from drowning, and from the supposed sting of an adder;
his being drawn as a soldier, and his providential
deliverance from death; the graphic account of his
difficulty in giving up bell-ringing at Elstow Church,
and dancing on Sundays on Elstow Green—these
and other minor touches which give a life and colour
to the story, which we should be very sorry to lose,
are later additions. It is impossible to over-estimate
the value of the “Grace Abounding,” both
for the facts of Bunyan’s earlier life and for
the spiritual experience of which these facts were,
in his eyes only the outward framework. Beginning
with his parentage and boyhood, it carries us down
to his marriage and life in the wayside-cottage at
Elstow, his introduction to Mr. Gifford’s congregation
at Bedford, his joining that holy brotherhood, and
his subsequent call to the work of the ministry among
them, and winds up with an account of his apprehension,
examinations, and imprisonment in Bedford gaol.
The work concludes with a report of the conversation
between his noble-hearted wife and Sir Matthew Hale
and the other judges at the Midsummer assizes, narrated
in a former chapter, “taken down,” he says,
“from her own mouth.” The whole
story is of such sustained interest that our chief
regret on finishing it is that it stops where it does,
and does not go on much further. Its importance
for our knowledge of Bunyan as a man, as distinguished
from an author, and of the circumstances of his life,
is seen by a comparison of our acquaintance with his
earlier and with his later years. When he laid
down his pen no one took it up, and beyond two or
three facts, and a few hazy anecdotes we know little
or nothing of all that happened between his final
release and his death.
The value of the “Grace Abounding,” however,
as a work of experimental religion may be easily over-estimated.
It is not many who can study Bunyan’s minute
history of the various stages of his spiritual life
with real profit. To some temperaments, especially
among the young, the book is more likely to prove
injurious than beneficial; it is calculated rather
to nourish morbid imaginations, and a dangerous habit
of introspection, than to foster the quiet growth
of the inner life. Bunyan’s unhappy mode
of dealing with the Bible as a collection of texts,
each of Divine authority and declaring a definite meaning
entirely irrespective of its context, by which the
words hide the Word, is also utterly destructive of
the true purpose of the Holy Scriptures as a revelation
of God’s loving and holy mind and will.
Few things are more touching than the eagerness with
which, in his intense self-torture, Bunyan tried to
evade the force of those “fearful and terrible
Scriptures” which appeared to seal his condemnation,
and to lay hold of the promises to the penitent sinner.
His tempest-tossed spirit could only find rest by
doing violence to the dogma, then universally accepted
and not quite extinct even in our own days, that the