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JOHN BUNYAN

(BORN 1628--DIED 1688.)

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT.

John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language,
was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may
be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary
caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally
vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies,
whom, in truth, they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more
respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was
able to send his son to a village school, where reading and writing were
taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit
was in the highest vigor all over England; and nowhere had that spirit
more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore,
that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and
sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted
by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by
fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of
fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental
conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which he
described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr.
Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to
cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to
rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness. He is called
in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand
plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr. Ivimey's "History of
the Baptists" as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr.
Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into
the following rhapsody: "No man of common sense and common integrity can
deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless, contemptible
infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a
soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as
could exist on the face of the earth. Now, be astonished, O heavens, to
eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures! Behold this
very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness,
holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the
evidence, will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived
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