trousers, that I may not flee
Privily by the window. Hence these groans.
There is no fleeing in a _robe de nuit_.
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!

Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.

JOHN BUNYAN

(1628-1688)

BY REV. EDWIN P. PARKER

John Bunyan, son of Thomas Bunnionn Junior and Margaret Bentley, was
born 1628, in the quaint old village of Elstow, one mile southwest of
Bedford, near the spot where, three hundred years before, his ancestor
William Boynon resided. His father was a poor tinker or "braseyer," and
his mother's lineage is unknown. He says,--"I never went to school to
Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father's house in a very
mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen."

He learned to read and write "according to the rate of other poor men's
children"; but soon lost "almost utterly" the little he had learned.
Shortly after his mother's death, when he was about seventeen years of
age, he served as a soldier for several months, probably in the
Parliamentary army. Not long afterward he married a woman as poor as
himself, by whose gentle influence he was gradually led into the way of
those severe spiritual conflicts and "painful exercises of mind" from
which he finally came forth, at great cost, victorious. These religious
experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in
the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his
discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much
explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to
those who will but consider Bunyan's own explanations.

From boyhood he had lived a roving and non-religious life, although
possessing no little tenderness of conscience. He was neither
intemperate nor dishonest; he was not a law-breaker; he explicitly and
indignantly declares:--"If all the fornicators and adulterers in England
were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would still be
alive and well!" The particular sins of which he was guilty, so far as
he specifies them, were profane swearing, from which he suddenly ceased
at a woman's reproof, and certain sports, innocent enough in themselves,
which the prevailing Puritan rigor severely condemned. What, then, of
that vague and exceeding sinfulness of which he so bitterly accuses and
repents himself? It was that vision of sin, however disproportionate,
which a deeply wounded and graciou