-named work, the "Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by
Faith," is entirely controversial. The Rev. Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, then Rector of Northill, had published in the early
part of 1671, a book entitled "The Design of Christianity." A copy
having found its way into Bunyan's hands, he was so deeply stirred by
what he deemed its subversion of the true foundation of Evangelical
religion that he took up his pen and in the space of six weeks composed a
long and elaborate examination of the book, chapter by chapter, and a
confutation of its teaching. Fowler's doctrines as Bunyan understood
them--or rather misunderstood them--awoke the worst side of his impetuous
nature. His vituperation of the author and his book is coarse and
unmeasured. He roundly charges Fowler with having "closely, privily, and
devilishly turned the grace of God into a licentious doctrine,
bespattering it with giving liberty to lasciviousness;" and he calls him
"a pretended minister of the Word," who, in "his cursed blasphemous book
vilely exposes to public view the rottenness of his heart, in principle
diametrically opposite to the simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, a
glorious latitudinarian that can, as to religion, turn and twist like an
eel on the angle, or rather like the weathercock that stands on the
steeple;" and describes him as "contradicting the wholesome doctrine of
the Church of England." He "knows him not by face much less his personal
practise." He may have "kept himself clear of the ignorant Sir Johns who
had for a long time, as a judgment of God, been made the mouth to the
people--men of debauched lives who for the love of filthy lucre and the
pampering of their idle carcases had made shipwreck of their former
faith;" but he does know that having been ejected as a Nonconformist in
1662, he had afterwards gone over to the winning side, and he fears that
"such an unstable weathercock spirit as he had manifested would stumble
the work and give advantage to the adversary to speak vilifyingly of
religion." No excuse can be offered for the coarse violence of Bunyan's
language in this book; but it was too much the habit of the time to load
a theological opponent with vituperation, to push his assertions to the
furthest extreme, and make the most unwarrantable deductions from them.
It must be acknowledged that Bunyan does not treat Fowler and his
doctrines with fairness, and that, if the latter may be though