... • ... addresses were delivered at the grave, among which that of William Penn is perhaps the best. He says, 'George Fox had an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures, but above all he excelled in prayer; he was of an innocent life; . . . . a most merciful man, as ready to forgive as unapt to give or take an offence; an incessant labourer, as unwearied as undaunted in his services for God and for His people; no more to be moved to fear than to wrath; civil beyond all forms of breeding; very temperate; eating little and sleeping less, though a bulky person.' JOHN BUNYAN was born in 1628, at the village of Elstow, about two miles from Bedford. His father was a tinker. Of his boyhood very little is known. He appears to have been sent to school, and taught to read and write; whatever else he may have learned, he says he soon lost 'even almost utterly.' It is stated,' says Southey, that he was bred to the business of a brazier, and worked as a journeyman in Bedford.' In his youth he had several narrow escapes from death, which appear to have made a deep impression upon his morbid mind. Once he fell into a creek, and once out of a boat into the river Ouse, near Bedford, and each time was barely saved from drowning. One day an adder crossed his path; he stunned it with a stick, and plucked out the tongue, which he supposed to be the sting, with his fingers, 'by which act,' he says, 'had not God been merciful unto me, I might by my desperateness have brought myself to my end.' Another circumstance which more than the rest impressed him, was one which occurred whilst he was a soldier in the army of the Parliament; for it will be remembered that Bunyan lived during one of the most critical and eventful periods of English history, from the time of the first Charles to that of the second James. It would appear to have taken place when he was about seventeen years old. He had been drawn out to go to the siege of Leicester; another soldier of the same company wishing to go in his stead, Bunyan consented to the exchange; the substitute, whilst standing sentinel at the siege, was shot through the head with a musket-ball. Bunyan married shortly after the siege of Leicester, when he was about nineteen. He includes this event in the list of his mercies, inasmuch as he was led 'to light upon a wife' whose father was a godly man, who reproved vice both in his own house and amongst his neighbours, and had led a strict and holy life both in word and deed. As her marriage portion she brought him two books, which her father left her at his death: The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven, and The Practice of Piety, by Bayly, Bishop of Bangor. Bunyan's moral character for the first twenty years of his life is a matter of question; that is, as to the degree of wickedness of which he was guilty, for no one pretends that he led a praiseworthy life. Some say that he was a thorough reprobate; others, that he was a commonplace, ordinary sort of sinner, neither better nor worse than his neighbours. Southey considers that the most appropriate epithet to be applied to him is ‘blackguard,' meaning thereby one of those loose and idle characters to be seen lounging about the streets and lanes on fine Sunday afternoons, whose conversation abounds with oaths and all manner of filthiness, who are the annoyance of respectable people, and who excite grief and pity in the breast of the Christian. What is known of him is, that he was foremost in mischief and wickedness, being possessed of great energy; that he was usually to be found on the Sunday afternoons playing pitch and toss, or |