many cases, the first outlines of the books which, in rapid succession,
flowed from his pen during the earlier years of his imprisonment,
relieving the otherwise insupportable tedium of his close confinement.
Bunyan himself tells us that this was the case with regard to his "Holy
City," the first idea of which was borne in upon his mind when addressing
"his brethren in the prison chamber," nor can we doubt that the case was
the same with other works of his. To these we shall hereafter return.
Nor was it his fellow prisoners only who profited by his counsels. In
his "Life and Death of Mr. Badman," he gives us a story of a woman who
came to him when he was in prison, to confess how she had robbed her
master, and to ask his help. Hers was probably a representative case.
The time spared from his handicraft, and not employed in religious
counsel and exhortation, was given to study and composition. For this
his confinement secured him the leisure which otherwise he would have
looked for in vain. The few books he possessed he studied indefatigably.
His library was, at least at one period, a very limited one,--"the least
and the best library," writes a friend who visited him in prison, "that I
ever saw, consisting only of two books--the Bible, and Foxe's 'Book of
Martyrs.'" "But with these two books," writes Mr. Froude, "he had no
cause to complain of intellectual destitution." Bunyan's mode of
composition, though certainly exceedingly rapid,--thoughts succeeding one
another with a quickness akin to inspiration,--was anything but careless.
The "limae labor" with him was unsparing. It was, he tells us, "first
with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that
his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of
Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow
dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine; books
which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of
language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and
earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.