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John Bunyan was arrested because of his conviction that God had called him to preach—an especially dangerous calling at a time when Nonconformists were “dreaded as potential revolutionaries only waiting for a chance to murder Charles II as they had murdered Charles I.” (Robert M. Adams, Land and Literature of England, p. 242). Nonconformists faced prison and even banishment for gathering in groups of five or more, and ministers and teachers, the leaders in the separatist movements, came under special suspicion. Bunyan’s first arrest and sentence demonstrate the political climate: the constables who came to arrest Bunyan acted, as he later recalled, “as if we that was to meet together in that place did intend to do some fearful business, to the destruction of the country,” and, after indicting him as “an Upholder and Maintainer of unlawful Assemblies and Conventicles, and for not conforming to the National Worship of the Church of England,” the justices sentenced Bunyan to “perpetual banishment.” (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Section 319.)

The sentence was never carried out, but Bunyan spent the greater part of the next fourteen years in prison. His imprisonment exacted a real price in suffering, one which his family shared: his second wife, Elizabeth, lost her first child after a premature labor precipitated by the arrest. She was left to care for Bunyan’s four children from his earlier marriage “with nothing to live on but the charity of good people,” as she told one of her husband’s judges (A Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan, p. 128). Bunyan never mentioned this loss in his writing, but fear for his family led to acute psychological suffering:

The parting with my Wife and poor Children hath oft been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from my bones; and that not only because I am somewhat too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind Child, who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides.

(Grace Abounding, Section 327.)

His suffering seems to have been most acute when he comtemplated the probable fate of his most helpless child, his blind daughter Mary, destitute of parental shelter: he visualized her suffering all the woes of an orphan at the time: beatings, hunger, cold, and other calamities. “O the thoughts of the hardship I thought my blind one might go under, would break my heart to pieces” (Grace Abounding, Section 327). While alive, he could help support his family by making “many hundred gross of long tagg’d laces,” but even this support would be lost to them should he die or be transported.

The authorities’ promises to release him if he would refrain from preaching played on his fears for his family, so that even his love for them became part of the temptation to deny his calling. Other fears also eroded his strength and tempted him to quit: fear that he might fail to persevere in his calling; fear that he might die without the conviction of his salvation: “Satan laid hard at me to beat me out of heart, by suggesting thus unto me: But how if when you come indeed to die, you should be in this condition; that is as not … to have any evidence upon your soul for a better state hereafter?” (Grace Abounding, Section 333).

Yet Bunyan persevered. If temptation and fear were great, his consolation was greater still, and depended in large part on the promises he found in Scripture: “Leave thy fatherless children,” he read in Jeremiah, “and I will preserve them alive, and let thy widows trust in me” (Jer. 49:11). Scripture convinced him that he could trust his family with God. As for his other fears, he could face them in God’s company. When he was most fearful, he found most comfort: “when I have started, even as it were at nothing else but my shadow, yet God, as being very tender of me, hath not suffered me to be molested, but would with one Scripture and another strengthen me against all” (Grace Abounding, Section 323).

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