How difficult is it, when immorality has been encouraged by royal authority, to turn the tide or to stem the torrent. For at least four years, an Act of Parliament had prohibited these Sunday sports. Still the supinelness of the justices, and the connivance of the clergy, allowed the rabble youth to congregate on the Green at Elstow, summoned by the church bells to celebrate their sports and pastimes, as they had been in the habit of doing on the Lord's day.[57]
This solemn warning, received in the midst of his sport, was one of a series of convictions, by which he hardened sinner was to be fitted to receive the messages of mercy and love. In the midst of his companions and of the spectators, Bunyan was struck with a sense of guilt. How rapid were his thoughts—'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' With the eye of his understanding he saw the Lord Jesus as 'hotly displeased.' The tempter suggests it is 'too, too late' to seek for pardon, and with a desperate resolution which must have cost his heart the severest pangs, he continued his game. Still the impression remained indelibly fixed upon his mind.
The next blow which fell upon his hardened spirit was still more deeply felt, because it was given by one from whom he could the least have expected it. He was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, 'belching out oaths like the madman that Solomon speaks of, who scatters abroad firebrands, arrows, and death'[58] 'after his wonted manner.' He exemplified the character drawn by the Psalmist. 'As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment: so let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.' Here was a disease that set all human skill at defiance, but the great, the Almighty Physician, cured it with strange physic. Had any professor reproved him, it might have been passed by as a matter of course; but it was so ordered that a woman who was notoriously 'a very loose and ungodly wretch,' protested that she trembled to hear him swear and curse at that most fearful rate; that he was the ungodliest fellow she had ever heard, and that he was able to spoil all the youth in a whole town.[59] Public reproof from the lips of such a woman was an arrow that pierced his inmost soul; it effected a reformation marvelous to all his companions, and bordering upon the miraculous. The walls of a fortified city were once thrown down by a shout and the tiny blast of rams'-horns (Josh 6:20); and in this instance, the foundations of Heart Castle, fortified by Satan, are shaken by the voice of one of his own emissaries. Mortified and convicted, the foul-mouthed blasphemer swore no more; an outward reformation in words and conduct took place, but without inward spiritual life. Thus was he making vows to God and breaking them, repenting and promising to do better next time; so, to use his own homely phrase, he was 'feeding God with chapters, and prayers, and promises, and vows, and a great many more such dainty dishes, and thinks that he serveth God as well as any man in England can, while he has only got into a cleaner way to hell than the rest of his neighbours are in.'[60]
Such a conversion, as he himself calls it, was 'from prodigious profaneness to something like moral life.'[61] 'Now I was, as they said, become godly, and their words pleased me well, though as yet I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite.' These are hard words, but, in the most important sense, they were true. He was pointed out as a miracle of mercy—the great convert—a wonder to the world. He could now suffer opprobrium and cavils—play with errors—entangle himself and drink in flattery. No one can suppose that this outward reform was put on hypocritically, as a disguise to attain some sinister object; it was real, but it arose from a desire to shine before his neighbours, from shame and from the fear of future punishment, and not from that love to God which leads the Christian to the fear of offending him. It did not arise from a change of heart; the secret springs of action remained polluted; it was outside show, and therefore he called himself a painted hypocrite. He became less a despiser of religion, but more awfully a destroyer of his own soul.
A new source of uneasiness now presented itself in his practice of bell-ringing, an occupation requiring severe labour, usually performed on the Lord's-day; and, judging from the general character of bell-ringers, it has a most injurious effect, both with regard to morals and religion. A circumstance had recently taken place which was doubtless interpreted as an instance of Divine judgment upon Sabbath-breaking. Clark, in his Looking-Glass for Saints and Sinners, 1657, published the narrative:—'Not long since, in Bedfordshire, a match at football being appointed on the Sabbath, in the afternoon whilst two were in the belfry, tolling of a bell to call the company together, there was suddenly heard a clap of thunder, and a flash of lightning was seen by some that sat in the church-porch coming through a dark lane, and flashing in their faces, which must terrified them, and, passing through the porch into the belfry, it tripped up his heels that was tolling the bell, and struck him stark dead; and the other that was with him was so sorely blasted therewith, that shortly after he died also.'[62] Thus we find that the church bells ministered to the Book of Sports, to call the company to Sabbath-breaking. The bell-ringers might come within the same class as those upon whom the tower at Siloam fell, still it was a most solemn warning, and accounts for the timidity of so resolute a man as Bunyan. Although he thought it did not become his newly-assumed religious character, yet his old propensity drew him to the church tower. At first he ventured in, but took care to stand under a main beam, lest the bell should fall and crush him; afterwards he would stand in the door; then he feared the steeple might fall; and the terrors of an untimely death, and his newly-acquired garb of religion, eventually deterred him from this mode of Sabbath-breaking. His next sacrifice made at the shrine of self-righteousness was dancing: this took him one whole year to accomplish, and then he bade farewell to these sports for the rest of his life.[63] We are not to conclude from the example of a man who in after-life proved so great and excellent a character, that, under all circumstances, bell-ringing and dancing are immoral. In those days, such sports and pastimes usually took place on the Lord's-day; and however the Church of England might then sanction it, and proclaim by royal authority, in all her churches, the lawfulness of sports on that sacred day, yet it is now universally admitted that it was commanding a desecration of the Sabbath, and letting loose a flood of vice and profaneness. In themselves, on days proper for recreation, such sports may be innocent; but if they engender an unholy thought, or occupy time needed for self-examination and devotion, they ought to be avoided as sinful hindrances to a spiritual life.
Bunyan was now dressed in the garb of a religious professor, and had become a brisk talker in the matters of religion, when, by Divine mercy, he was stripped of all his good opinion of himself; his want of holiness, and his unchanged heart, were revealed to his surprise and wonder, by means simple and efficacious, but which no human forethought could have devised. Being engaged in his trade at Bedford, he overheard the conversation of some poor pious women, and it humbled and alarmed him. 'I heard, but I understood not; for they were far above, out of my reach. Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts, also how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature; how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus, and with what words and promises they had been refreshed, comforted, and supported against the temptations of the devil. Moreover, they reasoned of the suggestions and temptations of Satan in particular; and told to each other by which they had been afflicted, and how they were borne up under his assaults. hey also discoursed of their own wretchedness of heart, of their unbelief; and did contemn, slight, and abhor their own righteousness, as filthy and insufficient to do them any good. And methought they spake as if joy did make them speak; they spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world; as if they were people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned among their neighbours (Num 23:9).
'At this I felt my own heart began to shake, as mistrusting my condition to be nought; for I saw that in all my thoughts about religion and salvation, the new birth did never enter into my mind; neither knew I the comfort of the Word and promise, nor the deceitfulness and treachery of my own wicked heart. As for secret thoughts, I took no notice of them; neither did I understand what Satan's temptations were, nor how they were to be withstood, and resisted.
'Thus, therefore, when I heard and considered what they said, I left them, and went about my employment again, but their talk and discourse went with me; also my heart would tarry with them, for I was greatly affected with their words, both because by them I was convinced that I wanted the true tokens of a truly godly man, and also because by them I was convinced of the happy and blessed condition of him that was such a one.'[64]
The brisk talker of 'talkative,' was confounded—he heard pious godly women mourning over their worthlessness instead of vaunting of their attainments. They exhibited, doubtless to his great surprise, that self-distrust and humility are the beginnings of wisdom.
These humble disciples could have had no conception that the Holy Spirit was blessing their Christian communion to the mind of the tinker, standing near them, pursuing his occupation. The recollection of the converse of these poor women led to solemn heart-searching and the most painful anxiety; again and again he sought their company, and his convictions became more deep, his solicitude more intense. This was the commencement of an internal struggle, the most remarkable of any upon record, excepting that of the psalmist David.