Bunyan's Works. Volumes 1, 2, 3 & 4.

Four volumes. Navy leather spine and corners, green cloth boards. Gilt all edges. Dimensions are for one volume. A magnificent and unique rebound set. Printed & published in Canada 1864

Bunyan is best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress Some people wanted a simpler form of worship and independent congregations (from the Church of England) began to emerge. One Sunday, John Bunyan heard a sermon on the evil of breaking the Sabbath; Bunyan was playing a game of tip-cat on the Elstow village green when he heard a voice within asking "Wilt though leave thy sins and go to heaven? Or have thy sins and go to hell?" From that moment on Bunyan's life began to change. In 1653 he joined the newly formed Independent church that met in St John's Church, Bedford, south of the river, where he became friends with their pastor John Gifford.

John Bunyan (baptised 30 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an English writer and Puritan preacher best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them expanded sermons. Bunyan came from the village of Elstow, near Bedford. He had some schooling and at the age of sixteen joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army, he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He became interested in religion after his marriage, attending first the parish church and then joining the Bedford Meeting, a nonconformist group in Bedford, and becoming a preacher. After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of nonconformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested and spent the next twelve years in jail as he refused to give up preaching. During this time he wrote a spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and began work on his most famous book, The Pilgrim's Progress, which was not published until some years after his release. Bunyan's later years, in spite of another shorter term of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort as a popular author and preacher, and pastor of the Bedford Meeting. He died aged 59 after falling ill on a journey to London and is buried in Bunhill Fields. The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most published books in the English language; 1,300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after the author's death. Bunyan is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 30 August, and on the liturgical calendar of the United States Episcopal Church on 29 August. Some other churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death (31 August).

John Gifford is easily the most arresting character in the Bunyan story, apart from Bunyan himself. He had had a strange career. On the 1st June 1648 a very bitter fight was fought at Maidstone in Kent in a rain-storm, between the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax and a Royalist body, making insurrection in a lost cause on behalf of Charles. Sir Thomas Fairfax never performed a more brilliant exploit than when on that one memorable night at Maidstone the Royalist insurrection was stamped out and extinguished in its own blood. Hundreds of dead bodies filled the streets of the town, hundreds of the enemy were taken prisoners, while hundreds more hid in the hop-fields and woods around the town only to fall into Fairfax's hands the next morning. Among the prisoners was John Gifford, a Royalist major of dragoons, a Kentish man of good family, but known as a fierce and notorious swashbuckler. He had been a leader in the Maidstone uprising and was one of the very few prisoners condemned to death. On the night before his execution, by the courtesy of Fairfax himself, Gifford's sister was permitted to visit her brother in prison. The guards were overcome by weariness and drink and lay heavily asleep; Gifford's sister urged him to escape, and showed him the door to freedom. He got clear away without discovery. For three days he lay in hiding in a ditch, and when the hue and cry after him had died down, he went in disguise to London, and thence to the shelter of some friends of his at Bedford. Here he married and settled down to the practice of medicine which he had studied before he entered the army. Gifford had been a dissolute man as a soldier, and he became a still more scandalously dissolute man as a civilian. He spent much time with the wine cup and the dice-box. His hatred and opposition to the Puritans of Bedford made his name an infamy and a fear. He reduced himself almost to beggary with gambling and drink, and when near suicide God laid mighty hold upon him, and he came under the power of the truth. In the providence of God there came into his hands a Puritan book by John Bolton, The Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven, published in 1633. The Bedford Church Book records it thus: "Something therein took hold upon him and brought him into a great sense of shame, wherein he continued for ye space of a moneth or above. But at last God did so plentifully discover to him by His word the forgiveness of his sins for the sake of Christ, that (as he hath by severall of the brethren been heard to say) all his life after, which was about ye space of five yeares he lost not the light of God's countenance." Converted he surely was, and his changed life was apparent to all who knew him. In a very short time he was in fellowship with the leading Puritans of Bedford. His talents could not be hid, and before long he was exhorting the saints at meetings in their homes, organising them into a spiritual society, and then becoming their minister and gathering a sizeable congregation drawn from the town and surrounding villages. Very soon, wonder upon wonders, John Gifford was actually appointed parish minister of St John's Church, Bedford, under Cromwell's evangelical but otherwise inclusive ecclesiastical establishment. Oliver Cromwell, though a strict Calvinist himself, was extremely tolerant of all forms of Christianity except episcopacy and papacy. Any peaceable Christian, he insisted, was entitled to liberty of worship as he thought fit. He sought to establish one Church in which all true believers could worship. In his State Church the parish clergy might have been Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, or even former Episcopalians who accepted the new situation. During the Interregnum about two thousand clergy out of nine thousand parishes in the country gave up their benefices, so that a substantial majority of English clergy carried on as usual—as Christopher Hall at Elstow did. Under Cromwell two sets of officials governed Church leadership: there were Triers, godly ministers who had to examine new incumbents; and there were Ejectors, prominent local Puritan citizens with local knowledge, who could deprive them of their benefices if they neglected their duties or led immoral lives. As Lord Protector, Dr Maurice Ashley reminds us, Cromwell maintained the system of paying clergy out of tithes and he allowed lay patrons to appoint parish clergy. It was in this way, through the commendation of leading Puritan citizens of Bedford, that John Gifford was appointed parish minister of St John's. Cromwell's inclusive Church Establishment might be the scorn of the prelatic party, but it was a genuine attempt to obtain order in the Church, without enforcing restricting regulations regarding, for example, the administration of baptism. He would have liked to make the National Church the comprehensive Church that his friend Dr John Owen sought. But Cromwell did not live long enough to see this come about. The Roman Catholic sympathies of both Charles II and James II were decisive against such a system: during their reigns Nonconformists looked back to the Cromwellian Protectorate as a golden age of liberty and peace. So, in 1653 Cromwell's Commissioners, satisfied that John Gifford had the root of the matter in him, appointed the ex-major to the sequestrated living of St John's, Bedford. The Bedford dissenting congregation had been founded in 1650 with some of the leading citizens, including an ex-Mayor, belonging to it. When Gifford became their Pastor at the small Church of St John's, as the Church Book records: "They made choice of Brother Gifford to be their Pastor, or elder, to minister to them the things of the Kingdom of God, to whom they had given themselves before; wherefore Brother Gifford accepted of the charge and gave himself up to the Lord and to His people, to walke with them, watch over them, and dispense the mysteries of the Gospel among them." The Church thus reformed by him consisted of twelve members "in the Congregational way". Their principal of union was stated as follows: "Now the principle upon which they thus entered into fellowship one with another, and upon which they did afterwards receive those that were added to their body and fellowship, was Faith in Christ and Holiness of life, without respect to this or that circumstance or opinion in outward and circumstantial things. By which means grace and faith was encouraged, love and amity maintained, disputings and occasion to janglings and unprofitable questions avoided, and many that were weak in the faith confirmed in the blessing of eternal life." It was this simple principle of church unity that so influenced John Bunyan and moulded his own views of church fellowship and the sacraments in days to come. This remarkable Church still exists in Bedford, proud of its association with John Gifford and John Bunyan. Brother Gifford, or "holy Mr Gifford" as Bunyan calls him, invited John to St John's rectory for conversation, and there in his spacious garden, he opened up to the troubled tinker the way of salvation—repentance towards God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Lovingly, patiently, and clearly he did it, and Bunyan's burden was slowly lifted and his guilty conscience healed as he drank in the spiritual truths Gifford showed him in private talk and public exhortation. Eagerly Bunyan attended Gifford's ministry at St John's. One sermon by Gifford on a text from the "Song of Songs" —"Behold, thou art fair, my love", reminded the hearers that the love of Christ was not ,as John was inclined to think, withheld from the tempted and afflicted soul. This promise filled him with so much hope, Bunyan tells us, that he felt he could have spoken of God's mercy to the crows that sat on the ploughed fields. In Grace Abounding, paragraph 89, we have John Gifford's sermon outline, and very good it is. John Bunyan continued for more than a year in a state of spiritual uncertainty. Sometimes a text would lift his soul on high, but a day or so later another text would send him to despair. He was altogether too introspective. In the pages of Grace Abounding he sets down at length these spiritual struggles, which we need not further discuss here. Eventually, however, the truth gripped his soul that through the sin-atoning sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and through faith in his finished work for sinners he could be forgiven and become a true child of God. The text, "He hath made peace by the blood of his cross" was a powerful message to his soul. He received Christ as his Saviour in true repentance for sin, and simple faith and promised obedience, and his struggles were over. In the process he came across a tattered copy of Luther's Commentary on the Epistle of St Paul to the Galatians, in a shop, which he bought and carried home to study. It was so old that it almost fell to pieces in his hand. It was greatly to his enlightening and strengthening, for Martin Luther had known spiritual struggles similar to his own. "I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians," he tells us, "(excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I have seen, as most fit for a wounded conscience." John Bunyan was formally received into the Puritan Church at Bedford worshipping in St John's Church, in 1653. He was still living at Elstow, but had been attending Gifford's ministry since 1651. Some biographers, who should have known better, boldly stated that Bunyan joined the Baptist Church at Bedford. This is a mistake. There was no Baptist Church in Bedford in 1653 or for many years afterwards. Gifford's church fellowship, as we have seen, was a Union Church, comprising both Congregational and Baptist members. Tradition has it that Gifford baptized John Bunyan one dark night by immersion in the river Ouse, and a place is pointed out where baptizing later on took place. It is indeed possible, but there is no record of this happening, and John himself never mentions it. Only twice between 1650 and 1690 is baptism mentioned in the Church Book of Bedford Meeting, and neither of these is of John Bunyan. At any time between his conversion and his death he would have denied that he was a Baptist—or Anabaptist as the denomination was then known. In his attitude to baptism and other forms of ritual he was deeply influenced by the principles of John Gifford his pastor, and later by those of his friend William Dell who would have abandoned baptism altogether. Writing a farewell letter to the Bedford Church a little before he died John Gifford clearly warned them to avoid "separation from the Church about baptisme, laying on of hands, Anoynting with Oyls, Psalmes, or any externalls". He urged them instead to concentrate on the fundamental truths of the faith. Baptism, he considered, was not one of these. Nor was it to John Bunyan. He did not "preach up" baptism of believers by immersion, as some did in his day, and some do today. Indeed, he was to engage in controversy with some London Baptists of the stricter sort. Towards the end of his book, A Confession of my Faith he dealt briefly with the terms on which Christians should be admitted to Communion. He deplores undue attention being given to questions of ritual, "taking off Christians from the more mighty things of God, and to make them quarrel and have heart-burnings one against another." Tip-cat (also called cat, cat and dog, one-a-cat, pussy, or piggy) is a pastime which consists of tapping a short billet of wood (usually no more than 8 to 15 centimetres (3 to 6 in)) with a larger stick (similar to a baseball bat or broom handle); the shorter piece is tapered or sharpened on both ends so that it can be "tipped up" into the air when struck by the larger, at which point the player attempts to swing or hit it a distance with the larger stick while it is still in the air (similar to swinging at a pitch in baseball or cricket, etc.). There are many varieties of the game, but in the most common, the batter, having placed the billet, or "cat", in a small circle on the ground, tips it into the air and hits it to a distance. His opponent then offers him a certain number of points, based upon his estimate of the number of hops or jumps necessary to cover the distance. If the batter thinks the distance underestimated, he is at liberty to decline the offer and measure the distance in jumps, and score the number made.