The conflicted Puritan inheritance of John Bunyan's political writings.

In his study of the Italian Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt suggested that a heightened sense of the individual demarcates modern from medieval times.

Difficult life under despotic rulers forced medieval persons who had previously looked to race or nation for self-understanding to turn to "inward resources" instead, and they eventually came to think of themselves in individual rather than collective terms. (1) A definite political corollary of the new individualism in Europe was the growing call, especially by the time of the Enlightenment, for toleration and freedom of conscience in the public sphere. Perhaps the quintessential example was John Locke, who said that because all persons must construct their lives individually without the foundation of innate ideas, they should also have civil liberties conducive to their doing so. Since the highly introspective writings of John Bunyan (who was Locke's slightly older contemporary) both reflected and furthered the individualist ethos of his era, one might naturally assume that Bunyan may have petitioned the state to permit free exercise of conscience to religious nonconformists like himself. However, as Christopher Hill pointed out, "Unlike Levellers, Cromwell, and Locke, Bunyan contributed nothing to the theory of toleration, proclaimed no principles of natural right." (2) I believe that Bunyan's failure to construct a systematic theory of toleration and free exercise of conscience--remarkable enough from someone whose legacy is "the great seventeenthcentury religious writer and contender for religious conscience" (3)--was not a result of neglect but rather indecision based on the conflicted Puritan heritage on the relationship between church and state which the Baptist Bunyan inherited.

The classic Puritan statements on liberty of conscience were made by William Perkins (1558-1602) and his student at Cambridge, William Ames (1576-1633). Yet, their writings assumed that the Calvinistic worship for which they desired liberty would also become the religion of the state church and thus have the support and protection of the crown. However, when their disciples found themselves in an adversarial relationship with the unsympathetic Stuart kings James I and Charles I, the Perkins-Ames linking of liberty of conscience with established religion could no longer hold.

Nowhere was this tension more evident than in America when Puritan immigrants who were dissatisfied with Caroline England tried to establish new governments of their own. Was it more important for the good of society, as John Cotton believed, that magistrates establish a single state religion (and that a Calvinist one), or instead, as Roger Williams argued, that liberty of conscience be unfolded to its fullest extent so that even Catholics and Anabaptists could worship freely? Both Cotton and Williams could appeal to the Perkins-Ames tradition to argue their case.

With Bunyan, however, the debate became internalized. Having been imprisoned for over twelve years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Bunyan vigorously desired religious liberty for his Nonconformist congregation, and he showed no serious belief that Nonconformity could ever be the religion of all. Yet, in his overtly political writings, he assumed a role for magistrates in contending for true religion that seems to be a holdover of the older, establishment Puritanism. The juxtaposition of his individualist tendencies and his nostalgia for a king who would be a Protestant defensor pacis makes Bunyan a personification of the bridge between the premodern and modern world views.

Individualism and Conservatism in Bunyan's Political Theory

Even while he described why Bunyan's political theory has received relatively little scholarly attention, Michael Mullett unintentionally demonstrated why it should:

   It is worth noting that, of his nearly sixty published works, none
   directly concerns politics, and that one early production, the 1663
   Christian Behaviour "illustrates the conservatism of Bunyan's social
   views." Conservative or not, there is every indication that Bunyan
   was not deeply interested in political questions, in view of the
   overwhelming priority of spiritual and religious issues in his scheme
   of things. However, he was a leader in a church which had taken a
   consistent radical line on political questions. (4)

Mullett's evaluation reflects the very conflict between two strands of Puritan tradition that I summarized above: how could it simultaneously be that Bunyan's church toed a "consistent radical line on political questions" while Bunyan's writings remained politically conservative? Mullett is correct that Bunyan did not write a treatise strictly on politics as such (though neither did Perkins or Ames), but his opinions about the state, particularly in the posthumously published works, occur frequently enough that a reconstruction of Bunyan's political views is possible. Before illustrating the two sides of Bunyan's thought, however, it is germane to establish that Bunyan did in fact write within the Perkinsian tradition.

Like most Puritans, Bunyan was a covenant or federal theologian. This is most evident in An Exposition on the Ten First Chapters of Genesis (1692):

   Wherefore those that think it enough to attain to the state of Adam
   in Innocency, think it sufficient to be meer Naturalists; think
   themselves well, without being made Spiritual: yea, let me add, they
   think it safe standing by a Covenant of Works; they think themselves
   happy, though not concerned in a Covenant of Grace.... (5)

Richard Muller believed that Bunyan emphasized predestination more than did Perkins or Ames, (6) and Christopher Hill said that the major difference between Bunyan's covenantalism and Perkins's was that Bunyan did not assume a state church, (7) but neither of them doubted that Bunyan was one of Perkins's theological heirs. Richard Greaves joined Hill in also placing Bunyan with Perkins and Ames in the category of "strict Calvinists" who argued that the "law has a rightful and necessary place in the life of a Christian." (8)

Furthermore, Bunyan could hardly have drawn A Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation (1692), which diagrams the doctrine of double predestination from the divine decrees through many intermediary steps to ultimate salvation and reprobation, without knowledge of Perkins's "ocular Catechisme," A Golden Chain, or, The Description of Theology: Containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation, According to God's Word. (9) Martyn Lloyd-Jones and C. E. Hambrick-Stowe also likened the stages of conversion in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress to those described in Perkins's sermons, with Hambrick-Stowe even suggesting that "the correspondence between the two presentations is so close that it may be surmised that Bunyan was consciously working from Perkins's earlier scheme." (10) Thus, the influence on Bunyan not only of Puritanism generally but of Perkins particularly is clear.

How did Bunyan appropriate that influence--with emphasis on liberty of conscience, promoting what would later become liberal individualism, or with emphasis on the right of the magistrate to constrain conscience, the inherited conservatism of his Puritan forebears? I will present the evidence for each case, beginning with the strand of Bunyan's political writings that tends toward complete liberty of religious expression that would ally him with the crypto-Baptist, Roger Williams.

Religious Liberty

The strongest individualistic language in Bunyan's political writings come from A Relation of My Imprisonment, which was not released by Bunyan's descendants for publication until 1765, 105 years after the events it described. In it, Bunyan recounted his interrogation before various justices concerning the charge:

   That John Bunyan of the town of Bedford, labourer, being a person of
   such and such conditions, he hath (since such a time) devilishly and
   perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service,
   and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and
   conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good
   subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord
   the king, &c. (11)

When offered the exchange of his freedom for his agreement to stop preaching, Bunyan replied that he would have to violate such terms of release since his conscience would not allow him to resist his calling. If it was a sin to preach at conventicles, he said, "I should sin still." (12) Bunyan had become a man against his culture in the sense that, with Williams, he had cut any necessary tie between individual religiosity and ecclesial conformity. Such was the impetus of Separatism, that "extreme expression of the religious individualism of Puritan faith and doctrine." (13)

Nowhere in A Relation did Bunyan better demonstrate his superior allegiance to soul over society--and at the same time demonstrate his casuistic skill--than in responding to Paul Cobb, clerk of the peace, who entreated him, "Pray be ruled." Upon the example of Jesus and Paul, Bunyan said, he certainly intended to obey the civil magistrate. But,

   the law hath provided two ways of obeying: The one to do that which
   I in my conscience do believe that I am bound to do, actively; and
   where I cannot obey actively, there I am willing to lie down, and to
   suffer what they shall do unto me. (14)

Here, Bunyan exalted the authority of conscience over the authority of magistracy, so that the former dictated to what degree Bunyan could honor the latter. And when he professed elsewhere, "I shall not force or compel any man to hear me," he suggested, as did Williams shortly before him and Locke shortly after him, that religious conviction should result only from persuasion, not coercion. (15) Thus, Bunyan could not in good conscience attend the services of the Church of England since he did not feel an inner persuasion to confirm the outward requirement to do so. He told Justice John Kelyng that he neither attended the parish church nor used the Book of Common Prayer because the Bible did not expressly command him to do so, but he saw nothing treasonous in this since he did not hold that civil harmony depended on religious uniformity. Therefore, those who desired to use the prayer book "have their liberty; that is, I would not keep them from it, but for our parts, we can pray to God without it." (16)

At issue in Bunyan's responses to Clerk Cobb was the purpose of an act to suppress dissenters passed by Parliament in 1593 with the support of Queen Elizabeth. Cobb interpreted the act to support the distinction between toleration and liberty of conscience: the act tolerated only public worship services, and so Bunyan was not at liberty to worship in private meetings. But "I am no heretic," Bunyan replied, and explained that the act was only meant to punish any who used religious assemblies as a pretext for working mischief, of whom he was not one. (17) The implication was that religious Nonconformity should be given a berth, at least in private conventicles, in which to practice its peaceable principles, for Bunyan would "walk according to all righteous laws, and that whether there was a King or no." (18)

William York Tindall contended that statements such as this betray how radical Bunyan truly was: "He saw and detested the injustice of laws, jails, magistrates, and governors, between whom and the saints was a perpetual war." (19) Like Williams, Bunyan also traced the entrance of the spirit of antichrist into the world to the time of Constantine in Of Antichrist, and His Ruine (1692), and in that same document he applauded King Artaxerxes of Persia for not imposing religion on the freed Judean exiles and wished that "all Kings would but give such liberty," even if "contrary (if he had any) to his own National Worship." (20) In The House of the Forest of Lebanon (1692), in stating that the kingdom of Jesus Christ, makes "no infringement on any mans Liberties," Bunyan again called for magistrates to reward the peaceableness of most Nonconformists with religious liberty. (21)

A Protestant Kingdom

Yet, a considerable strand of Bunyan's political writings was not woven into the banner of a new, more libertarian pattern. For example, despite his disagreements with the repressive policy of the Church of England toward evangelical preachers like himself, Bunyan did not follow Roger Williams in refusing all fellowship with conformists. Perhaps influenced by the memory of his church in Bedford actually being part of the church establishment during the Cromwellian period, Bunyan had his children baptized as infants in the parish church and, in A Defence of Justification, by Faith (1672), he also defended the Thirty-Nine Articles against their latitudinarian detractor, Edward Fowler. (22) Whereas Roger Williams found the "reformation" of King Henry VIII to be no more laudable than the medieval papacy, since Henry had overstepped his lawful bounds, (23) Bunyan approved that:

   The Noble King, King Henry VIII did cast down the
   Antichristian-worship; so he cast down the Laws that held it up: So
   also did the good King Edward his Son. The brave Queen also, the
   Sister to King Edward, hath left of things of this nature, to her
   lasting Fame, behind her. (24)

As W. R. Owens noted, Bunyan rather obviously omitted the Stuart kings from his praise, (25) and he no doubt did so because of their Catholic sympathies. But he hailed the Protestant monarchs, though he surely knew that "good King Edward" introduced the prayer book and "the brave Queen" Elizabeth had little tolerance for dissenters. Since he argued in Antichrist that the Protestant Tudors each did successively more to resist "Antichristian-Worship," one can deduce that Bunyan expected any future Protestant kings to move even further toward supporting what he believed to be the full development of Protestantism, which lay in separating Puritanism.

Tindall supported his arguments for Bunyan's political radicality by citing a 1653 letter from Bunyan's congregation to Oliver Cromwell, encouraging him not to accept kingship. But Bunyan himself was not the pastor of the Bedford church at the time, and at any rate, this is not sufficient evidence to overturn the clear nostalgia for Protestant monarchs Bunyan expressed in Antichrist, where, as Roger Sharrock said, "the last days are forecast as being heralded by an alliance of Protestant kingdoms but not in terms of social revolution." (26)

Bunyan's emphasis on the word "protest" in another quotation from Antichrist supports this contention:

   Thus when the Synagogue of Satan, of old, had Taken Christ, and
   Accused him, they made Pontius Pilate to Condemn and hang him. But
   God has begun to shew to some of the Kings this Wickedness, and has
   prevail'd with them to PROTEST against her. (27)

Bunyan's statements professing loyalism are abundant, especially in his late and posthumous works. I will survey them here by way of proceeding to the more critical issue for this essay, which is whether Bunyan thought the monarch had any right to coerce religious conscience. In A Confession of My Faith (1672), Bunyan called the magistracy "Gods ordinance" for putting "wickedness to shame." (28) In Israel's Hope Encouraged (1692), despite the occasion of his writing being the encouragement of beleaguered dissenters, he still could say that "we had a gracious King [Charles II], brave Parliaments," etc., for protecting citizens from potential Catholic violence during the Popish Plot of 1678. (29) And in Christ a Compleat Saviour (1692), Bunyan encouraged prayer for magistrates "to hate the Whore [i.e., the papal antichrist], to eat her Flesh, to make her desolate, and burn her with Fire." (30) John Cotton would surely have agreed with Bunyan's statement in Seasonable Counsel (1682):

   Tho' the Christian as a Christian is the only man at liberty, as
   called thereunto of God, yet his liberty is limited to things that
   are good: he is not licensed thereby to indulge the flesh. Holiness
   and liberty are joyned together, yea our call to liberty, is a call
   to holiness. See, and you shall find, that a quiet and peaceable
   life, in our respective places, under the Government, is that which
   we should pray for.... (31)

With the relatively early The Holy City (1665), in which he urged subjection to magistrates "for conscience sake," Bunyan established a theme which reappeared in some of the works published posthumously in 1692: the expectation that the destruction of Antichrist would be accomplished by Christian kings. (32) 1 have already cited some of the individualist tendencies in Antichrist, and His Ruine, but this is also the work where Bunyan praised the Tudor kings and avowed that "to testifie my Loyalty to my King, my Love to my Brethren, and Service for my Countrey, has been the cause of this my present Scribble." (33) He again emphasized the divine installation of monarchs and his belief that future Protestant kings would arise who would be "Bout-Hammers" against Antichrist, and if the Stuarts "go not on in the Work of Reformation so fast as thou wouldest they should, the fault may be thine; know that thou also hast thy cold and chill frames of heart...." (34) Thus, in the same document we see the dual inheritance of Puritan political theory--one whiggish and calling for a new era, the other conservative.

The same is true of The Saints Knowledge of Christs Love, which argued for the divine right of kings alongside not "suffering the Law to rule but over my outward man," (35) and The House of the Forest of Lebanon, which, notwithstanding its plea for toleration mentioned earlier, said that "even in Gospel times, Kings [in the iconoclastic mold of Jehu and Josiah] shall hate the Whore, make her desolate, and naked, and shall eat her Flesh, and burn her with Fire." (36) While An Exposition of the Ten First Chapters of Genesis probably alluded to King James II when it said that Nimrod in Genesis 10:8 was the first who ever "sought after Absolute Monarchy," by no means is Tindall's assertion plausible that this aside established Bunyan's merely "specious loyalty" in Antichrist. (37)

In An Exposition, Bunyan dreamed of a church where there was "Oneness," again hailed the work of Josiah in promoting religion, and, if Christopher Hill is correct, even was conciliatory toward tolerationist ideas espoused by James II, which were principally for the benefit of Catholics. (38) Tindall adduced no evidence for his assertion that Bunyan's loyalist comments cover up his real interest in sedition. (39) Instead, they reveal that two strands of Puritan thought could operate on Bunyan's mind simultaneously and with equal force. Indeed, the conflict between liberty of conscience on one hand and loyalty on the other was endemic to the Baptist situation in England after the middle of the seventeenth century, when Baptists tried to toe a middle line between Anabaptist separatism and accommodating with Puritan society for the sake of the preservation of the movement. (40)

Owen C. Watkins, in his introduction to Seasonable Counsel, warned that no easy assumption should be made that nonconformists such as Bunyan would automatically prefer complete liberty of conscience for all in order to guarantee their own freedom of worship. Instead, said Watkins, "Few of the Nonconformists who protested about being persecuted thought that all beliefs should be tolerated by a Christian state." (41) Yet, he added, Bunyan "had little to say about toleration as a principle." (42) I would amend Watkins's assessment to say that although Bunyan wrote many statements about the role of government in religion, he said little that could formally reconcile the inherent tensions among them. In A Discourse of the Building ... of the House of God (1688), Bunyan's left hand seemed not to know what his right was doing:

   For those that have private opinions too
   We must make room, or shall the Church undo;
   Provided they be such as don't impair
   Faith, Holiness, nor with good Conscience jarr;
   Provided also those that hold them shall
   Such Faith hold to themselves, and not let fall
   Their fruitless Notions in their Brothers way,
   Do thus, and Faith and Love will not decay. (43)

It is not easy to argue from this passage whether Bunyan would have felt more at home in Roger Williams's Rhode Island or John Cotton's Massachusetts. This brings us to the very important question of whether Bunyan, though himself a dissenter, conceded the right of magistrates to coerce to any degree the religious conscience of individuals. This coercion would have meant in Bunyan's time mandatory church attendance and the prohibition of antiecclesial activities, not only public subscription to a written creed. His belief that Christian unity is more important than private opinions--especially in light of his saying in Antichrist that Babylon is the home of sects, and kings have the divinely ordained task to destroy it (44)--could be read as establishmentarian.

The Life and Death of Mr. Badman and The Holy War seem to reflect this side of Bunyan, with Mr. Wiseman in the former wanting to report to a magistrate that he had heard someone blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and Emanuel in the latter leaving a standing order to the Mansoulians to execute captured Diabolonians as proof of their sincere desire to keep his commandments. (45) But Bunyan's call to "make room" for private opinions is certainly individualistic. Bunyan found it difficult to choose between the two. Despite his deserved reputation as champion of conscience, he did not consider himself an innovator: "I do confess my self one of the old-fashion Professors, that covet to fear God, and honour the King." (46)

Conclusion

Patrick Crutwell believed that, after the English Civil Wars, literature became fully "modern" by exalting argumentation over cultural consensus, and thereby it severed ties with the Middle Ages. (47) If this is so, then John Bunyan was not a fully modern man. His political writings did come after the Civil Wars, and they often reflected a new cultural ethos that emphasized the individual. But the grounding of his thought was in a previous age, and therefore he stood astride the divide between pre-modernity and modernity. Martin Schmidt's claim that the development of modern Western consciousness runs through Perkins, Ames, and Bunyan is accurate, (48) but that is only part of their story. The other part, now only a vestigial remain of the body politic, was the hope they placed, at least theoretically, in the magistrate who would establish Puritan religion. Such sentiments reveal Bunyan's conviction that private revelation and individual experience could never trump the life of the community, whether political or ecclesial.

(1.) Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1928), 143; cited in Roger Pooley, "Grace Abounding and the New Sense of Self," in John Bunyan and His England, 1628-88, ed. Anne Laurence, W R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (London: Hambledon Press, 1990), 105.

(2.) Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990), 340.

(3.) Robert G. Collmer, ed., Bunyan in Our Time (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), front sleeve.

(4.) Michael A. Mullett, John Bunyan in Context (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 52-53.

(5.) John Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 12, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 124-25.

(6.) Richard A. Muller, "Covenant and Conscience in English Reformed Theology: Three Variations on a 17th Century Theme," Westminster Theological Journal 42, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 320.

(7.) Hill, 179.

(8.) Richard Greaves, "John Bunyan and Covenant Thought in the Seventeenth Century," Church History 36, no. 2 (June 1967): 152. Hill, 178, noted, "Bunyan shares to the full what to modern ways of thinking seems the rather disagreeable legalism of the covenant theologians."

(9.) William Perkins, "Golden Chain," in Introduction to Puritan Theology: A Reader, ed. Edward Hindson (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976), insert after p. 138. Gordon Campbell makes a convincing case that Bunyan relied on Perkins in "The Source of Bunyan's Mapp of Salvation," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 240-241.

(10.) Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans, vol. 6, The Law: Its Function and Limits (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1973), 261,357ff.; C. E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 77. Likewise does Maurice Hussey say, "We experience little surprise in finding by comparison how closely related Bunyan is to William Perkins, the 'apostle of practical divinity.'" Hussey, "Christian Conduct in Bunyan and Baxter," Baptist Quarterly 14, no. 2 (April 1951): 75.

(11.) Bunyan, A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan, in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 113.

(12.) Ibid., 110.

(13.) William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 181. Mark R. Bell, Apocalypse How? Baptist Movements During the English Revolution (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2000), 257, offers a healthy caution: "Offen it is unacceptable for historians to look to the past for modern concepts, but in the case of Baptists it is tempting. Words like democracy, liberty, individualism, plurality, and tolerance come to mind. Applying these ideas to the earliest Baptists is anachronistic..."

(14.) Bunyan, A Relation in Grace Abounding, 124-25.

(15.) Ibid., 110.

(16.) Ibid., 117.

(17.) Ibid., 122.

(18.) Ibid., 124.

(19.) william York Tindall, John Bunyan: Mechanick Preacher (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964), 137.

(20.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 13, ed. W R. Owens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), xxiv, 497, 487, 425-26.

(21.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 7, ed. Graham Midgley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), xl, 153; cf. Mullett, 283.

(22.) Mullett 44, 101; Roger Sharrock, John Bunyan (London: Macmillan, 1968), 35-36; Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 4, ed. T. L. Underwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 123-24. Bell, 26, said that for many early Baptists, "Religious persecution and infant baptism were the two surest signs of the Beast, but at the same time, they were also his two strongest fortresses." By contrast, in Bunyan's The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 77, Mr. Wiseman offered a typically Reformed defense of infant baptism when he spoke of "the advantage of Election for their fathers sakes" which the children of ungodly parents do not have. Wiseman also reminisced about "Olivers dayes" (Ibid., 54).

(23.) Roger Williams, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams Vol. 3, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963), 309.

(24.) Bunyan, Of Antichrist and His Ruine in The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 441.

(25.) W. R. Owens, in ibid., 526, 528.

(26.) Tindall, 138; Roger Sharrock, "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman: Facts and Problems," Modern Language Review 82, no. 1 (January 1987): 24.

(27.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 496.

(28.) Ibid., vol. 4, 153.

(29.) Ibid., vol. 13, 21.

(30.) Ibid., 306.

(31.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 10, ed. Owen C. Watkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 32-33. George Offor noted that "Dr. John Cotton of New England, in his 'True Constitution of a Visible Church,' fully concurs with Bunyan" in his view of the church as a congregation of the faithful which should strictly follow biblical injunctions toward each other and government. Offor, The Whole Works of John Bunyan (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1977), 2:577.

(32.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 3, ed. 3. Sears McGee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 40, 166-68.

(33.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 429.

(34.) Ibid., 481,488-89.

(35.) Mullett, 281-82; Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 392.

(36.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 7, 164. Note that the quotation of Revelation 17:12,16 is precisely the same as that which Bunyan used in Seasonable Counsel.

(37.) Tindall, 140-41.

(38.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 12, 267, 276, 227; Hill, cited in ibid., xlvi.

(39.) Tindall, 136.

(40.) Bell, 80, 91.

(41.) Watkins, in Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 10, xx.

(42.) Ibid.

(43.) Bunyan, A Discourse of the Building, Nature, Excellency and Government of the House of God with Counsels and Directions to the Inhabitants Thereof, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 6, ed. Owen C. Watkins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 311.

(44.) Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 466. Bunyan could have had in mind for destruction the Quakers, whom he called In A Vindication of Some Gospel-Truths Opened "a new upstart sect." Bunyan, The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, vol. 1, ed. T. L. Underwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 184. In the same work, he referred to the Quakers as heretics or committers of heresy nine times. Ibid., 124-25, 134-35, 146, 150, 190, 213.

(45.) Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 54-55; The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James E Forrest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 134-35. Among those for whose execution Emanuel left a standing order is Mr. Heresie (145). When Clip-promise was hanged at the end of the allegory, Bunyan as narrator remarked, "And truly my judgment is that all those of his name and life should be served even as he" (p. 243).

(46.) Bunyan, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, in The Miscellaneous Works, vol. 13, 489.

(47.) Patrick Crutwell, The Shakespearean Moment and its Place in the Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 206-07.

(48.) Martin Schmidt, "Biblizismus und naturliche Theologie in der Gewissenslehre des englischen Puritanismus," Zweiter Teil, Archly fur Reformationsgeschichte 43, no. 1 (1952): 85.

Galen K. Johnson is assistant professor of theology, John Brown University, Siloam Springs, Arkansas.