characteristic of him and
of the body to which he belonged, that he leaves us to guess on which
side he served. He does not tell us himself. His friends in after life
did not care to ask him, or he to inform them, or else they also
thought the matter of too small importance to be worth mentioning with
exactness. There were two traditions, and his biographers chose
between them as we do. Close as the connection was in that great
struggle between civil and religious liberty--flung as Bunyan was
flung into the very centre of the conflict between the English people
and the Crown and Church and aristocracy--victim as he was himself of
intolerance and persecution, he never but once took any political
part, and then only in signing an address to Cromwell. He never showed
any active interest in political questions; and if he spoke on such
questions at all after the Restoration, it was to advise submission to
the Stuart Government. By the side of the stupendous issues of human
life, such miserable _rights_ as men might pretend to in this world
were not worth contending for. The only _right_ of man that he thought
much about, was the right to be eternally damned if he did not lay
hold of grace. King and subject were alike creatures whose sole
significance lay in their individual immortal souls. Their relations
with one another upon earth were nothing in the presence of the awful
judgment which awaited them both. Thus whether Bunyan's brief career
in the army was under Charles or under Fairfax must remain doubtful.
Probability is on the side of his having been with the Royalists. His
father was of 'the national religion.' He himself had as yet no
special convictions of his own. John Gifford, the Baptist minister at
Bedford, had been a Royalist. The only incident which Bunyan speaks of
connected with his military experience points in the same direction.
'When I was a soldier,' he says, 'I was with others drawn out to go to
such a place to besiege it. But when I was just ready to go, one of
the company desired to go in my room. Coming to the siege as he stood
sentinel he was shot in the heart with a musket bullet and died.'
Tradition agrees that the place to which these words refer was
Leicester. Leicester was stormed by the King's troops a few days
before the battle of Naseby. It was recovered afterwards by the
Parliamentarians, but on the second occasion there was no fighting, as
it capitulated without a shot being fired. Mr. Carl