With reference to all these notes on Original Sin, see
Aids to Reflection
, p. 250-286. — Ed.
Aids to Reflection
, p. 274. — Ed.
Ante. 'Vindication, &c.' p. 357-8.
Ibid.
Dupliciter vero sanguis Christi et caro intelligitur, spiritualis ilia atque divina, de qua ipse dixit, Caro mea vere est cibus, &c., vel caro et sanguis, quæ crucifixa est, et qui militis effusus est lancea.
In
Epist. Ephes.
c. i.
See
Table Talk
, p. 72, second edit. Ed.
Ipsum regem tradunt, volventem commentaries Numæ, quum ibi occulta solennia sacrificia Jovi Elicio facta invenisset, operatum his sacris se abdidisse; sed non rite initum aut curatum id sacrum esse; nee solum nullam ei oblatam Cælestium speciem, sed ira Jovis, sollicitati prava religione, fulmine ictum cum domo conflagrasse.
L. i. c. xxxi. Ed.
"This also rests upon the practice apostolical and traditive interpretation of holy Church, and yet cannot be denied that so it ought to be, by any man that would not have his Christendom suspected. To these I add the communion of women, the distinction of books apocryphal from canonical, that such books were written by such Evangelists and Apostles, the whole tradition of Scripture itself, the Apostles' Creed, &c. ... These and divers others of greater consequence, (which I dare not specify for fear of being misunderstood,) rely but upon equal faith with this of Episcopacy,"
&c. Ed.
S. xxvi.
S. iv. 4. Ed.
Notes on The Pilgrim's Progress
I know of no book, the Bible excepted, as above all comparison, which I,
according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as
teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that
was in Christ Jesus, as the
Pilgrim's Progress
. It is, in my conviction,
incomparably the best
Summa Theologiæ Evangelicæ
ever produced by
a writer not miraculously inspired.
June 14, 1830.
It disappointed, nay surprised me, to find Robert Southey express
himself so coldly respecting the style and diction of the
Pilgrim's
Progress
.
can find nothing homely in it but a few phrases and single
words. The conversation between Faithful and Talkative
is a model of
unaffected dignity and rhythmical flow.
Southey's Life of Bunyan
P. xiv.
"We intended not," says Baxter, "to dig down the banks, or pull up the hedge, and lay all waste and common, when we desired the Prelates' tyranny might cease."
No; for the intention had been under the pretext of abating one tyranny to establish a far severer and more galling in its stead: in doing this the banks had been thrown down, and the hedge destroyed; and while the bestial herd who broke in rejoiced in the havoc, Baxter, and other such erring though good men, stood marvelling at the mischief, which never could have been effected, if they had not mainly assisted in it.
But the question is, would these 'erring good' men have been either
willing or able to assist in this work, if the more erring Lauds and
Sheldons had not run riot in the opposite direction? And as for the
'bestial herd,' — compare the whole body of Parliamentarians, all the
fanatical sects included, with the royal and prelatical party in the
reign of Charles II. These were, indeed, a bestial herd. See Baxter's
unwilling and Burnet's honest description of the moral discipline
throughout the realm under Cromwell.
Ib.
p. xv.
They passed with equal facility from strict Puritanism to the utmost license of practical and theoretical impiety, as Antinomians or as Atheists, and from extreme profligacy to extreme superstition in any of its forms.
'They!' How many? and of these how many that would not have been in
Bedlam, or fit for it, under some other form? A madman falls into love
or religion, and then, forsooth! it is love or religion that drove him
mad.
Ib.
p. xxi.
In an evil hour were the doctrines of the Gospel sophisticated with questions which should have been left in the Schools for those who are unwise enough to employ themselves in excogitations of useless subtlety.
But what, at any rate, had Bunyan to do with the Schools? His
perplexities clearly rose out of the operations of his own active but
unarmed mind on the words of the Apostle. If anything is to be
arraigned, it must be the Bible in English, the reading of which is
imposed (and, in my judgment, well and wisely imposed) as a duty on all
who can read. Though Protestants, we are not ignorant of the occasional
and partial evils of promiscuous Bible-reading; but we see them vanish
when we place them beside the good.
Ib.
p. xxiv.
False notions of that corruption of our nature which it is almost as perilous to exaggerate as to dissemble.
I would have said "which it is almost as perilous to misunderstand as to
deny."
Ib.
p. xli. &c.
But the wickedness of the tinker has been greatly over-charged; and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally, to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved. The worst of what he was in his worst days is to be expressed in a single word ... he had been a blackguard, &c.
All this narrative, with the reflections on the facts, is admirable and
worthy of Robert Southey: full of good sense and kind feeling — the
wisdom of love.
Ib.
p. lxi.
But the Sectaries had kept their countrymen from it (the Common Prayer Book), while they had the power, and Bunyan himself in his sphere laboured to dissuade them from it.
Surely the fault lay in the want, or in the feeble and inconsistent
manner, of determining and supporting the proper powers of the Church.
In fact, the Prelates and leading divines of the Church were not only at
variance with each other, but each with himself.
One party, the more faithful and less modified disciples of the first
Reformers, were afraid of bringing anything into even a semblance of a
co-ordination with the Scriptures; and, with the
terriculum
of Popery
ever before their eyes, timidly and sparingly allowed to the Church any
even subordinate power beyond that of interpreting the Scriptures; that
is, of finding the ordinances of the Church implicitly contained in the
ordinances of the inspired writers.
But as they did not assume infallibility in their interpretations, it
amounted to nothing for the consciences of such men as Bunyan and a
thousand others.
The opposite party, Laud, Taylor, and the rest, with a sufficient
dislike of the Pope (that is, at Rome) and of the grosser theological
corruptions of the Romish Church, yet in their hearts as much averse to
the sentiments and proceedings of Luther, Calvin, John Knox, Zuinglius,
and their fellows, and proudly conscious of their superior learning,
sought to maintain their ordinances by appeals to the Fathers, to the
recorded traditions and doctrine of the Catholic priesthood during the
first five or six centuries, and contended for so much that virtually
the Scriptures were subordinated to the Church, which yet they did not
dare distinctly to say out.
The result was that the Anti-Prelatists answered them in the gross by
setting at nought their foundation, that is, the worth, authority and
value of the Fathers.
So much for their variance with each other. But each vindicator of our
established Liturgy and Discipline was divided in himself: he minced
this out of fear of being charged with Popery, and that he dared not
affirm for fear of being charged with disloyalty to the King as the head
of the Church.
The distinction between the Church of which the king is the rightful
head, and the Church which hath no head but Christ, never occurred
either to them or to their antagonists; and as little did they succeed
in appropriating to Scripture what belonged to Scripture, and to the
Church what belonged to the Church.
All things in which the temporal is concerned may be reduced to a
pentad, namely, prothesis, thesis, antithesis, mesothesis and synthesis.
So here —
| Prothesis Christ the Word |
||
| Thesis The Scriptures |
Mesothesis The Holy Spirit |
Antithesis The Church |
| Synthesis The Preacher2 |
Ib.
p. lxiii.
"But there are two ways of obeying," he observed; "the one to do that which I in my conscience do believe that I am bound to do, actively; and where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to suffer what they shall do unto me."
Genuine Christianity worthy of John and Paul!
Ib.
p. lxv.
I am not conscious of any warping power that could have acted for so
very long a period; but from sixteen to now, sixty years of age, I have
retained the very same convictions respecting the Stuarts and their
adherents. Even to Lord Clarendon I never could quite reconcile myself.
How often the pen becomes the tongue of a systematic dream, — a
somniloquist! The sunshine, that is, the comparative power, the distinct
contra-distinguishing judgment of realities as other than mere thoughts,
is suspended. During this state of continuous, not single-mindedness,
but one-side-mindedness, writing is manual somnambulism; the somnial
magic superinduced on, without suspending, the active powers of the mind.
Ib.
p. lxxix.
"They that will have heaven, they must run for it, because the devil, the law, sin, death and hell, follow them. There is never a poor soul that is going to heaven, but the devil, the law, sin, death and hell make after that soul. The devil, your adversary, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. And I will assure you the devil is nimble; he can run apace; he is light of foot; he hath overtaken many; he hath turned up their heels, and hath given them an everlasting fall. Also the law! that can shoot a great way: have a care thou keep out of the reach of those great guns the Ten Commandments! Hell also hath a wide mouth," &c.
It is the fashion of the day to call every man, who in his writings or
discourses gives a prominence to the doctrines on which, beyond all
others, the first Reformers separated from the Romish communion, a
Calvinist. Bunyan may have been one, but I have met with nothing in his
writings (except his Anti-pædobaptism, to which too he assigns no saving
importance) that is not much more characteristically Lutheran; for
instance, this passage is the very echo of the chapter on the Law and
Gospel, in Luther's
Table Talk
.
It would be interesting, and I doubt not, instructive, to know the
distinction in Bunyan's mind between the devil and hell.
Ib.
p. xcvii.
Bunyan concludes with something like a promise of a third part. There appeared one after his death, and it has had the fortune to be included in many editions of the original work.
It is remarkable that Southey should not have seen, or having seen, have
forgotten to notice, that this third part is evidently written by some
Romish priest or missionary in disguise.
Life of Bunyan3
The early part of his life was an open course of wickedness.
Southey, in the
Life
prefixed to his edition of the
Pilgrim's Progress
,
has, in a manner worthy of his head and heart, reduced this oft repeated
charge to its proper value. Bunyan was never, in our received sense of
the word, wicked. He was chaste, sober, honest; but he was a bitter
blackguard; that is, damned his own and his neighbour's eyes on slight
or no occasion, and was fond of a row. In this our excellent Laureate
has performed an important service to morality. For the transmutation of
actual reprobates into saints is doubtless possible; but like the many
recorded facts of corporeal alchemy, it is not supported by modern
experiments.
Pilgrim's Progress
Part i. p. II.
As I walked through the wilderness of this world.
That in the Apocalypse the wilderness is the symbol of the world, or
rather of the worldly life, Bunyan discovered by the instinct of a
similar genius. The whole Jewish history, indeed, in all its details is
so admirably adapted to, and suggestive of, symbolical use, as to
justify the belief that the spiritual application, the interior and
permanent sense, was in the original intention of the inspiring Spirit,
though it might not have been present, as an object of distinct
consciousness, to the inspired writers.
Ib.
... where was a den.
The jail. Mr. Bunyan wrote this precious book in Bedford
jail, where he was confined on account of his religion. The
following anecdote is related of him. A Quaker came to the
jail, and thus addressed him:
"Friend Bunyan, the Lord sent me to seek for thee, and I have been through several counties in search of thee, and now I am glad I have found thee."
To which Mr. Bunyan replied,
"Friend, thou dost not speak the truth in saying the Lord sent thee to seek me; for the Lord well knows that I have been in this jail for some years; and if he had sent thee, he would have sent thee here directly."
Note in Edwards
.
This is a valuable anecdote, for it proves, what might have been
concluded
a priori
, that Bunyan was a man of too much genius to
be a fanatic. No two qualities are more contrary than genius and
fanaticism. Enthusiasm, indeed,
is almost a
synonyme of genius; the moral life in the intellectual light, the will
in the reason; and without it, says Seneca, nothing truly great was ever
achieved by man.
Ib.
p. 12.
And not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"
Reader, was this ever your case? Did you ever see your sins, and feel the burden of them, so as to cry out in the anguish of your soul, What must I do to be saved? If not, you will look on this precious book as a romance or history, which no way concerns you; you can no more understand the meaning of it than if it were wrote in an unknown tongue, for you are yet carnal, dead in your sins, lying in the arms of the wicked one in false security. But this book is spiritual; it can only be understood by spiritually quickened souls who have experienced that salvation in the heart, which begins with a sight of sin, a sense of sin, a fear of destruction and dread of damnation. Such and such only commence Pilgrims from the City of Destruction to the heavenly kingdom.
Note in Edwards
.
Most true. It is one thing to perceive and acknowledge this and that
particular deed to be sinful, that is, contrary to the law of reason or
the commandment of God in Scripture, and another thing to feel sin
within us independent of particular actions, except as the common ground
of them. And it is this latter without which no man can become a
Christian.
Ib.
p. 39.
Now whereas thou sawest that as soon as the first began to sweep, the dust did so fly about that the room by him could not be cleansed, but that thou wast almost choked therewith; this is to show thee, that the Law, instead of cleansing the heart (by its working) from sin, doth revive, put strength into, and increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it; for it doth not give power to subdue.
See Luther's
Table Talk
. The chapters in that work named "Law and
Gospel," contain the very marrow of divinity. Still, however, there
remains much to be done on this subject; namely, to show how the
discovery of sin by the Law tends to strengthen the sin; and why it must
necessarily have this effect, the mode of its action on the appetites
and impetites through the imagination and understanding; and to
exemplify all this in our actual experience.
Ib.
p. 40.
Then I saw that one came to Passion, and brought him a bag of treasure, and poured it down at his feet; the which he took up, and rejoiced therein, and withal laughed Patience to scorn; but I beheld but awhile, and he had lavished all away, and had nothing left him but rags.
One of the not many instances of faulty allegory in
The Pilgrim's
Progress
; that is, it is no allegory. The beholding "but awhile," and
the change into "nothing but rags," is not legitimately imaginable. A
longer time and more interlinks are requisite. It is a hybrid compost of
usual images and generalized words, like the Nile-born nondescript, with
a head or tail of organized flesh, and a lump of semi-mud for the body.
Yet, perhaps, these very defects are practically excellencies in
relation to the intended readers of
The Pilgrim's Progress
.
Ib.
p. 43.
The Interpreter answered, "This is Christ, who continually, with the oil of his grace, maintains the work already begun in the heart; by the means of which, notwithstanding what the Devil can do, the souls of his people prove gracious still. And in that thou sawest that the man stood behind the wall to maintain the fire, this is to teach thee, that it is hard for the tempted to see how this work of grace is maintained in the soul."
This is beautiful; yet I cannot but think it would have been still more
appropriate, if the waterpourer had been a Mr. Legality, a prudentialist
offering his calculation of consequences as the moral antidote to guilt
and crime; and if the oil-instillator, out of sight and from within, had
represented the corrupt nature of man, that is, the spiritual will
corrupted by taking up a nature into itself.
Ib.
What, then, has the sinner who is the subject of grace no hand in keeping up the work of grace in the heart? No! It is plain Mr. Bunyan was not an Arminian.
Note in Edwards
.
If by metaphysics we mean those truths of the pure reason which always
transcend, and not seldom appear to contradict, the understanding, or
(in the words of the great Apostle) spiritual verities which can only be
spiritually discerned — and this is the true and legitimate meaning of
metaphysics, [Greek: metà tà physikà] — then I affirm, that this very
controversy between the Arminians and the Calvinists, in which both are
partially right in what they affirm, and both wholly wrong in what they
deny, is a proof that without metaphysics there can be no light of
faith.
Ib.
p. 45.
I left off to watch and be sober; I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts
This single paragraph proves, in opposition to the assertion in the
preceding note in Edwards, that in Bunyan's judgment there must be at
least a negative co-operation of the will of man with the divine grace,
an energy of non-resistance to the workings of the Holy Spirit. But the
error of the Calvinists is, that they divide the regenerate will in man
from the will of God, instead of including it.
Ib.
p. 49.
" So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble; and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more."
We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding (or discernment of reason) that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
1. John, v. 20, 21.
Alas! how many Protestants make a mental idol of the Cross, scarcely
less injurious to the true faith in the Son of God than the wooden
crosses and crucifixes of the Romanists! — and this, because they have
not been taught that Jesus was both the Christ and the great symbol of
Christ.
Strange, that we can explain spiritually, what to take up the cross of
Christ, to be crucified with Christ, means; — yet never ask what the
Crucifixion itself signifies, but rest satisfied in the historic image.
That one declaration of the Apostle, that by wilful sin we
crucify
the Son of God afresh
, might have roused us to nobler thoughts.
Ib.
p. 52.
And besides, say they, if we get into the way, what matters which way we get in? If we are in, we are in. Thou art but in the way, who, as we perceive, came in at the gate: and we are also in the way, that came tumbling over the wall: wherein now is thy condition better than ours?
The allegory is clearly defective, inasmuch as 'the way' represents two
diverse meanings;
- the outward profession of Christianity, and
- the inward and spiritual grace.
But it would be very difficult to mend it.
1830.
In this instance (and it is, I believe, the only one in the work,) the
allegory degenerates into a sort of pun, that is, in the two senses of
the word 'way,' and thus supplies Formal and Hypocrite with an argument
which Christian cannot fairly answer, or rather one to which Bunyan
could not make his Christian return the proper answer without
contradicting the allegoric image.
For the obvious and only proper answer is: No! you are not in the same
'way' with me, though you are walking on the same 'road.'
But it has a worse defect, namely, that it leaves the reader uncertain
as to what the writer precisely meant, or wished to be understood, by
the allegory.