THE MESSAGE OF BUNYi TO OUR AGE

Evening Star, Issue 20032, 24 November 1928, Page 2

THE MESSAGE OF BUNYi TO OUR AGE

In the parish register of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, there is the record of the baptism of “ John, the soune of Thomas Bunnion.”/ It will bo 300 years next Friday since that event took place. After the lapse of,: those three centuries tho event will be celebrated throughout the whole’ English-speaking world. Why? How is it that Time, so careless of - tho other countless millions of its children, takes this one to its heart and ordains that his, memory shall smell sweet and bloom in tho dust? For a long wliile past we have been keeping company on this page with his pilgrims in his immortal book. Let us join the multitudes who at his tercentenary will be talking of himself. Let us try to indicate the message of Bunyan to our time. * « * * Between his birth and his death, 1628-ICBB, lies the wildest and most formative period in English history. It underwent a reformation in tho widest sense of that word. It is impossible for us of these quiet times to recapture or realise that age with its confusions, agonies,* and energies. The Book of Common Prayer was made the rule of faith and order. Tho Act of Uniformity turned a fifth of the English clergy and of their churches. The Five Milo Act forbade them to teach in schools, or settle within five miles of any city or corporation or parish where they had formerly ministered. The Conventicle Act forbade tho public or private assembly of more than four persons for Nonconformist worship. These were the hammer blows for tho destruction of “Dissent.” But force is no match for ideas horsed on convictions. Yot in midst of all this there was, in a sense, a merrio England, though the merriment of “miserable men can bo sadder than a burial day of kings.” There were dancing, dicing, cock fighting, and bear baiting in abundance. It was amid scenes such as these that Bunyau’s lot was cast. He was a child of his age and of tho storm. There are only two kinds of men: those whom tho storm rides, and those who ride the storm. For a time Bunyan was one of tho former. His nature led him into all sorts of pleasures, good, bad, and indifferent. Ho has frankly drawn a portrait of himself in ‘ Life and Death, of Mr Badman,’ and specially in ‘ Grace Abounding. 1 “ Many a soul-poisoning meal did 1 make out of divers lusts, as drinking, dancing, playing pleasure with wicked ones of this world.” He goes on to say ho was ono of those who may be called tho devil’s chief sin breedera. Making allowance for some exaggeration, Southey’s summing up of this wild, shag-haired youth may stand: “ He was a young blackguard.” Yot this young blackguard evolved from < being the child of the storm to become its master. He lived to bo the founder of modern romance, and to produce tho greatest imaginative work in* English literature. More than that, Coleridge describes it as the “ best summae theologica evangelic® ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.” Ho became a master of English. When ho went to London to preach no church was large enough to contain the crowds that flocked to hear him. By his teaching and practice he was one of the chief founders of English democracy as distiguished from that of France. In short, he has waked echoes which roil from soul to soul, and live for ever and for over. « * » * Ono wonders what might have happened to this “ young blackguard ” had ho lived in these days of Psycho-analy-sis and Mental Defective Acts. It would bo interesting to know what tho school of Frond, Jung, and Co. would have made of him. Fortunately wc are not required to solve that problem._ The message which comes to us out of it all is take care of the child. Wo talk about explosives. Tho biggest and most deadly explosive is the babe in the cradle. There, in the cradle of today, lies tho most revolutionary force m the world. Who would have dreamt that this babe, “ John Bunnion,” who was baptised three hundred years ago in the littlo parish church of Elstow. to whom his father in his will bequeathed unto “ My sonne John Bunyan ono shilling,” to be paid “ within a year after my death” (so proud aud poor-was he!) that this child should today be talked about all over the Englishspeaking world? And so take care of the child. Somebody says God is moulding the hope of to-morrow in tho childhood of to-day. A hundred years ago or so Europe was devastated by the Napoleonic wars. But there were seven boys who were afterwards to reconstruct tho shattered world. In English homes there were Gladstone, Cobden, and John Bright. In Italy Cavour and Garibaldi. In America Wendell Phillips and Lincoln. Within tho memory of many of us there was a widowed mother in a remote region of Wales. Her baby was dangerously ill. She walked five miles' in the night through a drenching rain to get a doctor. The doctor hesitated, tho child was only the son of a poor labourer. It was a wild night, but he went. The child was saved. Tho child was David Lloyd George. Whatever other opinions we may hold about his career, everybody admits that he saved the Empire in the crisis of the war.’ So the first message of Bunyan emphasises the last words of one of tho victims of the French terror of ’ninety-three, quoted and commended by John Morley: “Even at this incomprehensible moment on the fatal tumbril, with nothing free but my voice, I would still cry Take Care to a child who should come too near the wheel; perhaps I may save his life; perhaps ho may one day save his country.” > * * * * A second message emerges when we ask how this child, John Bunyan, was made into his marvellous manhood. It began with his marriage. Up til! then he was a wild rbysterer, the talk arid terror of his town. “ I lighted,” he says, “ upon a wife. We came together not having as much stuff as a dish or a spoon between ns.” 0 woman, great is thy faith! He had just come back from the war. He was what we would call in these days a disillusioned exservice man. Justice has yet to bo done to the insight and heroism of this orphan girl who gave herself to this uncouth and unemployed ex-soldier. She bad piety in good store. She prayed with him and for him. She taught him to read; she got him to go to church. She reformed him. But reformation Is not regeneration. So lapses came; old sine- and old habits

pulled him' into the mud at times. Like Kipling’s Kim; The fatted calf is dressed for me, But the husks have greater zest for. me; , I think my pigs will bo best for me, And I’m off to the sties again. But through thick and thin, through good report and evil report, she held on to him. They read good books together in the twilight in their little thatched cottage. She got him back again into the 'church. *lt was a refuge from the drab actualities into which lie had been drifting. Tho music and ideas appealed to his imagination, lie became what we should call in these days an Anglo-Catholic. “ 1 adored,” ho says, “ and that with great devotion, the high place, priest, clerk, vestments, services.” Ho was treading unconsciously the pathway of St. Paul, through the Law to the Cross. The great crisis, the supremo illumination of life came to him like many another quite suddenly. One day he saw three poor women sitting in the sunshine talking of religion. They had a peace and a joy which he had not. Why not? That question haunted him by day and night. It is not our purpose here to detail the desperate battles through which his soul fought its way to the light. Enough to give the issue. Opening his Bible one day, his eye lighted on the words “ He hath made peace by the blood of His Cross.” Often before he had read the words, but there is a “ fullness of time ” in everything. That had now arrived for him. The Law had to do its work before the Gospel could take him into its peace and power. Ho tells us in ‘ Grace Abounding ’ about the wonder and joy that took him the day ho made the discovery that ho had not to work out his salvation, but to accept a salvation wrought out for him and mediated to him God in Christ. “No mere ecclesiastical toll-bridge this, nor draw-bridgo, over which liveried envoys should pass to him with certified indul-. gences, but a lover’s bridge in very truth and sacred trysting place of the soul.” He would heartily have joined with the modern hymnist in singing: The Cross! it takes our guilt away; It holds the fainting spirit up; It cheers with hope the gloomy day, And sweetens every bitter cup; It makes the coward spirit brave, And nerves the feeble arm fcfr fight; It takes its terrors from tho grave, And gilds the bed . of death with light. How and why it docs that this is not the place to discuss. It is introduced hero simply to say that it was tho making of Bnnyan. That is a second message of his to our time. And after we have tried all other methods of making and remaking men—psychological, political, scientific —we -may have to como hack in the end of the day to this old-fashioned one. -X- & It is Introduced, also, for another reason—viz., to emphasise a third message of Banyan's to our time: the supremacy of duty. His life story after tho .Gross had lighted up his way is his loyalty at all costa to what his conscience, enlightened by Christ, told him what was right to do. Loyalty to duty kept him in prison for twelve years. He could have easily compromised, and so escaped all the terrible privations to which this loyalty subjected him. “It was my duty to stand to His Word whether He would over look upon mo or po: wherefore, thought I, the point being thus, I am for going on.” And go on he did. And that is another of his messages for our time. And it is needed. On all hands testimony accumulates as to the decay of the sense of duty. A generation has grown up that has never known, or has abandoned, the sanctions of duty where Bunyan found them. Science and philosophy between them have emptied conscience of its moral authority. Ought is no longer a word to conjure with. Self-pleasing, and not self-denial, is the motto of the multitude. "We have drifted far from the moorings which held Bunyan and thousands of others to the right at all hazards. And we have found no equivalents. Substitutes indeed there are in plenty. But a substitute is not an equivalent. Electricity may be a substitute for the sun. But an equivalent? Not yet—or ever. For many duty lias ceased to bo a question between right and wrong, and has become a matter of pleasure and pain. What is pleasurable is right. What is painful is wrong. But it was men and women of another stamp that made our Empire great, and it will ho men and women of another stamp who will be needed to prevent its decline. We have moved on from many of Banyan’s beliefs and creeds. But his central faith, with its correlative duty, remains still tho ono hope of the world. As one of his most recent biographers says: “To believe that the universe is organised for ultimate and eternal holiness, and that to this end Holy Love works through all things as redeeming grace—this has never been a matter of formal demonstration, but always a venture of the soul. Faith is neither easier nor more difficult than in Banyan’s day; it is still what he found it to be—a call to Valour. And for the rest neither criticism, science, nor the new psychology has dissolved for us the facts of sin, of sorrow, of mortality; and tho needs of the human heart remain unchanged. Conscience, duty, the eternal authority of right over wrong have outlasted the Puritan times, and man continues still » pilgrim and a stranger on the earth.”