CHAPTER II.


It cannot have been more than two or three years after Bunyan's return
home from his short experience of a soldier's life, that he took the step
which, more than any other, influences a man's future career for good or
for evil. The young tinker married. With his characteristic disregard
of all facts or dates but such as concern his spiritual history, Bunyan
tells us nothing about the orphan girl he made his wife. Where he found
her, who her parents were, where they were married, even her christian
name, were all deemed so many irrelevant details. Indeed the fact of his
marriage would probably have been passed over altogether but for the
important bearing it hid on his inner life. His "mercy," as he calls it,
"was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly," and who,
though she brought him no marriage portion, so that they "came together
as poor as poor might be," as "poor as howlets," to adopt his own simile,
"without so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt" them, yet
brought with her to the Elstow cottage two religious books, which had
belonged to her father, and which he "had left her when he died." These
books were "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," the work of Arthur Dent,
the puritan incumbent of Shoebury, in Essex--"wearisomely heavy and
theologically narrow," writes Dr. Brown--and "The Practise of Piety," by
Dr. Lewis Bayley, Bishop of Bangor, and previously chaplain to Prince
Henry, which enjoyed a wide reputation with puritans as well as with
churchmen. Together with these books, the young wife brought the still
more powerful influence of a religious training, and the memory of a holy
example, often telling her young graceless husband "what a godly man her
father was, and how he would reprove and correct vice both in his house
and amongst his neighbours, and what a strict and holy life he lived in