第30章 CHAPTER VI.(2)

But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quite so narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, during the greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painful one, especially when spent, as it sometimes was, "under cruel and oppressive jailers." The enforced separation from his wife and children, especially his tenderly loved blind daughter, Mary, was a continually renewed anguish to his loving heart. "The parting with them," he writes, "hath often been to me as pulling the flesh from the bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should often have brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them;especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all beside. Poor child, thought I, thou must be beaten, thou must beg, thou must suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow on thee. O, the thoughts of the hardships my blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces." He seemed to himself like a man pulling down his house on his wife and children's head, and yet he felt, "I must do it; O, I must do it." He was also, he tells us, at one time, being but "a young prisoner," greatly troubled by the thoughts that "for aught he could tell," his "imprisonment might end at the gallows," not so much that he dreaded death as that he was apprehensive that when it came to the point, even if he made "a scrabbling shift to clamber up the ladder," he might play the coward and so do discredit to the cause of religion. "I was ashamed to die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this." The belief that his imprisonment might be terminated by death on the scaffold, however groundless, evidently weighed long on his mind. The closing sentences of his third prison book, "Christian Behaviour," published in 1663, the second year of his durance, clearly point to such an expectation. "Thus have I in few words written to you before I die, . . . not knowing the shortness of my life, nor the hindrances that hereafter I may have of serving my God and you." The ladder of his apprehensions was, as Mr. Froude has said, "an imaginary ladder," but it was very real to Bunyan. "Oft I was as if I was on the ladder with a rope about my neck." The thought of it, as his autobiography shows, caused him some of his deepest searchings of heart, and noblest ventures of faith. He was content to suffer by the hangman's hand if thus he might have an opportunity of addressing the crowd that he thought would come to see him die. "And if it must be so, if God will but convert one soul by my very last words, I shall not count my life thrown away or lost." And even when hours of darkness came over his soul, and he was tempted to question the reality of his Christian profession, and to doubt whether God would give him comfort at the hour of death, he stayed himself up with such bold words as these. "I was bound, but He was free. Yea, 'twas my duty to stand to His word whether He would ever look on me or no, or save me at the last. If God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into Eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if Thou wilt catch me, do. If not, I will venture for Thy name."Bunyan being precluded by his imprisonment from carrying on his brazier's craft for the support of his wife and family, and his active spirit craving occupation, he got himself taught how to make "long tagged laces," "many hundred gross" of which, we are told by one who first formed his acquaintance in prison, he made during his captivity, for "his own and his family's necessities." "While his hands were thus busied," writes Lord Macaulay, "he had often employment for his mind and for his lips." "Though a prisoner he was a preacher still." As with St. Paul in his Roman chains, "the word of God was not bound." The prisoners for conscience' sake, who like him, from time to time, were cooped up in Bedford gaol, including several of his brother ministers and some of his old friends among the leading members of his own little church, furnished a numerous and sympathetic congregation. At one time a body of some sixty, who had met for worship at night in a neighbouring wood, were marched off to gaol, with their minister at their head. But while all about him was in confusion, his spirit maintained its even calm, and he could at once speak the words of strength and comfort that were needed. In the midst of the hurry which so many "newcomers occasioned," writes the friend to whom we are indebted for the details of his prison life, "I have heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of faith and plerophory of Divine assistance that has made me stand and wonder."These sermons addressed to his fellow prisoners supplied, in many cases, the first outlines of the books which, in rapid succession, flowed from his pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment, relieving the otherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement. Bunyan himself tells us that this was the case with regard to his "Holy City," the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind when addressing "his brethren in the prison chamber,"nor can we doubt that the case was the same with other works of his. To these we shall hereafter return. Nor was it his fellow prisoners only who profited by his counsels. In his "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," he gives us a story of a woman who came to him when he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her master, and to ask his help. Hers was probably a representative case. The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious counsel and exhortation, was given to study and composition. For this his confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would have looked for in vain. The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably. His library was, at least at one period, a very limited one, - "the least and the best library,"writes a friend who visited him in prison, "that I ever saw, consisting only of two books - the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs.'" "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no cause to complain of intellectual destitution." Bunyan's mode of composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid, - thoughts succeeding one another with a quickness akin to inspiration, - was anything but careless. The "limae labor" with him was unsparing.