Authors, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Bunyan, John, 1628-1688; Puritans -- England -- Clergy -- Biography
make out of divers lusts, such as drinking, dancing, playing, pleasure
with the wicked ones of the world; and so wedded was I to my sins, that
thought I to myself, 'I will have them though I lose my soul.'" And
then, after narrating the struggles he had had with his conscience, the
alternations of hope and fear which he passed through, which are more
fully described in his "Grace Abounding," he thus vividly depicts the
full assurance of faith he had attained to: "I saw through grace that it
was the Blood shed on Mount Calvary that did save and redeem sinners, as
clearly and as really with the eyes of my soul as ever, methought, I had
seen a penny loaf bought with a penny. . . O let the saints know that
unless the devil can pluck Christ out of heaven he cannot pull a true
believer out of Christ." In a striking passage he shows how, by turning
Satan's temptations against himself, Christians may "Get the art as to
outrun him in his own shoes, and make his own darts pierce himself."
"What! didst thou never learn to outshoot the devil in his own bow, and
cut off his head with his own sword as David served Goliath?" The whole
treatise is somewhat wearisome, but the pious reader will find much in it
for spiritual edification.
CHAPTER IV.
We cannot doubt that one in whom loyalty was so deep and fixed a
principle as Bunyan, would welcome with sincere thankfulness the
termination of the miserable interval of anarchy which followed the death
of the Protector and the abdication of his indolent and feeble son, by
the restoration of monarchy in the person of Charles the Second. Even if
some forebodings might have arisen that with the restoration of the old
monarchy the old persecuting laws might be revived, which made it
criminal for a man to think for himself in the matters which most nearly
concerned his eternal interests, and to worship in the way which he found
most helpful to his spiritual life, they would have been silenced by the
promise, contained in Charles's "Declaration from Breda," of liberty to
tender consciences, and the assurance that no one should be disquieted
for differences of opinion in religion, so long as such differences did
not endanger the peace and well-being of the realm. If this declaration
meant anything, it meant a breadth of toleration larger and more liberal
than had been ever granted by Cromwell. Any fears of the renewal of
persecution must be groundless.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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