The Tinker of Elstow

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief. 1 TIMOTHY 1:15

A tinker’s son. John Bunyan was born in 1628 at Harrowden, a hamlet in the parish of Elstow, a mile or so south of Bedford, and was baptised in Elstow church on 30 November that year. His father, Thomas, was a tinker, a mender of pots and kettles, and John followed him into the trade. The family were poor, though they owned their cottage. Bunyan later described his father’s house as among the meanest in the land, with that mixture of humility and bluntness that runs through all his writing. He was taught to read and write, and then, as he tells it, set himself to forget whatever good he had learned.

A lad of the village. Grace Abounding is merciless about his youth. He swore, he lied, he broke the Sabbath, he was the ringleader of the young men of Elstow in their games and mischief. Readers looking for a great scandal behind the self-accusation generally fail to find one. His sins were the ordinary sins of an ordinary young man, seen through a conscience that God later gave eyes.

The soldier. In 1644 his mother died, and within weeks his sister; his father married again almost at once. That same year, at about sixteen, Bunyan was mustered into the Parliamentary army in the Civil War and served in the garrison at Newport Pagnell. He saw little fighting. But he remembered all his life that at one siege another man asked to go in his place, and was shot in the head as he stood sentinel. Bunyan counted it a mercy, and admitted that at the time it did not move him at all.

Two books and a dish and a spoon. After the army he came home, took up the tinker’s trade and married. History has not kept his first wife’s name. They were, he says, as poor as poor might be, without so much as a dish or a spoon between them. But she brought with her two books that had belonged to her godly father, Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, and they read them together. The books did not convert him, but they began something. He went to church twice a day, admired the priest and the vestments, and became outwardly very religious. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1650. She was blind, and she lay, he said, nearer his heart than all the rest.

A voice on the green. One Sunday, in the middle of a game of cat — a village stick-and-ball game, as he was about to strike the second blow, a question darted into his soul: would he leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell? He looked up to heaven and seemed to see the Lord looking down on him, displeased. He concluded, in despair, that it was too late for him, and went back to his game. Not long after, a woman of the village, no saint herself, rebuked him for his cursing outside her shop window, and to his own amazement he gave up swearing. He reformed his life and was pleased with himself. He was, by his own account, a brisk talker in religion.

Poor women in the sun. Then, about 1651, his work took him into Bedford, and in one of its streets he came upon three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun and talking about the things of God. He drew near, expecting to join in. He could not. He heard, but he did not understand. They spoke of a new birth, of the work of God on their hearts, of the promises that held them up under temptation, and of their own righteousness as worthless. They seemed to him to have found a new world. He went back to them again and again, and they told their pastor, John Gifford, about him. Gifford, a former Royalist officer who had himself been converted out of a wild life, took the tinker in, invited him to his house and taught him. Bunyan joined the little Bedford congregation in 1653.

The years in the dark. What followed was not peace but the long ordeal told in chapters nineteen and twenty: years of doubt and temptation, ended at last by a sentence that fell on his soul in a field.

The tinker in the pulpit. The Bedford church soon saw that their tinker could preach. About 1655 the brethren asked him to speak, first privately and then in the villages round about. Crowds came to hear him, and he preached, as he said, what he felt. He also began to write, first in controversy with the Quakers in Some Gospel Truths Opened, then in a stream of books that never stopped. His first wife died about 1658, leaving him with four young children, and in 1659 he married Elizabeth, a young woman of the congregation.

Arrest. In 1660 Charles II came back to the throne, and with him the laws against worship outside the Church of England. In November that year Bunyan went to preach at a farmhouse at Lower Samsell, near Harlington. He was warned that a warrant was out for him. He would not run, lest his flight should discourage the weak. The constable came in as the meeting began. At the next sessions he was indicted for upholding unlawful meetings and for refusing to attend the parish church. The justices required only that he promise to stop preaching. He would not promise. He stayed in Bedford gaol, with a few brief intervals, for twelve years.

Elizabeth before the judges. Elizabeth was expecting a child when he was taken. The shock brought on labour, and the baby died. In 1661 she went three times to plead for her husband, the last time before Sir Matthew Hale and his fellow judges at the Bedford assizes, telling them that she had four small children, one of them blind, and nothing to live on but the charity of good people. Hale was moved, but said he could do nothing. She went home with nothing.

The prison years. The gaol was not a dungeon; Bunyan had visitors, and for a time some liberty. He made long tagged laces to support his family, and he wrote: Christian Behaviour, The Holy City, I Will Pray with the Spirit, and in 1666 Grace Abounding.

The dream in the den. Somewhere in these years, perhaps near the end of the long imprisonment or during a shorter one later, Bunyan began to write an allegory, almost as a diversion from graver work. It opens with a man walking through the wilderness of this world, lying down in a den and dreaming. The den was the gaol. The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in 1678 and sold at once. A Second Part, following Christian’s wife Christiana and her children, came out some years later.

Bishop Bunyan. In 1672, under the King’s Declaration of Indulgence, Bunyan was released and licensed to preach, and the Bedford congregation, which had already chosen him as its pastor, received him home. For sixteen years he preached, visited the scattered meetings of the county, travelled to London where great crowds came to hear him, and wrote — among much else The Life and Death of Mr Badman and The Holy War. Friends and enemies alike nicknamed him Bishop Bunyan. He was imprisoned again for some months in the mid-1670s.

The last journey. In August 1688 he rode to Reading to reconcile a father and a son who had quarrelled, and succeeded. Riding on to London through heavy rain, he arrived soaked at the house of his friend John Strudwick on Snow Hill, and fell ill with a fever. He died there on 31 August 1688, aged fifty-nine, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, the burial ground of the Dissenters. His last errand had been to make peace.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Bunyan’s turning came through a wife’s two books, a voice on the green, some poor women talking in the sun and a patient pastor. List the ordinary people and means God used to reach you, and thank Him for each by name.

2. The women at the door spoke of things Bunyan did not understand. Ask whether your conversation about God is the kind that would make a religious talker hungry for more.

3. Bunyan would not promise to stop preaching, and it cost his family dearly. Is there any faithfulness God is asking of you that will cost you something? Count the cost honestly.

4. Pray this week for someone imprisoned for their faith today.

5. His last journey was to reconcile a father and son. Is there a quarrel you could help to mend?

A PRAYER

Lord, You found John Bunyan on a village green and in a Bedford street, and You would not let him go.

Thank You for the people and the books, the voices and the providences, by which You have found me.

Give me the courage he had to be faithful when faithfulness is costly, and the tenderness he had for those I love.

And make me, like him at the last, a maker of peace. Amen.