of divinity were exceedingly wroth with this presumptuous tinker who “strove to mend souls as well as kettles and pans.”
On the restoration of Charles II. severe acts were passed against those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England. Bunyan, as an itinerant preacher of doctrines not fully in accord with that church, was especially obnoxious to those who upheld the law. As he refused to stop preaching, he was finally arrested and convicted of having “devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church.” He was sentenced to the county jail, and there, with the exception of a short period, he remained a prisoner for twelve years (1660–1672). This jail or the town jail—for he seems to have been imprisoned in both—was the “den” of which he speaks in the opening lines of “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and if it was as filthy and as miserably kept as most prisons were at that time in England, then the word “den” exactly describes it.
But in his marvellous dream of “A Pilgrimage from this World to the Next” (published in 1678), Bunyan forgot his squalid surroundings. Like Milton, in his blindness, loneliness, and poverty, he looked within and found that
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell.”
Bunyan’s chief writings besides “The Pilgrim’s Progress” were “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” and “The Holy War;” though he published in all about forty other books great and small, and after his death, in 1688, some ten or twelve more were issued bearing his name.
Lord Macaulay says of Bunyan, “Though there were many clever men during the latter part of the seventeenth century, there were only two great creative
