Perhaps not so very many young people of today have read The Pilgrim's Progress, and yet it is a remarkable book that has been translated into more languages and gone through more editions than any other book except the Bible. And it was written by a remarkable man-John Bunyan. He was not rich or well-educated or anything the world calls great, but just a simple, honest, working man, and yet his name is today found in more than one list of "Great Writers."
It is nearly three hundred years since, in the autumn of the year 1628, John Bunyan was born in a humble, straw-thatched cottage in the country village of Elstow in Bedfordshire, England. His parents, though poor, were respectable and hard-working.
The England of three hundred years ago was in some respects very unlike the England of today. There were no trains, steamships or telephones. Cars and planes were things not even dreamed of. Still, the sun shone as brightly, birds sang as sweetly, and every springtime groups of happy children went out to gather wildflowers.
No one in those days seemed to have even thought of providing free education for the boys and girls, and so children whose parents could not afford to pay the school fees were not only allowed to grow up without knowing how to read and write, but they were often sent out to help earn their living by working in fields or mills at an age when we should say they ought to have been starting to school.
The father and mother of John Bunyan were, as he himself believed, led by the guiding hand of God to send him to the village school, where he remained long enough to learn how to read and write. But it is not as a great writer but as a simple, humble follower of the Lord Jesus Christ that we care most to remember him.
We do not know much about Bunyan's boyhood, only that he was a real boy, entering with keen zest into all the sports of his village companions. We know enough of the outdoor sports of his day to be sure that they were always rough and sometimes cruel, bull-baiting and cock-fighting being among them. The village green was, on Sunday afternoons, the favorite gathering-place of the village boys, and Bunyan soon became an acknowledged leader in their sports and was as careless and godless as any of them, though he did not fall into the drinking habits that were then so common. He seems to have learned his father's trade of a tinker, in those days considered a far more settled and respectable calling than it is at present. He did not travel about the country with a tiny cart, though he may have visited the neighboring farms and cottages when his services were required to repair kitchen utensils, but he had a settled home in which he carried on his trade.
Wild and reckless as his village companions often thought him, as a boy of not more than nine or ten years old, he often had a deep sense of sin and a great fear of death and judgment. He himself tells us that frightful dreams and fearful visions often made him afraid to go to sleep, and the fear of being lost, eternally lost, often came like a dark cloud over him even while engaged in some boyish sport. But these impressions soon faded away.
Still, the eye of God was upon him, and the hand of God was outstretched to save him. Twice he narrowly escaped drowning, once in the river Ouse, near Bedford, and once farther north in a creek of the sea.
The death of his mother, his sister Margaret, and a very short time afterward his father may have depressed his naturally high spirits and helped to make him long for something more stirring than his quiet life at Elstow. He could hardly have been more than sixteen when he enlisted as a soldier, and for a short time he tried army life during the civil war between Parliament and Charles I.
He was not more than twenty years of age when he married. The short account Bunyan wrote of his own life tells us little if anything about the orphan girl he married, not even the name of her parents, only that her father was a man who feared God and that she brought with her to her new home two or three books that had belonged to him. One of these, The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, was in after years greatly valued by Bunyan, though at the time of his marriage he had no taste for such reading. He himself said, "A ballad or a news-book would have pleased me better." Mrs. Bunyan brought no marriage portion to her husband, but she proved herself a true and faithful wife and a loving mother to his children, of whom he had several. His blind daughter Mary, a gentle, thoughtful child, had, even as a baby, a very warm place in his affections.
The young couple began their married life with very little of this world's goods, and they had, as he also tells us, hardly a dish or spoon between them. "We were as poor as poor could be."
Much of the little that Bunyan had learned during his school days had doubtless been forgotten, but he was fond of reading, and his young wife would often, when his day's work was ended, beg him to read to her from one of the books her father had so loved and prized. She would also tell him of her father's godly life, and how he used to reprove swearing, or the use of bad language, whenever or wherever he heard it.
Bunyan thought he would be such a man as his wife's father had been, and so he began to go twice every Sunday to church and became one of the bell-ringers. But his reformation, as far as it went, was only outward; he had not felt his need of the grace of God or even his need of salvation through the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ.