Part 18

‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep!’

The malignant demons watch their opportunity to harass the pilgrim with evil thoughts, injected when least expected.

101. Vol. i., p. 19.

102. Vol. i., p. 20.

103. The anxiety of this pious teacher was to press upon his hearers to take special heed, not to receive any truth upon trust from any man, but to pray over it and search ‘the Holy Word.’ This, Mr. Southey designates, ‘doctrine of a most perilous kind.’ How happy would it be for society if every religious teacher pressed this perilous doctrine upon their hearers, that it might bring forth the same fruit universally, as it did specially in Bunyan. Compare Grace Abounding, No. 117, and Southey’s Life, p. 27, 28.

104. Vol. i., p. 21.

105. Vol. i., p. 22.

106. Vol. iii., p. 115.

107. Vol. iii., p. 270.

108. Luther fell into the same mistake as to the Baptists, that Bunyan did as to the Quakers. Both were keenly alive to the honour of Christianity, and were equally misled by the loose conduct of some unworthy professors. Luther charges the Baptists as being ‘devils possessed with worse devils’ [Preface to Galatians]. ‘It is all one whether he be called a Frank, a Turk, a Jew, or an Anabaptist’ [Com. Gal. iv. 8, 9]. ‘Possessed with the devil, seditious, and bloody men’ [Gal. v. 19]. Even a few days before his death, he wrote to his wife, ‘Dearest Kate, we reached Halle at eight o’clock, but could not get on to Eisleben, for there met us a great Anabaptist, with waves and lumps of ice, which threatened us with a second baptism.’ Bunyan, in the same spirit, calls the Quakers ‘a company of loose ranters, light notionists, shaking in their principles!’ [Vol. ii., p. 133, 9, 21]. Denying the Scriptures and the resurrection [Com. Gal. iv. 29]. These two great men went through the same furnace of the regeneration; and Bunyan, notwithstanding Luther’s prejudices against the Baptists, most affectionately recommended his Comment on the Galatians, as an invaluable work for binding up the broken-hearted.

109. Vol. i., p. 23.

110. Vol. ii., p. 181.

111. Vol. ii., p. 260.

112. Vol. i., p. 25; No. 158.

113. See note in vol. i., p. 26.

114. Vol. i., p. 29.

115. Vol. i., p. 30

116. The study of those scriptures, in order that the solemn question might be safely resolved, ‘Can such a fallen sinner rise again?’ was like the investigation of the title to an estate upon which a whole livelihood depended. Every apparent flaw must be critically examined. Tremblingly alive to the importance of a right decision, his prayers were most earnest; and at length, to his unspeakable delight, the word of the law and wrath gave place to that of life and grace.

117. Vol. i., p. 35.

118. Vol. iii., p. 100.

119. Irish sixpences, which passed for fourpence-halfpenny. See the note on vol. i., p. 36. Since writing that note I have discovered another proof of the contempt with which that coin was treated:—‘Christian, the wife of Robert Green, of Brexham, Somersetshire, in 1663, is said to have made a covenant with the devil; he pricked the fourth finger of her right hand, between the middle and upper joints, and took two drops of her blood on his finger, giving her a fourpence-halfpenny. Then he spake in private with Catharine her sister, and vanished, leaving a smell of brimstone behind!’—Turner’s Remarkable Providences, folio, 1667, p. 28.

120. Vol. i., p. 36.

121. Holy War.

122. Vol. ii., p. 141.

123. Luther and Tyndale.

124. Vol. iii., p. 398.

125. Vol. i., p. 495.

126. Vol. iii., p. 398.