Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/109

 JOHN BUNYAN 71 be called to suffer death for his faithful testimony to the truth ; and his great fear was, that he should not meet his fate with the requisite firmness, and so dis- honor the cause of his Master. And when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a sufficient evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with him, he girded up his soul with the reflection that, as he suffered for the word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth from it. " I will leap," he says, " off the ladder blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do ; if not, I will venture. in thy name !" The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled the false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal in the development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of its fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extrav- agant enjoyment of newly-acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now vent- ure to deny that it was the golden age of England ? Who that regards freedom above slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and lamentation of those interested in the continuance of the old order of things, against the prevalence of sects and schism, but who at the same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church ? Who shall now sneer at Puritanism, with the " Defence of Unlicensed Printing" before him ? Who scoff at Quakerism over the "Journal " of George Fox ? Who shall join with debauched lordlings and fat-witted prelates in ridicule of Anabaptist levellers and dippers, after rising from the perusal of " Pilgrim's Progress?" "There were giants in those days." And foremost amid that band of liberty-loving and God-fearing men, Who fought, and won it, Freedom's holy fight," stands the subject of our sketch, the " Tinker of Elstow." Of his high merit as an author there is no longer any question. The Edinbtirgh Review expressed the common sentiment of the literary world, when it declared that the two great creative minds of the seventeenth century were those which produced " Paradise Lost " and the " Pilgrim's Progress."
 * The slandered Calvinists of Charles's time,