Works of John Bunyan — Volume 01
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The Works Of John Bunyan
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. We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind.
Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. The Word of God! What calling of God on your own soul! May all be blessed in reading this! Bunyan has the flavor of the Holy Scriptures and a supreme love and fear of God. I am encouraged and edified in these writings.
One person found this helpful. Great servant of God. See all 6 reviews. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item? The Holy War Updated, Illustrated: The Pharisee and Publican Kindle Edition. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. The Pharisee and Publican. The Pilgrim's Progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream, by John Bunyan. Works of John Bunyan — Complete.
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Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Bunyan's later years, in spite of another shorter term of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort as a popular author and preacher, and pastor of the Bedford Meeting.
He died aged 59 after falling ill on a journey to London and is buried in Bunhill Fields. The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most published books in the English language; 1, editions having been printed by , years after the author's death. Some other churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death 31 August. Bunyan's date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 30 November , the baptismal entry in the parish register reading "John the sonne of Thomas Bunnion Jun.
Bunyan's father was a brazier or tinker who travelled around the area mending pots and pans, and his grandfather had been a chapman or small trader. As a child Bunyan learned his father's trade of tinker and was given some rudimentary schooling. In the summer of Bunyan lost both his mother and his sister Margaret. There are few details available about his military service, which took place during the first stage of the English Civil War.
A muster roll for the garrison of Newport Pagnell shows him as private "John Bunnian". When I was a Souldier, I, with others, were 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, to which, when I had consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood Sentinel, he was shot into the head with a Musket bullet and died.
Bunyan's army service provided him with a knowledge of military language which he then used in his book The Holy War , and also exposed him to the ideas of the various religious sects and radical groups he came across in Newport Pagnell. Within two years of leaving the army, Bunyan married. The name of his wife and the exact date of his marriage are not known, but Bunyan did recall that his wife, a pious young woman, brought with her into the marriage two books that she had inherited from her father: He also recalled that, apart from these two books, the newly-weds possessed little: They would have three more children, Elizabeth, Thomas and John.
By his own account, Bunyan had as a youth enjoyed bell-ringing, dancing and playing games including on Sunday, which was forbidden by the Puritans , who held a particularly high view of Sunday, called the Lord's Day. One Sunday the vicar of Elstow preached a sermon against Sabbath breaking, and Bunyan took this sermon to heart. That afternoon, as he was playing tip-cat a game in which a small piece of wood is hit with a bat on Elstow village green , he heard a voice from the heavens "Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to Heaven?
Or have thy sins, and go to Hell? During this time Bunyan, whilst on his travels as a tinker, happened to be in Bedford and pass a group of women who were talking about spiritual matters on their doorstep. The women were in fact some of the founding members of the Bedford Free Church or Meeting and Bunyan, who had been attending the parish church of Elstow, was so impressed by their talk that he joined their church. In Bunyan's wife died, leaving him with four small children, one of them blind. A year later he married an eighteen-year-old woman named Elizabeth.
The religious tolerance which had allowed Bunyan the freedom to preach became curtailed with the restoration of the monarchy in The members of the Bedford Meeting were no longer able to meet in St John's church, which they had been sharing with the Anglican congregation. Deciding not to make an escape, he was arrested and brought before the local magistrate Sir Francis Wingate, at Harlington House. The Act of Uniformity , which made it compulsory for preachers to be ordained by an Anglican bishop and for the revised Book of Common Prayer to be used in church services, was still two years away, and the Act of Conventicles , which made it illegal to hold religious meetings of five or more people outside the Church of England was not passed until Bunyan was arrested under the Conventicle Act of , which made it an offence to attend a religious gathering other than at the parish church with more than five people outside their family.
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The offence was punishable by 3 months imprisonment followed by banishment or execution if the person then failed to promise not to re-offend. The Act had been little used, and Bunyan's arrest was probably due in part to concerns that non-conformist religious meetings were being held as a cover for people plotting against the king although this was not the case with Bunyan's meetings. The trial of Bunyan took place in January at the quarter sessions in Bedford, before a group of magistrates under John Kelynge , who would later help to draw up the Act of Uniformity.
As Bunyan refused to agree to give up preaching, his period of imprisonment eventually extended to 12 years and brought great hardship to his family. Elizabeth, who made strenuous attempts to obtain his release, had been pregnant when her husband was arrested and she subsequently gave birth prematurely to a still-born child. But Bunyan remained resolute: There were however occasions when he was allowed out of prison, depending on the gaolers and the mood of the authorities at the time, and he was able to attend the Bedford Meeting and even preach.
His daughter Sarah was born during his imprisonment the other child of his second marriage, Joseph, was born after his release in He also had at times the company of other preachers who had been imprisoned.