Title : The Puritan movement during the reign of Charles II and John Bunyan

Title : The Puritan movement during the reign of Charles II and John Bunyan Have you ever heard of John Bunyan? Today, we will look at the restoration of Charles II and the Puritan movement. Charles II promised to ensure his freedom of conscience, but once he had established his political base, he ruled just the opposite.  He deprived Presbyterian ministers of their positions who preached or taught against the episcopal system. Worship began to flow formally again.  Two thousand clergy lost their seats for being non-national church believers, and in 1665 the so-called Five Mile Law was enacted, prohibiting non-national church believers from entering cities or hamlets within five miles.  Many Puritans were persecuted. John Bunyan, widely known for The Pilgrim's Progress, is a representative example. Born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, Bunyan, like many of the hastily created preachers at the height of the Puritan movement, did not receive a sufficient education. He learned his father's trade of tinkering from an early age and is said to have received some education, but it is not known at what school he studied. It appears that he began to receive a true education in 1644, when he was 16 years old. Around this time, Bunyan joined the Parliamentarian army stationed at Newport Pegnell. He enlisted at this time in the Parliamentary army, as an order was issued to recruit 225 men from the village of Bedford. Regarding his own conduct before his marriage, Bunyan confesses in his overflowing grace: “Until I got married,” he confessed, “I was the instigator of all the young people who stayed with me in all kinds of vice and ungodliness.” John Bunyan was converted. John Bunyan's Conversion Bunyan gets married two years after being discharged from the military. It is not known exactly who his wife was, but Bunyan recalled that she was a pious woman and that she brought with her two books that she had inherited from her father. The two books she brought with her were Arthur Dent's An Ordinary Man's Path to Heaven and Lewis Bailey's The Practice of Piety. Bunyan testified that the newlyweds had nothing other than two books and almost no household items such as plates or spoons. Their first daughter, Mary, born in 1650, was blind. Besides Mary, she had three more children: Elizabeth, Thomas, and John. Bunyan reveals how he was converted. He originally liked dancing, playing games, and even breaking the Sabbath, but after listening to Pastor Elster's sermon one Sunday, he took to heart the admonition not to break the Sabbath. That afternoon, Bunyan said, he was playing a ticket game on the green in his village when he heard a voice from heaven ask him, “Will you give up your sins and go to heaven or will you go to hell for your sins?” At this time, Bunyan suffered from severe conversion, fear, and guilt for several years, and suffered extreme spiritual conflict. He testified that he could not get close to the steeple door for fear that the bell tower would fall on him. While traveling as a tinkerer and struggling with spiritual issues, he meets a group of women. They were founding members of the Bedford Free Church, and Bunyan joined after being deeply challenged by them. Being called as a Pastor Bunyan realized his calling to lay ministry with the help of John Jiffard, who had become a pastor at the Bedford Congregational Church, which belonged to Cromwell's church. Six years later, in 1656, his first book was published. This is John Bunyan's trials, imprisonment, and writing activities. John Bunyan loses his first wife in 1558 and remarries an 18-year-old young woman named Elizabeth. As Bunyan describes in his work “Abounding Grace,” there was no religious crisis until the 1650s, when Bunyan was working as a journeyman. However, upon the restoration of the monarchy by Charles II in 1650, he was arrested by zealous magistrates for allegedly disobeying an order to stop preaching, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Meanwhile, Bunyan faces a deep religious crisis. While he was imprisoned, his young wife suffered greatly raising the four children born to Bunyan by his first wife.   Upon his release from prison in 1672, John Bunyan appears not to have returned to his former profession of tinkering, but instead devoted his time to writing and preaching. He went on to be pastor of the Bedford Church, traveling on horseback through Bedfordshire and adjoining counties, preaching. John Bunyan's works John Bunyan is widely known in history for his bestiary collection <The Pilgrim's Progress>, which depicts the life of a Christian, but in addition to this book, <Grace abounds for the monster of sinners>, semi-fictional dialogue works <The Life> and <Death of Mr. Bedman>, <The Holy War>, and <The Pilgrim> and he wrote over 50 books, including <Pilgrimage Part 2> and a collection of poetry, <Books for Boys and Girls>. Bunyan brilliantly combined his straightforward and fierce experience of his Christian faith with a vibrant national language through biblical theology and imagery. Although the Pilgrim's Progress was not as famous among nonconformists as it once was, the images of characters such as the brave man for the truth and the worldly wise man, the desperate leader, and the House of Beauty had great power. The Pilgrim's Progress was one of the most widely published books in English. This book was printed in 1,300 editions until 1938, 250 years after his death in 1688.