The Artistry of John Bunyan’s Sermons

By E. Beatrice Batson

Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois

In his sermons John Bunyan saw his responsibility as transmitting the urgent recognition of God’s judgment and grace which radiates from the Bible, and, correspondingly, to find unacceptable any interpretation which built a dichotomy between literal and spiritual meaning. He never lost sight of what he believed the Bible literally said, what it meant, and how its teaching applied to individual lives.

Several centuries before John Bunyan’s era, preachers and biblical commentators had studied and taught Scripture on four levels; the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. The literal simply entails the recapitulation of the biblical passage under discussion; the allegorical observes the manner in which the text points to general truths pertaining to humanity as a whole; the tropological expounds the moral lessons (often the standards of conduct) to be derived from the text; and the anagogical proclaims the awareness of and insistence upon a divine source as well as the spiritual or ultimate significance of the passage. A working example of this fourfold procedure might be applied to Psalm 114, a biblical passage in which as a warrant for his own practice in the Divine Comedy, Dante professed to discover the four levels:

When Israel went forth out of Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language;
Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion.
The sea saw it and fled; the Jordan was driven back.
The mountains skipped like rams, the little hills like lambs.
What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleest?
Thou Jordan, that thou turnest back?
Ye mountains, that ye skip like rams; ye little hills, like lambs?
Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
who turned the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a fountain of waters.[1]

Taking this psalm as the basis for his sermon, a preacher could begin by a literal explanation of the song in its historical context, the exodus of the Hebrew people from the strange land of Egypt to the sanctuary they found in Israel. He could then proceed to the allegorization by suggesting that the exodus stands for any individual or any land that leaves estrangement and seeks refuge. The tropological or moral lesson is that God demands reverence from man and nations, and the anagogical expounds the spiritual truth that God provides in miraculous ways for those who reverence and obey him.

The structure of Bunyan’s sermons shows no strict adherence to this approach, but a few bear the imprint of this method. For instance, The Holy City, or The New Jerusalem, based on a lengthy text from the Book of the Revelation, namely, 21:10–22:4, begins with a discussion under six headings of the literal setting of the verses which entail the vision which John the apostle saw, proceeds from a vision of one particular apostle to a city which includes the “whole family in heaven and earth,” expands upon the moral lesson that any member of the New Jerusalem must bow to God’s authority, and explains that the New Jerusalem or the holy city is prepared by God’s “strange judgments” and “works of wonder” and that the way for man to become an inhabitant of that city is to regard and reverence these judgments and wonders.

But the majority of Bunyan’s sermons accord in structure with the form laid down in the preaching manual by the Elizabethan preacher William Perkins in his Art of Prophesying. The model entails: “opening” the text, stating the “doctrine,” giving “reasons” or “proofs,” and finally offering “uses” and “applications.” This pattern is similar to those found in practically all of the preaching manuals of the seventeenth century which prescribed patterns of sermon construction derived somewhat rigidly from the classical oration: invention or division of the text into several parts, disposition or amplification of the parts with a view to opening up meaning, and finally an application of the text to the hearer.

In his earliest and one of his most sulphurous sermons, Sighs From Hell (1658), Bunyan closely follows the model suggested by Perkins. He chooses the parable of the rich man and Lazarus recorded in Luke 14:19–31 as the text. Not entirely keeping his promise that he “will not be tedious” and that he will “pass briefly through the several verses,” he proceeds from verse to verse as he works out “reasons” and “proofs” and follows with prolonged “applications” to the living. The one pervading theme is the horror of lostness. Through words denoting mental anguish like “a never dying worm,” “the unquenchable fire,” and so on, Bunyan underscores the aloneness and the finality of lostness. Juxtaposed with lostness is judgment, and even in his monotonous digressions and meanderings he keeps before the reader the “doctrine” of judgment. For instance, on the section of the parable, “Send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,” he digresses on that “unruly member” of the human body, the tongue, with rhetorical questions and conversational persuasion, and he concludes with a quotation from the book of James, “For, I say unto you every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment,” thus keeping in the forefront of the sermon the crucial fact that the one crying out for Lazarus to “dip the tip of his finger in water” and cool his parched tongue has already faced judgment. Chains of arguments and proofs link together death, judgment, and lostness.

If Bunyan marked his sermons into doctrines, reasons, and proofs, he was just as careful to show “uses” and “application.” He shows precisely where these sections begin as he pauses to state them and to persuade his hearers that in the light of what has been said many things follow “by way of use and application.” After promising to be brief, he lengthily discourses on man’s need to consider now, while he is in this life, the plight of his soul, and he urges that man apply to his soul the counsel, instruction, and forewarning which the text offers.

Perhaps an even more clearly marked example of the same structure of Sighs From Hell is that of The Doctrine of Law and Grace Unfolded. Selecting the text, “But ye are not under the law, but under grace,” he opens with a brief statement of the text within the context of the three preceding chapters of the Book of Romans. He then proceeds to two doctrines: “Doctrine 1: That there are some in gospel times that are under the covenant of works. Doctrine 2: That there is never a believer under the law, as it is the covenant of works, but under grace, through Christ…” (I, p. 185). Then come almost sixty pages of subdivisions with proofs, objections, questions, answers. The labels of the first doctrine include “What the Covenant of Works is and When Given,” “Who They are That are under the Covenant of Works, What Men may obtain to that are under The Covenant of Works.” Then, he turns to his second doctrine, “The New Covenant made with Christ,” and subdivides: “The Conditions of the New Covenant,” “The Suretyship of Christ,” “Christ the Messenger of the Covenant,” “Christ the Sacrifice of the New Covenant,” “Christ the High Priest of the New Covenant,” “Christ the Forerunner of the Saints,” and reaches finally his climactic section, “Christ Completely Fulfilled the Conditions of the New Covenant.” He turns next to opposers of the Covenant of Grace, labeling each step and then proceeds to “A Use of Examination About the Old Covenant” and “The Use of the New Covenant,” saving ultimately a little space for application of his laboriously drawn explication (I, pp. 186-259).

Closely associated with the textual opening and “doctrine-uses-application” model is another which Bunyan frequently used. First, there is an introduction in which he places the biblical passage in its context. Thus in The Resurrection of the Dead, he states the text: “But this I confess unto tbee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and the prophets. And I have hope towards God, which they themselves, also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust” (Acts 24:14, 15). He then briefly gives the focus of his discourse, and, losing no time, he places the passage in its historical context: “Paul being, upon his arraignment, accused of many things, by some that were violent for his blood; and being licensed to speak for himself by the then heathen magistrate, he doth in few words tell them…he was utterly faultless, only this he confessed, that after that which they call heresy, so he worshipped the God of his fathers…” (I, p. 340).[2] There follow preliminary remarks concerning the various meanings of the resurrection of the dead, and then he shows the major twofold structure of his framework: First, he will prove the resurrection of the just and then he will turn to the resurrection of the wicked, with both aspects of the structure containing specifically labeled subpoints. In this way the listener and the reader can see at a glance the general direction the sermon would take and the topics to be covered.

As Henri Talon aptly states, “here, too, side by side, with his own born orator’s instinct, Bunyan was following in the tradition of all sacred oratory, whether popular or learned, whether addressed to simple people or to the lettered.”[3] And we need only turn to John Donne’s sermons to see how acutely aware of structure one of the most lettered preachers of the age was. In his first extant sermon preached on April 30, 1615, at Greenwich, on Isa 52:3, “Ye have sold your selves for nought, and ye shall be redeemed without money,” Donne’s structure consists of an introduction, a division, and the principal parts referred to in the division. The introduction delineates three main interpretations placed by commentators upon the text; after careful discussion of these, Donne proceeds to an analysis of each word of the text, giving detailed study to the words, “nought,” “without money,” and “redeemed.” There follows a “Divisio,” a statement of the two main parts into which the sermon is to be divided: “Exprobrationem, and Consolationem: First, an exprobration, or increpation from God to us, and then a consolation, or consolidation of the same God upon us.” The first principal part is then divided into two subpoints: “…in the exprobration, God reproaches to us, first, our prodigality, that we would sell a reversion, our possibility, our expectance of an inheritance in heaven; And then, our cheapness, that we would sell that, for nothing.” The first subpoint, discussing prodigality, is in turn divided into three parts each of which describes the adversities or misfortunes befalling the prodigal (I, p. 154).[4] From sermon to sermon, the number of the divisions varies, as does the number of subpoints, but the sermon preached at Greenwich shows John Donne’s awareness of sermon structure.

Unlike Donne’s eloquent, complex, and intricately built sermons, Bunyan’s are plain, simple, and often monotonously constructed. But the structure of a sermon was not a matter of particular controversy among the trained minds of the seventeenth century. Joseph Glanvill, for instance, urged that the “divisions be not numerous, minute, and nice” and declares that one of the worst offenses in preaching is that “of dividing texts into indivisibles, and mincing them into single words, which make them signifie nothing….”[5] And earlier in the century, in his A Priest to the Temple, George Herbert castigates the practice of “crumbling a text into small parts, as, the person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and object, and the like….”[6] Bunyan’s sermons contained many subdivisions and he probably did “crumble the text” at times, but the constant resounding of his central theme usually gave a sense of wholeness to his rambling works, and with all his minute discussions of various meanings of words in biblical passages, he is no great offender of either Glanvill’s or Herbert’s homiletical views.

If the structure of the sermon was not a focal point of controversy, the rhetoric was definitely a cause of extensive dispute. John Downame spoke for many in asserting that “the holie Ghost in penning the Scripture hath used grest simplicitie and wonderful plainnesse.”[7] John Wilkins speaks against “rhetorical flourishes” and takes the position that the “greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness,”[8] and William Perkins insists that the sermon was not to profane its exposition of God’s word by mingling it with human art or learning. Preaching on April 30, 1668, Robert South exhorted preachers to speak with “unaffected plainness and simplicity,” contended that biblical truth should be presented “in the plainest and most intelligible language,” and denigrated “highflown metaphors and allegories” and “scraps of Latin and Greek.”[9]

That Bunyan’s sermons played a role in the declamations against “highflown metaphors,” “scraps of Latin and Greek” or even “rhetorical flourishes” is highly questionable; for his lack of these he deserves neither commendation nor condemnation. But the qualities which characterize the prose of his sermons are worth noting. How Bunyan demonstrates the various aspects depends largely, of course, on the text from which he preaches.

One distinctive quality is his highly effective manner of calling upon his listeners to imagine themselves placed in a particular, concrete situation. An excellent example of this method is found in Sighs From Hell in which Bunyan pictures the intolerable torments of the damned: “Thou shalt have none but a company of damned souls, with an innumerable company of devils to keep company with thee; while thou art in this world the very thought of the devils appearing to thee makes thy flesh to tremble, and thine hair ready to stand upright on thy head. But, oh, what wilt thou do, when not only the supposition of the devils appearing, but the real society of all the devils of hell will be with thee howling and roaring, screeching and roaring in such a hideous manner, that thou wilt be even at thy wits’ end, and be ready to run stark mad again for anguish and torment” (I, pp. 141f). The dreadful torment is more than feeling and hearing: “Thou shalt see thy friends, thy acquaintance, thy neighbours; nay it may be, thy father, thy mother, thy wife, thy husband, thy children…when you shall see Abraham (your father), Isaac, and Jacob…and all the prophets in the Kingdom of heaven, and you yourselves thrust out…then for thy sins and disobedience shalt be shut, nay, thrust out” (I, p. 141). The scene becomes more and more expansive as paragraph follows paragraph: “Unspeakable” torments of “a never dying worm,” of an “oven fire,” the “fiery-furnace,” “the bottomless pit,” the “stream of fire.” From whatever point contemplated the anguish of the tormented is the gloomiest of all vision for human thought: the tortures of memory, the agonies of aloneness, the sorrows of desolation.

But Bunyan has yet another angle to examine: the desperate lot of the tormented must be seen in relation to eternity. By stacking spatial images on top of the other, Bunyan shows the enormity and finality of the ungodly’s lost condition: “When thou hast been in hell so many thousand years as there are stars in the firmament, or drops in the sea, or sands on the sea-shore, yet thou hast to lie there forever. Oh, this one word, Ever, bow it will torment thy soul” (I, p. 142). The concrete situation takes on a panoramic sweep as Bunyan stretches it from infinity to infinity, and then with a final brush he admonishes the hearer to accept God’s mercy. The emotional tensions of man in a specific situation with anguish intensifying and enlarging and with the scene moving from the perspective of eternity, where there is no possible hope, to the present time; where there is abundant mercy, all make for an enormous, sweeping pictorial passage—much in contrast to Bunyan’s more usual short portrayals.

Of the many short, concrete scenes which Bunyan draws, mention should be made of his character-sermons. To illustrate this model, we turn to an early work, Some Gospel Truths Opened. He sketches the profane scoffer, the formal professor, and the legal righteous. The sermon in the “legal righteous” sketch has three principal divisions: definition, outward actions and inward revelations, and moral applications. Bunyan defines the “legal righteous” persons as those “ignorant of God’s righteousness” who go about “to establish their own righteousness”; their outward actions included “reading, hearing sermons, prayers, public or private, peaceableness with their neighbors, fasting, alms, good works, as they count them, just dealings, abstinence from the grosser pollutions of the world; strict obedience to the commandments of the first and second table”; their inward revelation entails terse confession, “Alas, saith one, I am a poor ignorant man, or woman; and therefore I hope the Lord will have mercy upon me” (I, 77). The entire sketch gives a mental picture of those “ignorant” persons who will find no favor at the judgment.

What I. A. Richards once said in theory can be applied without forcing a point to Bunyan’s panoramic “frescoes” as well as to the little pictures: “Too much importance has been attached to the sensory qualities of images. What gives an image efficacy is less its vividness as an image than its character as a mental event.”[10] When Bunyan depicts the predicament of a lost individual or when he portrays the profane scoffer or legal righteous or any other of his selected personalities, he invites the reader to think with him on the experience of the identifying characteristics of the false as well as the true “pilgrim.”

If the grand sketches as well as the brief ones are characteristic of Bunyan’s plain prose so also is his use of repetition. Frequently, from no artistic interest he multiplies points, texts, phrases, and words; but on occasion his repetitions recapitulate, summarize, and enhance the beauty of his prose. And when he ponders the glory of pardoning and forgiving mercy that shall show itself in that city, or when he speaks of the choirs of “little birds” and “pretty robins” sending forth “their pleasant notes” to join in praising God, Bunyan shows a rich lyrical quality.

One of the most prevalent and most effective characteristics of Bunyan’s plain prose is his use of antithesis. And one of the most pervading antitheses which an equally pervading theme embodies is the high dignity of man’s creation in contrast to his chosen ignoble position. The earmark of several sermons is not man’s depravity but his glory. In his Greatness of Soul, which contains many passages of superb beauty, Bunyan shows the difference between the soul of rational man and that of the beast and in so doing stacks one on the other “the possessions” of the soul: understanding, conscience, judgment, fancy, imagination, memory, affections, and the will; then to crown the soul’s distinctiveness, he writes: “God thought it worthy to be made, not like the earth, or the heavens, or the angels, seraphims, seraphins, or archangels, but like himself” (III, pp. 160-62). “Further,” says Bunyan, “as the soul is curious about arts and sciences and about every excellent thing of this life, so it is capable of having to do with invisibles, with angels….The soul is an intelligent power, it can be made to know and understand depths, and heights, and lengths, and breadths, in those high, sublime, and spiritual mysteries” (III, pp. 168-69).

Through antithesis Bunyan enunciates the sharp contrast between the place God intended for man and the role he chose for himself: “Man, in his creation, was made in the image of God; but man, by reason of his yielding to the tempter, both made himself the very figure and image of the devil. Man, by creation, was made upright and sinless, but man, by sin hath made himself crooked and sinful. Man, by creation, had all the faculties of his soul at liberty, to study God, Ws Creator, and his glorious attributes and being; but man, by sin, hath so bound up his own senses and reason, and hath given way for blindness and ignorance of God so to reign in his soul, that now he is captivated and held bound in alienation and estrangedness…(I, p. 363).

Mention should be made of Bunyan’s use of “objection-answer” and “question-answer” which punctuate lengthy and sometimes ponderous expositions. Not all are of equal merit, for frequently these are continuations of the analysis of the text under discussion with the “objection-answer,” or “question-answer” serving as prefixes, but a brief passage in his first published work has a special excellence:

Quest. But did this Man rise again from the dead, that very man, with that very body wherewith he was crucified? for you do seem, as I conceive, to hold forth so much by these your expressions. 

Ans. Why do you doubt of it? 

Quest. Do you believe it? 

Ans. Yes, by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, for he hath enabled me so to do. 

Quest. And can you prove it by the Scripture? 

Ans. Yes. 

Quest. How? 

Ans. First, from that scripture in Luke 24:37–41….Many other scriptures could I give for the proof…. 

Quest. Why did he rise again from the dead with that very body? 

Ans. Because it was not possible he should be holden of death (I, p. 83).

Pointed exchanges like this, suggestive of lively, zealous, intense conversation, lend not only a sense of firm purpose but revive the sense of immediacy obscured by the hard arguments and indicate the potential presence of two clashing individuals behind the questions and answers. All the qualities of dialogue which Bunyan used effectively and dramatically in his major works are here in embryo: the terse manageableness, the suggested immediacy, externalization of inner conflicts, and portrayal of what a person is by what he says.

Here and there Bunyan shows a fondness for patterns of sound which arouse the attention and impress upon it what is being said. At times he uses alliteration: “God will bow and bend and break,” or he will join together participles: “whining, pining, weeping, mourning.” A word that surprises or startles or catches the attention appealed to Bunyan as a sermonizer, for he said in Grace Abounding: “I have also observed, that a word cast in by the by hath done more execution in a sermon than all was spoken besides: sometimes also when I have thought I did no good, then I did the most of all; and at other times when I thought I should catch them, I have fished for nothing” (Section 287). His proverbial expressions appear as prolifically in the sermons as in his other writing: “The heart that is fullest of good works hath in it least room for Satan’s temptations” (II, p. 184), or “The devil nor men of the world can kill thy righteousness or love to it, but by thy own hand; or separate that and thee asunder, without thine own act” (II, p. 297).

Without the eruditeness of an Augustine, Bunyan responded as did the early learned Christian, to the potential in another prominent practice among religious writers, biblical typology. Bunyan often referred to individual personalities of the Old Testament in order to show that God’s will for them was a “shadow” or “figure” of his will for all men; but in one entire sermon, Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized, he studies minutely the various and numerous elements of Solomon’s ornate temple, contending that there “lies, as wrapt up in a mantle, much of the glory of our gospel matters in this temple.”

But if he could take the things of earth and give them spiritual meanings, he could just as surely look realistically at the world about him and portray lovely, intimate scenes—particularly of rustic and family life. He watches the toils of the coney and the spider; he notices the flowers in an English garden and listens to the song of birds; he observes the comets and “blazing” stars; he identifies with the heart that sorrows and sees its “excellencies,” and he creates the scene of a “court of judicature” and watches the accused “elbow his way through the crowd” and state openly: “Please give way; I am called to the Court.”

Scores and scores of keen observations, vividly depicted, fill the sermons. The delights and distresses of life in the market town blend with eternal matters of cosmic significance and this blending of the specific and concrete with large abstract subjects gives an undeniable eloquence and rhetorical power to his prose. As we have already suggested, much of the rhetorical power comes from his ability to handle images artistically, but the imagery of his sermons deserve special study. An orderly way to study Bunyan’s imagery would entail a threefold division: first, notice of passage in which comparisons are made between the Christian experience and the “book of creatures,” second, observation of the way Bunyan structures a sermon almost entirely around one central image; third, a brief study of Bunyan’s practice of making comparisons between aspects of life—usually man’s need for God—and some familiar area of his own experience.

To John Bunyan there is nothing passive anywhere in the universe, and all creatures, however small, give a special admonishment to man, for “they hold forth how man should behave himself both to God and one another” (I, p. 363). But the book of creatures teaches not only specific behavior; it teaches that God exists and that one can read something about God in his works, for every creature bears traces of the Creator: “the whole creation that is before thee are not only made to show the power of God in themselves, but also to teach thee…”, and “this book of creatures, it is so excellent and so full, so easy, and so suiting the capacity of all, that there is not one man in the world but is catched, convicted, and cast by it” (I, p. 363).

From Augustine until the seventeenth century, the Christian world-view presupposed that everything which God made was a species of self-revelation, manifesting aspects of his own great glory. Implicit and explicit in this world-view was the acknowledgment that for man, the crowning act of all creation, God actively spoke through his “book of creatures.” Bunyan writes in a tradition that is centuries old. Not radically different from John Bunyan’s view of the book of creatures is this eloquently stated position of John Donne:

There is an elder booke in the World than the Scriptures; It is not well said in the World, for it is the World it selfe, the whole booke of Creatures; And indeed the Scriptures are but a paraphrase, but a comment, but an illustration of that booke of Creatures (III, p. 264).

In its context, his view is that there are two books that supplement each other, the Bible and the book of creatures, and Donne shaped his images to fulfill a specific didactic purpose. He presented the book of creatures as “a multi-form, a manifold catechism” and as a book in which every creature is a “leaf.” That John Donne’s imagery places greater emphasis upon God as author of the book of creatures than upon the creatures themselves as teaching agents of specific human behavior is probably true,[11] but both John Donne and John Bunyan were acutely aware of the didactic significance of the book of creatures.

John Bunyan appropriates both animate and inanimate objects to demonstrate how man may know more about God and about human behavior. We must remember that he firmly believed that man was created in God’s image; he possessed a Godlikeness, but he fell, and now in this world, those creatures that still follow their fixed order, speak loudly of God’s power and majesty as well as of man’s need to follow his commands. “The heavens, earth, sun, moon, stars, with all other the creatures of God,” says Bunyan, “they preach aloud to all men the eternal power and Godhead of their Creator” (I, p. 363). But this book of creatures teaches, too, how man should behave: the stork, the swallow, the crane, by observing the season of their coming admonish man to learn the time of grace, the labor of the ant and the spider convict man of his sloth, the young ravens, who depend upon God for food, condemn man for cheating; and the fire, hail, snow, and vapors in their obedience point to the “untamed” and “unruly” state of man. And this book of creatures is so significant that “God hath sealed the judgment of the world” by it (I, pp. 363f).

Another characteristic of Bunyan’s handling of imagery is his organizing an entire sermon around one central figure. An example of such a practice is his sermon on the passage “So run that ye may obtain” (1 Cor 9:24). Entitled The Heavenly Footman, the work is constructed on the analogy between a footman and the Christian who “runs a race” toward heaven. He “opens” the text by explicating the “run,” and proceeds to “doctrines,” “uses,” and “application.” Often his analogies are clumsy, but always the image of the runner is in the forefront as he dissects reasons for failure in obtaining the prize and constructs directions for certainty in reaching it.

In The Barren Fig-Tree, Bunyan once again organizes an entire sermon around one central image with several coordinating ones. The text is the parable of the barren fig-tree from Luke 13:6–9. “The metaphors,” says Bunyan “in this parable are, 1. A certain man; 2. A vineyard; 3, A fig-tree, barren or fruitless; 4. A dresser; 5. Three years; 6. Digging and dunging.…The doctrine, or mystery, couched under these words, is to show us what is like to become of a fruitless or formal professor” (II, p. 248). In explaining the mysteries “couched under these words,” Bunyan pushes each image into an allegorical meaning, but crucial to the whole sermon is the figure of the barren fig-tree which he equates throughout the long dialectical process with fruitless professors of Christianity, who make religion their cloak and Christ their “stalking horse.”

If Bunyan draws comparisons between the Christian experience and the “book of creatures” and if he occasionally builds a sermon around one central image, perhaps his most frequent custom is that of comparing the Christian life with some familiar area of his own experience. In one of his early sermons, John Donne writes: “The Prophets, and the other Secretaries of the Holy Ghost, in penning the books of Scriptures, do for the most part retain, and express in their writings some impressions, and some air of their former professions; those that had been bred in Courts and Cities, those that had been Shepherds and Herdsmen, those that had been Fishers, and so of the rest; ever inserting into their writings some phrases, some metaphors, some allusions, taken from that profession which they had exercised before…” (I, p. 236). To apply this argument to the sermons of Bunyan would lead us to concur with Donne’s view, but would also lead us to examine the range of experience from which he draws his images.

This “fisher of souls” drew his images from the village forge, the jail, the hierarchies of the armed forces, house furnishings, the courts, the marriage relation, the parts of the human body, the English countryside, and above all from Scripture. For example, he could look at the “inferior courts of judicature” whose under-governors could be faulty and contrast it with the Throne of Heaven from which none can appeal; he could view a bed and compare it to a grave; he could look at a jail and see in it an image of the prison of hell; he could see the herbs and flowers in the garden and discover their counterfeits in the field and compare the latter to those with “wild faith” whom God never planted in his garden, the church. And he could read of the water of life and compare it to a river that could wash away mountainous doubts; he could study the story of Abraham and Lazarus and conclude that at death, though devils gather to devour the soul of the Christian, the angels will descend from heaven and carry it to the bosom of Abraham, and he could ponder the work of “Jesus Christ as Advocate” and call him the “Captain-general of all the forces of God.”

John Bunyan was aware of the solemnity of man’s life before God. He was equally aware of the serious nature of speaking of the God-Man relationship. Despite his numerous symbolic pictures or his many justifications for speaking in “similitudes,” he pauses in the midst of The Greatness of the Soul to declare that to present his hearers with emblems or to draw before their eyes “the picture of hell” are things “too light for so ponderous a subject.” But we have seen many of the ways in which Bunyan turned to imagery in order to enrich his sermons, and he did it with no slight degree of literary merit.

If we single out the predominant tone of Bunyan’s sermons, we would have to give priority to fear. He drew vividly the horrors and terrors of damnation. But love is never far removed from the emotion of fear; he spoke fully of the bliss of salvation,[12] and both tonal qualities are means of exhortations to the godly life.

On occasion Bunyan also uses irony and satire. The most frequent target of both is the quasi-believer or the “Sunday Christian”: “…feigned faith, pretended love, glorious carriages, will stand them in little stead. I call them holiday ones, for I perceive that some professors do with religion just as people do with their best apparel—hang it against the wall all the week and put it on on Sundays. For as some scarce ever put on a suit but when they go to a fair or market, so little house religion will do with some; they save religion till they go to a meeting, or till they meet with a godly chapman” (II, p. 388). Quakers, Ranters, Latitudinarians, or individuals like Edward Fowler and Francis Spira were also ojects of his ironical and satirical barbs, but as in the illustration cited, his remarks are usually well executed.

In his own analysis of John Bunyan’s sermons, Henri Talon said: “The critical analysis which is at pains to point out the beauties of his work runs the risks of overlooking its fault.”[13] We concur with his judgment, but we affirm our belief that John Bunyan’s sermons show an awareness of structure, of style, of imagery, and of tone, and given the tools with which he had to work and the extraordinary manner in which he used them, our “pains to point out the beauties” are somewhat justified.

Notes

1. The Holy Bible, American Standard Edition (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1901).
2. All quotations are from The Entire Works of John Bunyan, ed. Henry Stebbing, 4 vols. (London: James S. Virtue, 1862).
3. Henri Talon, John Bunyan, The Man and his Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 112.
4. Quotations from Donne’s Sermons are from The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–1962).
5. Joseph Glanvill, Essay Concerning Preaching; Written for the Direction of a Young Divine…(London, Printed for C. Browne, 1703), p. 46.
6. The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1941), pp. 234f.
7. Quoted by Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 328.
8. Ecclesiastes, or, a Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching As it Falls Under the Rules of Art (London, 1605), p. 128.
9. Robert South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1823), IV, pp. 149-151.
10. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul and Company, 1925), p. 119.
11. See Winfried Schleiner, The Imagery of John Donne’s Sermons (Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), pp. 94-103, for a splendid discussion of John Donne’s “book of the world” imagery.
12. See his sermon, The Saint’s Knowledge of Christ’s Love.
13. Talon, op. cit., p. 129.