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 notorious '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. 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.'
Such a conversion, as
he himself calls it, was 'from prodigious profaneness to something like moral
life.' '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.'
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.
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.
