And
this dipping of the pencil into his own soul, and into the freshness
of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his
perpetual originality and unsating freshness. Now, when men say
repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and
providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its
consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable,
against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and
memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as
carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly
plaints. With God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates
of his heaven brightening the horizon beyond the grave, we may be
reformers; but it cannot be in the destructive spirit displayed by
some who, in the prophet's language, amid darkness on the earth,
"fret themselves, and curse their King and their God, and look
upward." Poverty cannot degrade, nor ignorance bedwarf, nor
persecution crush, nor dungeon enthral the free, glad spirit of a
child of God, erect in its regenerate strength, and rich in its
eternal hopes and heritage. And this hopeful and elastic temperament
colors and perfumes every treatise that Bunyan sent out even from
the precincts of his prison.
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