illustration of how closely the literary and
religious interests of Anglican England were knit together is
afforded by the history of Lettice (Morison), lady Falkland, wife of
the famous leader of the theological coterie of Great Tew. After
the fashion of Little Gidding, she planned
places for the education of Young Gentlewomen and for the retirement of
Widows, . . . hoping thereby that learning and religion might flourish more
in her own Sex than heretofore, having such opportunities to serve the Lord
without distractions.
Her biography is a characteristic record of Anglican devotion,
but, from the point of view of the historian of literature, it is
chiefly noticeable for two things : the absence of rhetoric or
ornament, with the precision of detail in which the tale is told,
photographic in the exactness with which the daily life of a great
lady of the time is realised; and the influence of Spanish and
French mysticism both on the biographer and on the lady whose
sayings he records. Nicholas Ferrar had translated A Hundred
and Ten Divine Considerations of Juan de Valdés, and it seems
probable that Duncon himself was acquainted with the work in its
Italian form.
The mysticism of these people was mixed with metaphysics :
their letters are often almost as much philosophical as religious ;
and Traherne, their compeer, revels in speculations on the border-
land of philosophy. It is different with the other influence which
profoundly affected them—that of George Herbert.
Herbert, courtier, public orator at Cambridge, country parson,
was one of the happiest embodiments of the title 'a scholar
and a gentleman,' but, before all things, he was a 'priest to the
temple. ' His theory and practice are alike embalmed in an
immortal book.
A Priest to the Temple, most familiarly known as “George
Herbert's Country Parson,' seems to have been finished in 1632,


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6
but did not appear in print for twenty years, when Barnabas Oley
edited it with a 'friendly prosopopoea' to John Echard, answering
his 'grounds and occasions of the contempt of the clergy. '
Certainly, no one could contemn George Herbert's priest, for he is
as good a man as Chaucer's clerk of Oxenford. The sketch of him
may take its place, it has been pointed out, among other character-
sketches of the time, such as bishop Earle's. But it is conspicuous
among them all for the minuteness of its observation, the exactness
of its language and the fervent piety that animates the picture.
Of its usefulness for its own time, Izaak Walton has said the last
word, that it is 'a book so full of plain, prudent and useful rules
that that country parson that can spare 12d. and yet wants it, is
scarce excusable. ' But, of the subtle beauty of its style, it is not
easy to speak thus briefly. It abounds in happy phrases such as
that of 'crumbling a text into small parts'-and touches of insight
in words that exactly fit the thought. It is balanced in its parts,
80 that the effect of its sweet reasonableness is continuous and
cumulative. It is not without verbal reminiscences of the writer's
poetry; yet the prose is good prose, not poetry spoilt. And,
indeed, its literary excellence is more consistently excellent than
that of the writer's verse, because it has in it no straining for
effect or quaintness, but proceeds naturally as though it flowed
from ready lips and a full heart. If the poetry which Herbert
sent, on his deathbed, by John Duncon to Nicholas Ferrar, was
a picture, as he said, of his spiritual conflicts, the prose of A
Priest to the Temple was an image of country tranquillity, bright
and simple like the flowers of the field which he loved, and
fragrant like the incense which he tells the parson to use on high
festivals. The Country Parson marks an epoch in English
literature. It shows character drawing at its perfection, and the
character that is chosen is that of a profession which, transformed
by the reformation, had stamped on itself a peculiar mark, of
breadth and dutifulness and out-of-door piety, which, happily and
for generations, embodied a spirit that was English as well as
Christian in the lives of the English clergy. The publication of
the book may well have had not a little effect in bringing about
the restoration of the church with that of the king; for it showed
men how liberal, how tolerant and candid, how kindly and rational,
could that church be which the triumph of the sects had tem-
porarily superseded. Not many books, indeed, have made so deep
or abiding an impression. It has endowed the memory of its


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William Laud
157
author with a peculiar claim to the affection of Englishmen. And
it sums up the influence which men like Ferrar and Duncon and
Traherne, like Hammond and Sanderson, were quietly exercising,
amid days of disturbance, in the byways of English life.
This influence, it will already have been observed, is connected
at point after point with the name of the dominating personality
in the English church during the reign of Charles I, the determined
and masterful archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Laud
was the disciple of Andrewes, whom he regarded as his master in
theology and the light of the Christian world. ' He preached Donne's
funeral sermon.
He ordained Nicholas Ferrar. He was the con-
siderate patron of Sanderson, Hales and Chillingworth. Thus, he
linked the men of the new age to the times of the great Elizabeth.
For he himself belonged undoubtedly to the system, theological
and political, of the last of the Tudors. Brought up when England
was stirred by the victory over the Armada, trained at Oxford by
those who rejected another foreign influence, the dominant Calvin-
ism, he gave his whole loyalty to the English church and king
as national institutions yet related to a wider religious and political
world.
His first literary work was as an anti-Roman controversialist.
In 1622, he engaged in one of the common theological duels of the
day, defending the cause of the English church. The book re-
cording it came out first in 1624, was reissued more fully in 1639
and appeared in two more editions before the end of the seventeenth
century. It became the standard defence of Anglicanism against
Rome, and, as such, was recommended by Charles I to his children;
and it laid down the lines on which controversy of this nature has
proceeded practically down to the present day. The church, whether
at Rome or in London, is the same church-'one in substance but
not one in condition of state and purity. ' Rome has no ground of
infallibility or universality: the eastern church as well as the
reformation is a standing refutation of such an assertion. Laud
declares England's adherence to the creeds and the fundamental
unaltered doctrines of the church. His position with regard to
the Bible is the typical Anglican one, acceptance, submission, not
idolatry; and 'the key that lets men into the Scriptures, even to
this knowledge of them that are the Word of God, is the tradition
of the church. ' Protestants have not left the church of Rome in
her essence but in her errors'; and, to set matters right, the appeal
must be to a true general council, or, till that may be had, to the
Bible. Meanwhile, the church of England stands for liberty,


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a
enforces not its articles as necessary to salvation, and is secure in
the confidence that
to believe the Scripture and the Creeds, to believe these in the sense of the
ancient primitive Church, to receive the four great General Councils, to believe
all points of doctrine generally received as fundamental in the Church of
Christ, is a faith in which to live and die cannot but give salvation.
Laud, as a controversialist, is the true successor of Andrewes,
and his whole attitude, as well as his particular quotations, shows
him to be a disciple of Hooker. As a controversialist, he is, to
some extent, in contrast to Richard Mountague, a man of his own
age and school, who is happily described by Fuller in the words
'very sharp the nib of his pen, and much gall mingled in his ink,
against such as opposed him. ' Mountague, who afterwards, by
Laud's influence, became a bishop, was famed for his tart tracts
A New Gag for an old Goose who would needs undertake to stop
all Protestants' mouths even with 276 places out of their own
English Bible; Appello Caesarem: a Just Appeal from two Unjust
Informers; and a treatise on the invocation of saints with the title
Immediate Address unto God alone. In each of these he antici-
pates a good deal that modern writers have advanced as new; his
general position is that of Laud and Andrewes, asserting the
'catholicity' of the English church ; and his manner is biting and
epigrammatic, as he stands ‘in the gap against Puritanism and
Popery, the Scylla and Charybdis of ancient Piety. But the im-
portance of Mountague in English history is theological and, perhaps
even more, political, rather than literary. He is in style and
language a man of his age, and his age has better men in both.
He was not an influence on others. He stood rather at the wing
of the anti-Roman army of writers, and the permanent impression
was made by men who, if not more learned-for Mountague was
well read and won the admiration of the pedant king James-were
more sober and, therefore, more effective. The other wing of the
army is well represented by Joseph Hall, bishop, satirist, poet,
preacher, as well as controversialist. In 1640, he issued, with
Laud's approbation and assistance, his Episcopacy by Divine
Right Asserted, which is anti-presbyterian. He declares the
supreme authority of bishops to be from Christ and 'both universal
and unalterable. ' His meditations or contemplations' are of more
permanent value: they have been reprinted again and again, and
have passed into the stock material of Anglican devotions, marked,
as they are, by that quiet reticence and sobriety, relieved by
quaint humorous touches, which, since the time of Sir Thomas


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William Laud
159
9
More, at least, seem to us, in such matters, to be typically
English.
In all this we are still close to the name of Laud, and, because
all the English theological literature of his day is more or less
connected with him, we may pause to consider his sermons as
typical of those of the reign of Charles I.
The sermons that are preserved are but seven, and they were
all preached on special occasions. Thus, they may not be typical
of the preacher's ordinary manner, for he preached often and ad
populum: here, we find him at court, where a certain stiffness and
freedom in quotation from fathers and classics were expected.
They were recognised at the time to be in the Bishop of
Winchester's manner,' but they have not Andrewes's spiritual
beauty. The text is most carefully analysed, dissected,'crumbled':
it is often made to bear more than it can hold. The thesis is put
clearly, and often repeated for emphasis. The illustrations are
from medieval writers as well as the early fathers: moderns, outside
England, are little used, except Calvin—whom everybody knew
and expected to hear referred to. But, most characteristic of the
writer and, to some extent, of the school to which he belonged, are
two outstanding features in every sermon. Laud continually refers
to the psalms or lessons of the day; he was so familiar with the
church's daily services that he naturally took them as providing
each day with its lesson from God, and that lesson should be the
first he would employ for application or illustration. This was
personal to the man: it occurs again and again in his diary and
tinges his prayers.
A second feature is historical allusion. Laud
was more historical, perhaps, than strictly theological in his outlook.
English society came before him as an ordered system which had
its roots in the past, its analogies with foreign developments, its
debts to dead heroes and saints, its best hopes in imitations of the
good things of byegone ages. This thought is shown abundantly in
historical reference, be it to Julius Caesar, Frederic stupor mundi,
or Saladin, and even the quotations of which all the writers of the
age were fond have, in his case, it seems, a special direction: they
emphasise precedent as a part of the divine ordering of the
world.
Such is what one finds expressed very clearly, very pointedly,
very emphatically, in the writings of Charles I's chief religious
adviser. Two of those who may be regarded as Laud's disciples
reflect his thoughts and his manner-William Juxon and William
Sancroft. The former published but one or two sermons, of no


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160
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particular merit save that of consistent Anglicanism. The latter
did not issue his attack on Calvinism till just before the restora-
tion (1658), and belongs, from a literary point of view, entirely
to the later Caroline age; yet he must be just mentioned here
because all that he wrote shows Laud's influence, and it was he
chiefly who sought to preserve the archbishop's memory by the
faithful publication of his literary remains the little Diary and
the long, weary, but indomitable, record of his Troubles and
Tryal.
Besides these, there were, of course, many minor Laudians
some, in their writings, like Roger Mainwaring, of political rather
than literary fame; others, such as William Strode, with a nice
taste in poetry which showed itself happily in their sermons;
others, again, like Richard Steward, one of the many notable
fellows of All Souls who bore their part in the Laudian movement
and stood for the king, with the church party, throughout the war
and in exile. He held office after office, and, at last, the deanery
of Westminster—where, however, he never secured possession.
He was prominent among those who destroyed the influence of
Calvin at Oxford and handed on the influence of Laud to the next
generation. He has already been named among the notable
preachers. Others who left few remains must not be forgotten.
The circle of the primate's friends and disciples was a wide one.
At the fringe of the literary and ecclesiastical party which
looked to Laud as teacher and patron were wits like Abraham
Wright, whose Five Sermons (1656) most cleverly took off the
different styles of his age, and showed the difference between
‘ship board breeding and the Universities'; and Giles Widdowes,
author of The Lawless Kneeless Schismatical Puritan (a blow
for lawyer Prynne), but, as Anthony à Wood tells us,
a harmless and honest man, a noted disputant, well read in the schoolmen,
and as conformable to and zealous in the established discipline of the Church
of England as any person of his time, yet of so odd and strange parts that
few or none could be compared to him.
With not a few affinities in character to men such as these, but
strikingly unlike them in the nature of his literary work, there
stands a writer whose powers have not even yet been fully
appreciated. John Gauden is one of the most remarkable figures
in the literary history of his time. A singularly adroit ecclesiastic,
who was of the parliament's party and yet not wholly repugnant
to Laud, he was as well abused as any clergyman of his day—which
is saying a great deal—but no man had a better skill in retort.


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Eikon Basilike
161
His little known Anti-Baal-Berith or The Binding of the
Covenant and all Covenanters to their good behaviour (1661) is as
clever and amusing a piece of controversial writing as the seven-
teenth century produced. Its sledge-hammer blows recall Martin
Marprelate, and yet it never descends to mere scurrility. One feels
that Gauden knew extraordinarily well how far he might go and
carry people with him. And this is true, in as striking a way, of
his Sermon preached in St Paul's Church London before the Right
Honourable the Lord Mayor, Lord General, Aldermen etc. on
February 28, 1659 (1660), the day when there was public thanks-
giving for the return of the Rump. It is a most verbose and skilful-
the verbosity itself is skill-expression of what everybody at the
moment was feeling, and what the great persons of his audience
particularly wished to hear, as to the way of 'healing the hurts of
the kingdom. ' Not a word that men could have him by the heels
for is there in it: no indiscreet references to the late king, or the
late protector, or the young man Charles Stewart; but just those
hints which go far enough to lead the hearers a little further,
because they show which way popular feeling is turning. No man
ever expressed with more fidelity the thoughts of his generation
than John Gauden.
It is almost impossible to resist bis claim to the authorship of
the most important book of the day, Eikon Basilike, a “portraiture
of his Sacred Majesty in his Sufferings. ' Internal and external
evidence have been weighed again and again, as often as in the
instance of the Casket letters, and it is difficult, indeed, to put
aside the cumulative force of the facts. The long literary con-
troversy which the claim occasioned has lasted to the present
day. Briefly summarised, it turns upon the second-hand evidence
of those who are said to have seen parts of the book in the
handwriting of Charles I, and the counter-assertion of Gauden
that he was himself the author, and upon the remarkable and
detailed resemblance to his own writings. There is certainly
no conclusive evidence that it was the work of the king. On
the other hand, it is undoubtedly a masterpiece of expression
of his principles, his personal feelings, his prejudices, his piety,
his prerogative as it appeared to him at his moments of greatest
sincerity and exaltation. Idealised, it undoubtedly is. Charles,
perhaps, had never so deep a feeling of what kingship might mean
to its worshippers. But a man who loved Shakespeare as Charles
did may well have been inspired by his sufferings to write above
the level of his constant thoughts. And it is at least possible that
11
E. L. VII.
CH. VI.


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162
Caroline Divines
Eikon may be even more of a mosaic than it seems. The author
knew what Charles had said on public occasions, and used it; he
knew what the king felt on public questions; he knew what such
a man, the disciple of Laud, the devout attendant at Anglican
worship, would feel at a time of personal distress and imprisonment.
The result is an incomparable picture of a stedfast prince, who
acknowledges his weakness yet asserts the purity of his motives,
the truth of his political and religious principles, the supremacy
of his conscience. Such a dramatic presentment would not be
above the ability of Gauden: and it is quite possible that he
had before him, when he wrote, actual meditations, prayers and
memoranda of the king, which perished when they had been copied
and had found their place in the masterly mosaic.
Few books have had greater influence in English history. Forty-
seven editions of it were produced with surprising rapidity: those
who tried to answer it-Milton among them—failed utterly to
obliterate the impression it had created. The dull attempts at
dignity and splendour which tried to relieve the exasperating
vigilance and laborious monotony of the protectorate government
and court were entirely powerless in face of this appealing pathos.
The Stewart romance, which was to colour English history for
another century, had its strongest impetus from this wonderful
little book. The merit of the style is its simplicity and directness.
It speaks straight to the heart. Eikon Basilike is, indeed, among
the masterpieces of the age which produced the religion and
the literature of Nicholas Ferrar and of George Herbert.
If Eikon Basilike is one of the most important books in
English history, no
rank its author among the
immortals. But the last of the Caroline divines whom we shall
name has a claim to that title. Jeremy Taylor may be regarded
as the finished product of the school of Laud. It was Laud
who procured him his fellowship at All Souls, and to whom
his famous sermon on the Gunpowder plot was dedicated;
and Laud's influence, at once in its attachment to ancient
standards, in its antagonism to the theology of Rome and in its
breadth of toleration, is evident in all his writings. His was a full
life: he went through much affliction, and he had many consolations ;
he was an ardent scholar, a popular preacher, a bishop, a man of
affairs; and all these experiences are reflected in books which are
the most famous of all the work of the Caroline divines. No one
of all that distinguished body, whose position in that age was
summed up in the oft-quoted phrase clerus Anglicanus stupor
one
can


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Jeremy Taylor
163
mundi, was more eminent in his own day, and no one, except
George Herbert, has so certainly won permanent place in the
literature of England. He wrote voluminously; and few men who
have written so much have left more books that still retain
their value: the sermons, ingenious, fertile, convincing ; Ductor
Dubitantium, still the only English treatise of any importance on
its subject? ; the charm of The Marriage Ring; the piety of The
Golden Grove; the sagacious, corrective, kindling, instruction of
Holy Living and Holy Dying and The Worthy Communicant-
these are the abiding possession of the English people. Jeremy
Taylor's controversial work has passed out of consideration with the
greater part of all writing of the same kind that was contemporary
with it: perhaps no English controversialist in theology save Hooker
has secured a permanent place in English literature. Taylor's
theology is of his age: his learning would not preserve his books from
oblivion. But he remains a vital force in English letters, because
of the wonderful combination of fine qualities which he possesses.
Coleridge placed him among the four masters of early seventeenth
century literature, with Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton; and later
judgment shows no sign of reversing the verdict. But his character,
as a writer, is very specially his own. First and obviously, by pro-
fession he was an Anglican priest. He had the ecclesiastical temper
and the spiritual insight which befit his profession; and, in his firm
adherence to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, combined
with a wide tolerance in interpretation, a desire to admit and not
to exclude, like Hales and Chillingworth and Laud, he was a typical
Anglican of Charles I's day. Tradition, authority, faith, liberality,
were harmonious, not contending, in his mind. Secondly, he
was not less certainly a man of letters. His style is intensely
artificial, not in the sense of insincerity, but in the sense of
laborious achievement which has become facility and freedom. It
is intensely individual. There are in it points of comparison with
Sir Thomas Browne, with Donne, with Traherne, even with Burton;
but the curiously mingled simplicity and gorgeousness are all his
own. No one can, like Taylor, pile up splendour of description,
exotic richness of phraseology, colour, tones instinct with music,
and then turn in an instant to a sober, solemn, stately simplicity,
direct and appealing like the call of a herald. Again, in his use
of the ancient classics, if he is a man of his time, he works with
a distinction of his own. Now, he translates literally, incorporating
the result in his own text; now, he quotes, now, paraphrases; but
1 See, post, chap. XII.
11-2


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164
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>
he always handles his author as though he were familiar with him
and loved him. Whether it be the Greek Anthology, or Petronius,
or a Christian Father, he regards the book with a delicate appre-
a
ciation which comes of pure passion for literature in itself. His
taste is all-embracing, and he has an extraordinary aptitude for
applying it to the matter, however far away, which, for the moment,
is occupying his mind. Thus, you may often call his references, or his
analogies, far fetched: but, when you look more closely into the
texture of his argument, you will see how fitly as well as how
adroitly he has woven them in. This breadth of sympathy made
Mason call him the Shakespeare of English prose. ' The description
is an extremely happy one. He is rhetorical like a dramatist.
He abounds in arresting phrases, in haunting verbal felicities. He
can be magnificent, and he can be most deeply pathetic. And,
perhaps above all, his language is astoundingly popular and modern.
To compare his prose with Milton's is to find one's self in a world
of freedom as contrasted with the four walls of the scholar's
study.
You cannot read Jeremy Taylor without feeling that, in spite
of his preciosity, he is, in intention, before all things intensely
practical ; to this aim even his delight in expression and allusion
yields again and again. You come continually on passages, for
example, like that in which, after a list of diseases and a mention
of Maecenas, he writes thus :
It was a cruel mercy in Tamerlane, who commanded all the leprous
persons to be put to death, as we knock some beasts quickly on their head, to
put them quickly out of pain, and lest they should live miserably: the poor
men would rather have endured another leprosy, and have more willingly
taken two diseases than one death. Therefore Caesar wondered that the old
crazed soldier begged leave he might kill himself, and asked him, 'dost
thou think then to be more alive than now thou art? ' We do not die
suddenly, but we descend to death by steps and slow passages; and therefore
men, so long as they are sick, are unwilling to proceed and go forward in
the finishing that sad employment. Between a disease and death there are
many degrees, and all those are like the reserves of evil things, the declining
of every one of which is justly reckoned among those good things, which
alleviate the sickness and make it tolerable. Never account that sickness
intolerable, in which thou hadst rather remain than die: and yet if thou hadst
rather die than suffer it, the worst of it that can be said is this, that this
sickness is worse than death; that is, it is worse than that which is the best
of all evils, and the end of all troubles; and then you have said no great
harm against it1.
Taylor, it is true, had a variety of style. It is possible to
trace 'periods' in his literary manner, as it is to distinguish
a
1 Holy Dying, chap. III.


## p. 165 (#181) ############################################

Jeremy Taylor
165
the tone in which he dealt with different topics. He was a
controversialist and historian in The Sacred order and offices
of Episcopacy (1642); an advocate of toleration in The Liberty
of Prophesying (1647); purely a spiritual teacher in The
Great Exemplar (a life of Christ, 1649), Holy Living (1650),
Holy Dying (1651) and The Worthy Communicant (1660); an
opponent of Rome in many treatises, a defender of Anglicanism
in others; but, in all, he was a man of wide outlook, of temperate
mind and of warm heart. Why Taylor has always been popular,
has been, indeed, the Bunyan of the English church, is that he
obviously felt all he said, and was stirred by the very passion which
he sought to infuse into others. His work is not regular, his style
is hardly chastened; yet his feeling is restrained within limits
which not a few writers of his time transgressed to their peril. He
is intense in feeling, up to the very verge of legitimate expression;
he hardly ever oversteps it. His style is the servant, not the master,
of the conviction or the passion which breathes in every page that
he writes
When we survey the period of English prose of which Jeremy
Taylor is the brightest ornament, we are struck by the fact that
the divines of Charles I's day were conspicuously English Spanish
influence had passed by; French had hardly yet come, as it came
thirty years later; Latin and Greek were still potent, but chiefly
because they had taught men to write English. English they were,
and, though some of those of whom we have spoken had died before
'the troubles,' and the voices of almost all were temporarily silenced
during the years after Charles's death, their influence was powerful
in the next generation-a generation enthusiastic for both church
and king.


## p. 166 (#182) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
JOHN BUNYAN.
ANDREW MARVELL
THE great civil war of the seventeenth century, while revo-
lutionising English constitutional government, effected, also, an
important break in the historical continuity of English literature.
The years between 1640 and 1660, being years of prolonged and
intense conflict, constitute, in the main, a distinct and well defined
interval between the writers of the days of Elizabeth and James
and those of the restoration. Above all other periods in our
history, it was the age of the pamphleteer, of the writer who is
concerned rather with the urgent needs of the hour than with
the purpose of creating or developing the higher forms of
literature. His aim was to reach the public mind directly and at
once, and so shape the national policy at critical moments in
the nation's life. What literature there might be of more per-
manent sort was the intellectual product of a generation which
had either disappeared or was fast disappearing. Even Milton, re-
cognised, as he is, as the great poet of the restoration, may, more
properly, be said to belong to an earlier time. For the educative
forces which shaped him, and the creative impulse which finally
determined his path to fame, had exercised their influence upon
him before ever the war began. All that is most characteristic of
his genius belongs to the time when books were written to be read
by scholars, and when classical learning gave form and pressure
to English style. Very much the same thing may be said of
Andrew Marvell. For, while his literary reputation rests mainly,
if not exclusively, on poems not published till 1681, or three
years after his death, they were actually composed, with few
exceptions, during the early years of his manhood. They were
the product of a time when Donne's poetry, with its elaborate
conceits and recondite analogies, was the fashion of the hour, and
Donne himself the accepted poet of the younger men of the time,


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John Bunyan
167
6
the leader by whose style and manner they were consciously, or
unconsciously, influenced.
Taking into account, then, the effect of this hiatus in the
literary continuity of the seventeenth century, it is not surprising
that, in the succeeding period, we come upon writers who belong
to no special class or school, and whose literary genealogy cannot
be traced. Three names suggest themselves as furnishing illus-
trations of the kind: John Bunyan, who, with his vivid descriptions
of character, his quaint turns of thought and his racy English style,
stands alone ; Daniel Defoe, with his unrivalled power of clothing
with an air of reality the creations of his imagination; and
Jonathan Swift, whose style defies description or classification,
and, as he puts the case himself, whose English was his own. '
John Bunyan, in creative genius the most gifted of the three, was,
in educational advantages, the least favoured. Born in 1628, in
the Bedfordshire village of Elstow, the son of an artisan, a brasier
by trade, he was put to school, he tells us, to learn both to read
and write 'according to the rate of other poor men's children';
but, to his shame, he says, he has to confess he soon lost that
little he learnt, even almost utterly. ' Probably, if he had been
bent on continuing the modest acquirements of the village school,
he would have had small opportunity, for work at his father's
forge began early, and literature was as scanty as leisure. Most
likely, he was describing the kind of book within his own reach
in those days when, in after years, he represents one of his
characters as saying, 'Give me a ballad, a news-book, George on
horseback, or Bevis of Southampton; give me some book that
teaches curious arts, that tells old fables. ' And, even if books of
a higher class of literature had been within his reach, opportunity
for study scarcely could have been; for, during the civil war, the
army regulation age was from sixteen to sixty, and in the very
month in which Bunyan completed his sixteenth year he was
drafted into service as a soldier in the parliamentary army. As
we now know from the recently discovered muster-rolls of the
garrison, he was on military duty at Newport Pagnell from
November 1644 to June 1647. He was here under the command
of Sir Samuel Luke, parliamentary scout master general, the
puritan knight whom Butler, in his well known satire, lampooned
as Sir Hudibras. And it is curious to notice, by the way, that
Bunyan, the writer of puritan books, and Butler, the merciless
satirist of puritan types, were both of them, at one and the same
time, in the service of the same worthy of Cople Woodend—the
>


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168
John Bunyan
one as a soldier in the garrison and the other as tutor or secretary
in his household
On his release from military service in 1647, Bunyan returned
to his native village, and married a year or two later. It is in
connection with this event in his life that he first refers to any
influence which books may have had over him. His wife, he
tells us,
had for her part The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice
of Piety which her father had left her when he died. In these two books I
should sometimes read with her, wherein I also found some things that were
somewhat pleasing to me.
A year or two later, he came under a more potent influence. One
day he happened to fall into the company of a poor man who
did talk pleasantly of the Scriptures. Wherefore, falling into some love and
liking to what he said, I betook me to my Bible and began to take great pleasure
in reading; but especially with the historical part thereof. For as for Paul's
Epistles, and such like Scriptures, I could not away with them.
As yet, he had not entered upon that deep religious experience,
those intense struggles of soul, which he has vividly depicted in
his Grace Abounding; but, when that time came to him, he
turned again to his Bible with more living purpose—the book
to which, more than any other, his literary style was indebted for
its English clearness and force. 'I began,' he says, 'to look into
it with new eyes and read as I never did before. I was never
out of the Bible either by reading or meditation. ' So far as his
native genius was shaped and directed by external influence, it is
here we come upon that influence.
‘Buyan's English,' writes J. R. Green, “is the simplest and homeliest
English that has ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the
English of the Bible. He had lived in the Bible till its words became his
own. '
Such was the main, and, so far as we know, the only influence
of a literary sort under which Bunyan ever came, until he appeared
before the world as an author. This was in 1656, when he was
twenty-eight years of age, and then only in response to what he
felt to be the call of duty. This first venture was brought about
in a somewhat unexpected way. When his intense and memorable
conflict of soul had passed into a more peaceful phase, he joined,
in 1653, the fellowship of a Christian church recently formed in
Bedford outside the national system. A year or two later, these
people prevailed upon him to exercise his gifts among them, and,
in this way, he came gradually into active service as a preacher


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Bunyan and the Quakers
169
9
in Bedford and the villages round. This brought him into collision
with some of the followers of George Fox, founder of the Society
of Friends, then a very aggressive body. Like Fox himself, his
followers went into places of worship and, in the presence of the
congregation, assailed the preacher. This they did with Bunyan,
at one of his services. He was not sufficiently mystical in his
teaching for them. They laid more stress upon the inward light
and less upon historic fact and external revelation. They would
have a Christ within, a resurrection within, a light within. He
also, was desirous of these, but he would not let go the historic
Christ, the historic facts of the Christian faith, or the Scriptures
of revelation by which to guide and test the inward light. A
A
Quaker sister, he says, 'did bid me in the audience of many “to
throw away the Scriptures. " To which I answered, “No, for then
the devil would be too hard for me. "
We are not here concerned with this controversy except in
80 far as to note the fact that, as its immediate result, it was re-
sponsible for the launching of Bunyan upon a career of authorship.
For the purpose of advancing what he held to be more scriptural
teaching on the subject in dispute, he published, in 1656, a duo-
decimo volume of 270 pages, entitled Some Gospel Truths Opened.
This book, written rapidly and in a heat, was published at Newport
Pagnell, and was immediately replied to by Edward Burrough, an
eminent Quaker. To this reply, Bunyan gave instant rejoinder in
a further volume of 280 pages, his second book following his first,
as he tells us, at only a few weeks' interval. These first literary
ventures are not specially characteristic of Bunyan's genius; but
they display the same ease of style, the same directness and
naturalness of speech, which he maintained to the end, and are
certainly remarkable as the productions of a working artisan of
scantiest education, who had not long left the distractions of a
soldier's life behind him.
Having thus ventured forth upon authorship in the interests
of theological controversy, in 1658 Bunyan appeared again with a
published treatise on the parable of the rich man and Lazarus,
in which we have foretokens of his matured style in such
characteristic touches as this: "The careless man lies like the
smith's dog at the foot of the anvil though the fire-sparks fly in
his face’; and this, “Some men despise the Lazaruses of our Lord
Jesus Christ because they are not gentlemen, because they cannot
with Pontius Pilate speak Hebrew, Greek and Latin. ' A further
work of no special note, issued by him in 1659, brings us to 1660,


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170
John Bunyan
6
when he entered upon the second and most important part of
his life and literary history.
The restoration of monarchy to the state and of episcopacy to
the church vitally affected the social and religious condition of
nonconformists, and Bunyan was almost the first man among them
to feel the change. In the November following the king's return in
May, he was committed to Bedford gaol for preaching at a farm-
house in the south of the county, and, as he was convicted under
the unrepealed Conventicle act of 1593, which required public
confession and promise of submission before release could follow
the term of imprisonment, he remained a prisoner for twelve
years, that is, till the king's declaration of indulgence in 1672.
So far as his literary history is concerned, these twelve years fall
into two equal parts of six years each, during the first of which
he published no fewer than nine of his books. The last of these,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, which appeared in
1666, is the first of the four outstanding creations of his genius.
It is really his own autobiography, an intense record, written after
he had 'tarried long at Sinai to see the fire and the cloud and the
darkness,' and it has been recognised as one of the great books of
the world on religious experience, and not unworthy to take its
place by the side of the Confessions of Augustine. Another book
which preceded this by a year, entitled The Holy City, or the
New Jerusalem, is of interest to us as being a kind of foregleam
of that celestial city to which, in after days, he conducted the
pilgrims of his dream. At one time, there were no fewer than
sixty other nonconformists in prison with him under the new
Conventicle act of 1664, and they were accustomed to hold
religious services among themselves in the common room of the
county gaol. As he tells us in his preface to the book in question,
it was his turn one Sunday morning to speak to the rest; but he
felt so empty and spiritless that he thought he would not be able
to speak among them so much as five words of truth with light
and evidence. ' However, as he turned over the pages of his Bible,
in the book of Revelation, his eye lit upon the glowing picture of
the city of God coming down out of heaven, her light like unto
a stone most precious as it were a jasper stone clear as crystal.
Musing upon this glowing vision, seen by that other prisoner in
Patmos, Bunyan says, “Methought I perceived something of that
jasper in whose light this holy city is said to come or descend';
and the Lord helped him to set this great hope before his brethren:
we did all eat and were well-refreshed. ' But the matter did not
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Bunyan's Language
171
6
end there. When the sermon was over, the vision splendid rose
before his mind again :
the more I cast mine eye upon it the more I saw lie in it. Wherefore setting
myself to a more narrow search, through frequent prayer to God, what first
with doing and then with undoing, and after that with doing again, I thus did
finish it.
It has been truly said that, while Bunyan possessed in a
remarkable degree the gift of expressing himself in written words,
he had no appreciation of literature as such. In the preface
of the book before us, he explains his mental attitude. He
thinks his learned reader may blame him because he has ‘not
beautified his matter with acuteness of language,' and has not,
'either in the line or in the margent, given a cloud of sentences
from the learned fathers. ' As for the language of the learned, the
sentences and words which others use, he does not give them
because he has them not, nor has he read them : 'had it not been
for the Bible, I had not only not thus done it, but not at all. '
That is reason enough, but there is another behind it. Even if
he had had the learning of the learned Fathers,
'I durst not make use of ought thereof,' he says, "and that for fear lest that
grace and these gifts that the Lord hath given me, should be attributed to
their wits rather than the light of the Word and Spirit of God. '
This way of regarding the literary gift as heaven-descended,
therefore to be reverently used and not perverted to unworthy
ends, was Milton's as well as Bunyan's. When he put in print
a public pledge to execute his design of a great poem, Milton, at
the same time, said that he conceived of it
as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of
wine, nor to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren
daughters, but by devout prayer to the Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and Knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with all the hallowed
fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases.
This may not be the common way, but it was the puritan way
of regarding the endowments of man's richer nature as gifts of the
Spirit of God, as signs of his wider operation on the imagination
and heart of the world. In the preface to his Grace Abounding,
a book which, in some passages, seems as if it had been written
with a pen of fire, Bunyan touches again upon the question of the
relation of conscience to literature :
'I could,' he says, ' have stepped into a style much higher than this in which
I have bere discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I
have seemed to do; but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me
wherefore I may not play in my relating of these experiences, but be plain and


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172
John Bunyan
simple, and lay down the thing as it was. He that liketh it let him receive it;
and he that does not, let him produce a better. '
While during the first six years of his prison life, as we have
said, no fewer than nine books came from Bunyan's pen, for the
next five years, so far as we know, that pen was laid aside. It
was not till 1671 that he broke this long silence and published a
book which he entitled A Confession of my Faith, and a Reason
of my Practice. This work, while giving a reasoned statement of
his religious opinions, was, at the same time, a kind of apologia
pro vita sua, a vindication of his conduct in resolutely standing
by his convictions for a long time, while so weighty an argument
as over eleven years' imprisonment was continually urging him
to pause and consider again and again the grounds and foundation
of those principles for which he thus had suffered.