1628 Birth of John Bunyan
John Bunyan was born in Bunyan’s End, Bedfordshire to a family of small means. As a teenager he followed the tinker’s trade and then served in the rebel armies during the English Civil War. At the war’s end in 1649 he returned home where he underwent a religious conversion and joined a congregation of nonconformist Protestants. In 1655, though unlearned in anything except the English scriptures, he began to preach and write tracts. He had been cautioned for unlicensed preaching in 1659 but his real troubles began with the return of the English monarchy in 1660 and the reestablishment of the Anglican Church which cracked down on the radical sects and demanded that all services be conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer. Bunyan refused to abandon his calling and was arrested and imprisoned numerous times for unlicensed preaching and abstaining from attendance at a lawful church. After 1672 the government relaxed its oppression of nonconformists for a time; Bunyan was released from prison and became a popular minister, even being named chaplain to the Lord Mayor of London.
Bunyan was an indefatigable writer, producing some 6o tracts and books of a religious nature. His spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and The Life and Death of Mister Badman are still read, but most of his other works such as Seasonal Counsel or Suffering Saints in the Furnace – Advice to Persecuted Christians in Their Trials & Tribulations are not. His masterwork is Pilgrim’s Progress or to give it its full title, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream, published in 1678. It follows the journey of sin-burdened Christian from the City of Destruction past the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, the Valley of Humiliation, the Hill of Difficulty and other trials to his destination in the Celestial City. Along the way he will meet Evangelist, Mr Worldly Wiseman, Simple, Sloth, Presumption and the demonic Apollyon. Pilgrim’s Progress is the most famous allegory in the English language, a monument of religious literature which has inspired many. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print. Modern-language versions are now being produced for those whose taste does not run to seventeenth-century English prose.