A TINKER out of Bedford, | |
| A vagrant oft in quod, | |
| A private under Fairfax, | |
| A minister of God— | |
| Two hundred years and thirty | 5 |
| Ere Armageddon came | |
| His single hand portrayed it, | |
| And Bunyan was his name! | |
| |
| He mapped for those who follow, | |
| The world in which we are— | 10 |
| “This famous town of Mansoul” | |
| That takes the Holy War. | |
| Her true and traitor people, | |
| The gates along her wall, | |
| From Eye Gate unto Feel Gate, | 15 |
| John Bunyan showed them all. | |
| |
| All enemy divisions, | |
| Recruits of every class, | |
| And highly-screened positions | |
| For flame or poison-gas; | 20 |
| The craft that we call modern, | |
| The crimes that we call new, | |
| John Bunyan had ’em typed and filed | |
| In Sixteen Eighty-two. | |
| |
| Likewise the Lords of Looseness | 25 |
| That hamper faith and works, | |
| The Perseverance-Doubters, | |
| And Present-Comfort shirks, | |
| With brittle intellectuals | |
| Who crack beneath a strain— | 30 |
| John Bunyan met that helpful set | |
| In Charles the Second’s reign. | |
| |
| Emmanuel’s vanguard dying | |
| For right and not for rights, | |
| My Lord Apollyon lying | 35 |
| To the State-kept Stockholmites, | |
| The Pope, the swithering Neutrals, | |
| The Kaiser and his Gott— | |
| Their rôles, their goals, their naked souls— | |
| He knew and drew the lot. | 40 |
| |
| Now he hath left his quarters, | |
| In Bunhill Fields to lie, | |
| The wisdom that he taught us | |
| Is proven prophecy— | |
| One watchword through our Armies, | 45 |
| One answer from our Lands:— | |
| “No dealings with Diabolus | |
| As long as Mansoul stands!” | |
| |
| A pedlar from a hovel, | |
| The lowest of the low, | 50 |
| The Father of the Novel, | |
| Salvation’s first Defoe, | |
| Eight blinded generations | |
| Ere Armageddon came, | |
| He showed us how to meet it, | 55 |
| And Bunyan was his name! | |
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