The Author to the Reader
Courteous Reader,
As I considered my account in Pilgrim’s Progress of the journey from this world to glory, and how many people in this nation had welcomed it, I thought of writing again. Then I wrote about someone going to heaven; now I would write about the life and death of the ungodly, and their journey from this world to hell. That is what I have done here, under the name and title of Mr. Badman, a name very fitting for such a subject. I have also written it as a dialogue, to make the work easier for me and more enjoyable for the reader. Although I have presented it in this form, I have departed as little as possible from my own observations. Indeed, I think I can truthfully say that, to the best of my memory, everything I discuss here as a matter of fact has been acted out on the stage of this world, often before my own eyes.
Here, then, courteous reader, I present you with the actual life and death of Mr. Badman. I trace his life from childhood to death so that, as in a mirror, you may see with your own eyes the steps that lead to hell. As you read about Mr. Badman’s death, you may also discover whether you yourself are following his path there. Please refrain from quibbling and mocking because I say that Mr. Badman is dead. Instead, seriously examine yourself by the Word to discover whether you belong to his family. Mr. Badman has left many relatives behind; indeed, the whole world is overrun with his kindred.
Some of his relatives, like him, have gone to their place and their lasting home, but thousands upon thousands remain: brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, and countless friends and associates. I can say, with only too much truth, that scarcely any fellowship, community, or fraternity in the world is without some of Mr. Badman’s relatives. Indeed, we can rarely find a family or household in a town where he has not left a brother, nephew, or friend.
The target I am shooting at is therefore broad. It will be as impossible for this book to enter several families without catching someone as for the king’s messenger to rush into a house full of traitors and find only honest men. I cannot help thinking that this shot will strike many, since our fields are so full of this game. But how many it will make dead to Mr. Badman’s way of life and alive to the way of Pilgrim’s Progress is beyond my power to determine. That secret belongs only to the Lord our God. He alone knows whom he will bless through it to such a good and blessed end. Still, I have fired the gun, and I have no doubt that its report will soon be heard.
I told you that Mr. Badman had left many friends and relatives behind. If I outlive them, though I very much doubt whether I will, I may also write about their lives. Whether my life is longer or shorter, my prayer now is that God will raise up witnesses against them who may either convert them or expose and defeat them. Wherever they live and wallow in their wickedness, they are that country’s pest and plague. England already shakes and totters under the burden that Mr. Badman and his friends have wickedly laid upon it. Indeed, our earth “reels and staggereth to and fro like a drunkard,” and “the transgression thereof is heavy upon it.”
Courteous reader, here at the door and threshold of this house, I will offer you only this news: Mr. Badman lies dead inside. If you have time, please enter and see the condition in which he lies between his deathbed and the grave. He is not yet buried, nor does he yet stink as he is intended to before he sinks into oblivion. Others have had their funerals conducted according to their greatness and grandeur in the world. Mr. Badman likewise has funeral honors suited to what he deserves, since he does not deserve to go silently to his grave.
Four things are customary at great men’s funerals. We will take the liberty, I hope without giving offense, of referring to them in Mr. Badman’s funeral.
First. After their deaths, they are sometimes presented to their friends through fully finished images, as lifelike as skilled craftsmen can make them. These renew their memory among those who survive them, the memory of both the people and their deeds. I have tried to do the same in my account of Mr. Badman, portraying his features and actions from childhood to gray hair. Here you have him vividly depicted, as in engraved pictures, in his youth, the prime of his life, and his old age. You also have the actions he was most capable of performing under the circumstances of his time, place, strength, and available opportunities.
Second. At great men’s funerals, it is also customary to display the badges and shields of honor they inherited from their ancestors or were considered worthy of receiving for their deeds and exploits. Mr. Badman has his here, too. They differ from those of all worthy men, but agree all the more with what his deeds deserve. Those men have all gone to their graves with ceremony; he alone goes as an abominable branch. His rewards are the rewards of sin. His shields of honor therefore declare only that he died without honor, “and at his end became a fool.” “Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial.” “The seed of evil doers shall never be renowned” (Isa 14:20).
Mr. Badman’s funeral pomp therefore consists of displaying on his hearse the badges of a dishonorable and wicked life, since “his bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down,” as Job says, “with him in the dust.” Nor should anyone attend him at his death except those who conspired with him against their own souls during their lives. Their transgressions have made them infamous to everyone who knows or will know what they have done.
In this little account, I have therefore also given the reader some notice of those who were his accomplices in life and his attendants at death. I have indicated some great villainy they committed, as well as the judgments that overtook and fell upon them from God’s just and avenging hand. These things are either fully known to me because I witnessed them with my own eyes and ears, or were reported to me by people whose accounts I am bound to believe. To distinguish these accounts from other events and passages in the book, I have attached a pointing-hand mark to them, like a finger pointing them out: ☞
Third. The funerals of distinguished people have been accompanied by a suitable sermon at the time and place of burial. I have not reached that point yet, having come no further than Mr. Badman’s death. But he must be buried after he has spent his appointed time stinking before those who look on. I have no doubt that some like those appointed, as we read, to attend Gog’s burial will do this work in my place. They will leave neither skin nor bone of him above ground, but will set a sign beside it until the buriers have buried it in the valley of Hamon-gog (Ezek 39).
Fourth. Funerals usually involve mourning and lamentation, but here, too, Mr. Badman differs from others. His close companions cannot mourn his departure because they have no sense of his damnable condition. Instead, they send him to hell with ringing and singing, in the sleep of death in which he goes there. Good men consider him no loss to the world; his place can easily do without him. The loss is his alone. It is too late for him to recover that damage or loss through a sea of bloody tears, even if he could shed them. Indeed, God has said that he will laugh at his destruction. Who, then, will lament him, saying, “Ah, my brother!”? He was only a stinking weed in life, and he was no better in death. Such weeds may well be thrown over the wall without sorrow once God has uprooted them in his wrath.
Reader, if you belong to Mr. Badman’s race, lineage, stock, or fraternity, I tell you before you read this book that you will tolerate neither it nor its author, because he has written about Mr. Badman as he has. Anyone who condemns the wicked who die in that condition also passes sentence on the wicked who are still living. I therefore expect neither belief nor support from you for this account of your kinsman’s life. Your old love for your friend, his ways, his deeds, and so on will instead stir up hostility against me in your very heart.
I am therefore inclined to think that you will tear up this book, burn it, or throw it away in contempt. You may even wish that some harm would come to me for writing such a glaring truth. I also expect you to heap disdain, scorn, and contempt on me, and to abuse and vilify me by saying that I lie and slander the lives and deaths of honest men. When Mr. Badman was alive, he could not bear to be considered a scoundrel, though his actions told every passerby that he was one. How, then, could his surviving brothers, who follow in his very footsteps, approve of the sentence this book pronounces against him? Will they not instead imitate the friends of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, attacking me for condemning him as those friends attacked Moses for carrying out judgment?
I know it is dangerous to stir up a cockatrice’s den, and that those who hunt the wild boar run risks. Anyone who writes Mr. Badman’s life also needs the protection of a coat of mail and a spear, because his surviving friends will know what he is doing. But I have ventured to do it, and this time to play at the hole of these venomous snakes. If they bite, they bite; if they sting, they sting. Christ sends his lambs among wolves to suffer at their hands for bearing plain witness against their evil deeds, rather than to behave like them.
But would a person not need to walk with a guard and have a sentry at the door because of this? Certainly, human nature would welcome such help. Even a spiritual man would welcome it if he knew how to get it (Acts 23). Yet I have been stripped of these protections and am still commanded to serve Christ faithfully. Well, then, I have said what I have said, and now “come on me what will” (Job 13:13). True, the text does say, “Rebuke a scorner and he will hate thee,” and that “he that reproveth a wicked man getteth himself a blot and shame.” But what of it? “Open rebuke is better than secret love,” and whoever receives it will discover afterward that this is true.
So whether Mr. Badman’s friends rage or laugh at what I have written, I know that I have the better end of the bargain. I am trying to stop a hellish way of life and to “save a soul from death” (Jas 5:20). If this earns me hatred from people who ought reasonably to thank me, I must remember the man in the dream who cut his way through his armed enemies and entered the beautiful palace. I must remember him, I say, and do the same myself.
Still, I will offer four things for Mr. Badman’s friends to consider before I turn my back on them.
1. Suppose there really is a hell. I do not question it any more than I question whether there is a sun to shine; I am only supposing it for the sake of argument with Mr. Badman’s friends. Suppose, I say, that there is a hell such as Scripture describes: a place at the greatest possible distance from God and eternal life, where the worm of a guilty conscience never dies and the fire of God’s wrath is never quenched. Suppose there is such a hell, prepared by God, as indeed there is, where the bodies and souls of the ungodly world will be tormented after this life. Just suppose it to yourself, I say, and then tell me: is it not prepared for you, since you are wicked?
Let your conscience speak. Is it not prepared for you, since you are ungodly? And do you think that, if you were there now, you could wrestle with God’s judgment? Why, then, do the fallen angels tremble there? Thy hands cannot be strong, nor can thy heart endure, in that day when God shall deal with thee (Ezek 22:14).
2. Suppose someone whose soul is now in hell for sin were allowed to return and live here again. Suppose that person were also promised that, by changing his life, he could exchange that place for heaven and glory the next time he died. What do you say, wicked man? Do you think such a person would return to his former way of life and risk the damnation he had already experienced for sin? Would he choose that cursed life again, which would kindle hell’s flames around him afresh and bind him under God’s heavy wrath? Oh, he would not, he would not! The account in Luke 16 suggests this. Indeed, reason itself, once awake, would recoil and tremble at such a thought.
3. Suppose, again, that you who live and wallow in sin, and have so far known only its pleasure, were carried by an angel to a place from which you could clearly see heaven and hell, the joys of the one and the torments of the other. Suppose, I say, that this view convinced your reason that both heaven and hell are realities just as the Word declares them to be. Do you think that, once brought home again, you would choose your former life and return to your folly? No. If you continued to believe what you had seen, you would eat fire and brimstone first.
4. I will offer another supposition. Suppose we had a law, and a magistrate to enforce its penalty, that for every openly wicked act you committed, a certain amount of flesh would be pulled from your bones with burning pincers. Would you continue openly lying, swearing, drinking, and having illicit sex, as you now do with delight? Surely, surely not. Fear of the punishment would make you stop. Even when your lusts were powerful, it would make you tremble to think of the punishment you were certain to suffer as soon as the pleasure ended.
But oh, the folly, the madness, the desperate madness in the hearts of Mr. Badman’s friends! Despite the threats of a holy God who avenges sin, despite the cries and warnings of all good men, and even despite the groans and torments of those now in hell for sin, they continue in a sinful way of life. They do this even though every sin is another step down into that infernal cavern (Luke 16:24, 28). How true is Solomon’s saying: “The heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead” (Eccl 9:3).
To the dead! That is, to the dead in hell, the damned dead. That is where those who died as bad men have gone, and where those who live as bad men are likely to go once their sinful souls have drunk a little more sin, like stolen waters.
These are my reasons for publishing this book:
1. Wickedness, like a flood, threatens to drown our English world. It is already beginning to rise above the mountaintops. It has almost swallowed everything; our young people, the middle-aged, the old, almost everyone is being carried away by this flood. Oh, debauchery, debauchery, what have you done in England! You have corrupted our young men and made beasts of our old men. You have deflowered our virgins and made married women into procurers. You have made our earth “to reel to and fro like a drunkard.” It is in danger: it could “be removed like a cottage.” Indeed, because transgression weighs so heavily upon it, it is likely to fall and rise no more (Isa 24:20).
Oh, that I could mourn for England and the sins committed here! Even now I see that, without repentance, the agents of God’s wrath are about to deal with us, each with his “slaughtering weapon in his hand” (Ezek 9:1-2). Well, I have written, and with God’s help I will pray that this flood may subside in England. If only I could see the mountaintops above it, I would consider that a sign that these waters were receding.
2. Those who are able have a duty to cry out against this deadly plague, to raise their voices like a trumpet against it. People must be awakened to it and flee from it as the greatest of evils. Sin pulled angels out of heaven, pulls people down to hell, and overthrows kingdoms. Who sees a house on fire without warning those who live in it? Who sees the land invaded without lighting the warning beacons? Who sees devils, like roaring lions, continually devouring souls without crying out?
Above all, when we see sin, sinful sin, swallowing a nation, sinking a nation, and bringing its inhabitants to ruin in this life, in their spirits, and for eternity, should we not cry out? Should we not cry, “They are drunk, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink”? They are intoxicated with sin’s deadly poison. Unless its harmful power is checked by wholesome remedies, it will bring soul and body, property and country, everything, to ruin and destruction.
3. By this outcry I will save myself from sharing the ruin of those who perish. A man in my position can do no more in this matter than expose and condemn the wickedness, warn the evildoer of judgment, and flee from it himself. But oh, that I might save more than myself! Oh, that many would hear my cry and turn from sin, so that they might be safe from the death and judgment that accompany it!
Why I have handled the subject in this form is best known to me. My reasons for concealing most of the names of the people whose sins or punishments I recount here and there in this book are these:
(1) Their sins and judgments were not all equally public. Some people committed their sins, and received the judgments for them, only in an obscure corner. Besides, I could not learn some of their names. Even if I could have learned them, I would not have made them public, for this next reason.
(2) I did not want to provoke their surviving relatives. I did not want to give them just cause for anger. Yet I think I would have done so if I had linked the punishments to the sins, attached both to the names, and published them to the world.
(3) Nor did I want to expose them to disgrace and contempt, which I think would inevitably have happened if I had also included the names.
As for those I do name, their crimes or judgments were plain, almost as public as anything of that kind that happens to mortal people. They have therefore publicized their own shame through their sin, and God has publicized his anger by taking open vengeance. As Job says, God has struck “them as wicked men in the open sight of others” (Job 34:26). Since their sin and judgment were so conspicuous, I cannot imagine that my warning the world about them should harm them.
As far as their relatives are concerned, publishing these things is intended as a reminder, so that they too may reflect, repent, and turn to God, lest the judgments for those sins become hereditary. The God of heaven has threatened to visit the fathers’ iniquity upon their children, if they hate him, to the third and fourth generation (Exod 20:5).
Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment for pride was public. For his sin he was driven from his royal dignity and from human society to eat grass like an ox and live among the beasts. Daniel therefore did not hesitate to tell Belshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar’s son, about it to his face, or to publish it so that coming generations might read and remember it. The same can be said of Judas, Ananias, and others, whose sin and punishment were known to everyone living in Jerusalem (Acts 1:19).
When the offspring or relatives of people who have suffered public, fearful, and extraordinary judgments for sin overlook, forget, pass by, or take no notice of such mighty acts of God against them and their household, it is a sign of nothing but desperate refusal to repent and hardness of heart. Thus Daniel shows how much worse Belshazzar’s crime was because he hardened his heart in pride, even though he knew that this very sin and transgression had brought his father down from his high position and made him a companion of donkeys. “And thou his son, O Belshazzar,” he says, “hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this” (Dan 5:22). That was a pointed rebuke indeed, but a pointed rebuke is most fitting for open and persistent transgression.
Let the offspring or relatives of such people beware. Through their own sin and God’s dreadful judgments, these people have become a warning sign (Deut 16:9-12), swept like dung from the face of the earth. When judgment knocks at their descendants’ door for their sins, as it once knocked at their ancestors’ door, it may fall with as heavy a blow as it did on those who went before them (Num 16:38-40). Let them beware lest, on that day, instead of mercy, they find judgment without mercy for their arrogant, daring sins that defy judgment.
To conclude, anyone who does not want to die Mr. Badman’s death must beware of Mr. Badman’s ways, because his ways lead to his end. Wickedness will not rescue those devoted to it, even if they cover everything with a profession of religion. If it was a transgression in former times for a man to wear a woman’s clothing, surely it is a transgression now for a sinner to cloak himself in a profession of Christianity. Wolves in sheep’s clothing swarm in England today, wolves in both doctrine and practice. I suspect that some people profess religion deliberately to worm their way into a business, and from there into wealth. If necessary, they acquire that wealth dishonestly, through their neighbor’s ruin. Let such people beware, because those who do these things receive the greater damnation.
Christian, make your profession shine through a life that accords with the gospel. Otherwise you will harm religion, bring disgrace on your fellow Christians, and give the enemies cause for offense. It would be better for a millstone to be hung around your neck and for you, wearing that adornment, to be thrown to the bottom of the sea than to do this. Christian, a profession that accords with the gospel is rare these days. Seek it, then, put it on, and keep it spotless and, as is fitting for you, white and clean. Then you will be a rare Christian.
The prophecy about the last times is that many who profess religion, for that is how I understand the text, will be wicked (2 Tim 3). But “continue thou in the things that thou hast learned,” learned from the Word and doctrine of God, which accords with godliness, rather than from immoral people or permissive times. Then you will walk with Christ in white.
Now may God Almighty give his people grace to keep from hating or bearing ill will toward sinners, and also from choosing any of their ways. May they keep themselves free from responsibility for the blood of anyone, by speaking and acting according to the name and the rules they profess to know and love, for Jesus Christ’s sake.
John Bunyan.
