John Bunyan

John Bunyan told the story of his conversion in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published in 1666. He was a Bedfordshire tinker by trade. By his own account he passed through a long period of terror over his soul, convinced he was cast off. The turn came, he writes, one day as he crossed a field.

But one day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand: there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, He wants My righteousness; for that was just before Him.John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), §229

He describes the effect that followed.

Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me: now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God.John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), §230

Bunyan became a preacher among the Bedford Baptists. Under the laws against unlicensed preaching he was imprisoned for some twelve years, and it was in Bedford gaol that he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, published in 1678. He was born at Elstow in 1628 and died in London in 1688.