Explore "Bunyan and the Puritans" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Southey's Life of Bunyan is beautiful. I wish he had illustrated that mood of mind which exaggerates, and still more, mistakes, the inward depravation, as in Bunyan, Nelson, and others, by extracts from Baxter's Life of himself. What genuine superstition is exemplified in that bandying of texts and half texts, and demi-semi-texts, just as memory happened to suggest them, or chance brought them before Bunyan's mind! His tract, entitled, "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners"[1] is a study for a philosopher.
[Footnote 1: "Grace abounding to the Chief of Sinners, in a faithful Account of the Life and Death of John Bunyan, &c. " Is it not, however, an historical error to call the Puritans dissenters? Before St. Bartholomew's day, they were essentially a part of the church, and had as determined opinions in favour of a church establishment as the bishops themselves.