Works of John Bunyan — Volume 02

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May not contain Access Codes or Supplements. Buy with confidence, excellent customer service! Fold-out facsimile of John Bunyan's will on parchment on rear of ffep; engraving of John Bunyan on frontis prior to pictorial half-title page; pages; contents are overall bright and clean; tissue protectors intact over engravings throughout the book; foxing primarily on tissue protectors with light foxing transferred to margins of the plates; few very minor spots on text; stain on last leaf and rfep.

Dark green pebbled boards are deeply beveled with a central cartouche at front and back decorated with gilt flourishes and title; spine with gilt title and "illustrated". Introduction by John P. Overall a very clean, attractive book. Illustrated Edition with an introduction by John P. Fold-out facsimile of John Bunyan's will on parchment. Bound in dark brown hand tooled leather with gold gilt.

He was aided in his recovery by his association with the Bedford Separatist church and its dynamic leader, John Gifford. He entered into full communion about Fresh from his own spiritual troubles, he was fitted to warn and console others: Bunyan soon became recognized as a leader among the sectaries. The Restoration of Charles II brought to an end the 20 years in which the separated churches had enjoyed freedom of worship and exercised some influence on government policy.

He refused to give an assurance that he would not repeat the offense, was condemned at the assizes in January , and was imprisoned in the county jail. In spite of the courageous efforts of his second wife he had married again in to have his case brought up at the assizes, he remained in prison for 12 years. During this imprisonment Bunyan wrote and published his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding, The Bedford community had already chosen him as their pastor in January, and a new meetinghouse was obtained. In May he received a license to preach together with 25 other Nonconformist ministers in Bedfordshire and the surrounding counties.

When persecution was renewed he was again imprisoned for illegal preaching; the circumstances of this imprisonment have remained more obscure than those of the first, though it does not appear to have lasted longer than six months.

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A bond of surety for his release, dated June , has survived, so it is likely that this second detention was in the first half of that year. His handling of language, colloquial or biblical, is that of an accomplished artist. He brings to his treatment of human behaviour both shrewd awareness and moral subtlety, and he demonstrates a gift for endowing the conceptions of evangelical theology with concrete life and acting out the theological drama in terms of flesh and blood.

Bunyan thus presents a paradox , since the impulse that originally drove him to write was purely to celebrate his faith and to convert others, and like other Puritans he was schooled to despise the adornments of style and to treat literature as a means to an end. In this style, which is rich in powerful physical imagery, the inner life of the Christian is described; body and soul are so involved that it is impossible to separate bodily from mental suffering in the description of his temptations.

In the allegories some of his greatest imaginative successes are due to his dreamlike, introspective style with its subtle personal music; but it is the workaday vigour and concreteness of the prose technique practiced in the sermons which provide a firm stylistic background to these imaginative flights. Episodes of stirring action like these alternate with more stationary passages, and there are various conversations between the pilgrims and those they encounter on the road, some pious and some providing light relief when hypocrites like Talkative and Ignorance are exposed.

The halts at places of refreshment like the Delectable Mountains or the meadow by the River of Life evoke an unearthly spiritual beauty. Only Christ, the Wicket Gate, admits Christian into the right road, and before he can reach it he has to be shown his error in being impressed by the pompous snob Worldly Wiseman, who stands for mere negative conformity to moral and social codes.

Quite early in his journey Christian loses his burden of sin at the Cross, so he now knows that he has received the free pardon of Christ and is numbered among the elect. It might seem that all the crises of the pilgrimage were past, yet this initiation of grace is not the end of the drama but the beginning. Bunyan displays a sharp eye for behaviour and a sardonic sense of humour in his portrayals of such reprobates as Ignorance and Talkative; these moral types are endowed with the liveliness of individuals by a deft etching in of a few dominant features and gestures.

And finally, Christian himself is a transcript from life; Bunyan, the physician of souls with a shrewd eye for backsliders, had faithfully observed his own spiritual growth. Bunyan continued to tend the needs of the Bedford church and the widening group of East Anglian churches associated with it. As his fame increased with his literary reputation, he also preached in Congregational churches in London. His The Life and Death of Mr.

Badman is more like a realistic novel than an allegory in its portrait of the unrelievedly evil and unrepentant tradesman Mr. The book gives an insight into the problems of money and marriage when the Puritans were settling down after the age of persecution and beginning to find their social role as an urban middle class.

The town of Mansoul is besieged by the hosts of the devil, is relieved by the army of Emanuel, and is later undermined by further diabolic attacks and plots against his rule. The metaphor works on several levels; it represents the conversion and backslidings of the individual soul, as well as the story of mankind from the Fall through to the Redemption and the Last Judgment; there is even a more precise historical level of allegory relating to the persecution of Nonconformists under Charles II.

This book gives a more social and humorous picture of the Christian life than the First Part and shows Bunyan lapsing from high drama into comedy, but the great concluding passage on the summoning of the pilgrims to cross the River of Death is perhaps the finest single thing Bunyan ever wrote.

In spite of his ministerial responsibilities Bunyan found time to publish a large number of doctrinal and controversial works in the last 10 years of his life. In literary estimation, however, Bunyan remained beyond the pale of polite literature during the 18th century, though his greatness was acknowledged by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.

Later literary historians noted his indirect influence on the 18th-century novel, particularly the introspective fiction of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. After the Romantic movement he was recognized as a type of natural genius and placed alongside Homer and Robert Burns. Twentieth-century scholarship has made it possible to see how much he owed to the tradition of homiletic prose and to Puritan literary genres already developed when he began to write. Nothing illustrates better the profound symbolic truth of this noted work than its continuing ability, even in translation, to evoke responses in readers belonging to widely separated cultural traditions.

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