"To Contain a Man of some Four or Five Foot Long"

(an editorial note)

"Consider, that that heaven into which the man Christ is ascended must contain him till the time of the restitution of all things, as in Acts iii.21":

Bunyan's insistence throughout this argument that heaven must "contain" Christ is based on the Geneva Bible text of Acts 3:21:

Whom the heaven must containe untill the time that all things be restored, which God had spoken by the mouth of all his holy Prophets since the world began.

"a man of some four or five foot long":

This standard piece of Reformed polemic against the real physical presence of Christ in the eucharist, which Bunyan transfers to the bodily presence of Christ in the Quakers, had been expressed by William Perkins in A Reformed Catholic (1597; sixth ed. 1634):

This bodily presence overturns the nature of a true body, whose common nature or essential property it is to have length, breadth and thickness, which being taken away a body is no more a body. And by reason of these three dimensions a body can occupy but one place at once, as Aristotle said.

"And they say four times that Christ ascended":

This sentence is badly punctuated in both the 1659 and 1831 printings of Fox's Great Mystery, as if the words "four times" were part of Bunyan's statement, telling how often Christ had ascended. Since Bunyan makes his point about Christ's ascension a good deal more than four times, and since Fox's quotation habits are very loose, it is hard to guess which four passages in Some Gospel Truths Opened Fox had in mind. I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen four representative Bunyan passages to link to Fox's statement. They can be found by clicking on each of the four words of " they say four times" in the text of The Great Mystery.