Born at Elstow, Bedfordshire, Nov. 1628. Educated at parish school, and brought up to father’s trade of tinker. Served as soldier, 1644–46. Married, 1648(?) or 1649(?). Lived at Elstow. Joined Nonconformists, 1653. Removed to Bedford, 1655(?); wife died there. Elected Deacon, 1655; Preacher, 1657. Married again, 1659. At Restoration was arrested, 12 Nov. 1660, for preaching. Imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, 1660–72. Released for a few weeks in 1666. Chosen Minister to Bedford Nonconformists, Jan. 1672; received license to preach, 9 May 1672. Received formal pardon from Crown, 13 Sept. 1672. Perhaps imprisoned for six months in 1675, during which time “Pilgrim’s Progress” was written. Active life—preaching in neighbourhood of Bedford and in London. Chaplain to Lord Mayor of London, 1688. Died in London, 31 Aug. 1688; buried in Bunhill Fields, Finsbury. Works: “Some Gospel Truths Opened,” 1656; “Vindication” of same, 1657; “A Few Sighs from Hell,” 1658; “The Doctrine of the Law,” 1659; “Profitable Meditations” (1661); “I will pray with the Spirit,” 1663; “Christian Behaviour,” 1663; “The Four Last Things, etc.” (1664?); “The Holy City,” 1665; “The Resurrection,” 1665; “Grace Abounding,” 1666; “Defence of the Doctrine of Justification,” 1672; “Confession of Faith,” 1672; “Difference of Judgment about Water Baptism,” 1673; “Peaceable Principles,” 1674; “Reprobation Asserted” (1675?); “Light for them that sit in Darkness,” 1675; “Instruction for the Ignorant,” 1675; “Saved by Grace,” 1675; “The Strait Gate,” 1676; “Pilgrim’s Progress,” pt. i., 1678 (2nd edn. same year); pt. ii., 1684; “Come, and Welcome, to Jesus Christ,” 1678; “Treatise of the Fear of God,” 1679; “Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” 1680; “Holy War,” 1682; “Barren Fig Tree,” 1682; “Greatness of the Soul,” 1683; “Case of Conscience Resolved,” 1683; “Seasonable Counsel,” 1684; “Holy Life the Beauty of Christianity,” 1684; “A Caution to stir up to Watch against Sin,” 1684; “Questions about the Nature … of the … Sabbath,” 1685; “The Pharisee and the Publican,” 1685; “Book for Boys and Girls” (in later edns. called “Divine Emblems”), 1686; “Jerusalem Sinner Saved” (anon.), 1688; “Advocateship of Jesus Christ,” 1688 (another edn. under title: “Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate,” 1688); “Discourse of the … House of God,” 1688; “Water of Life,” 1688; “Solomon’s Temple Spiritualized,” 1688. Posthumous: “Acceptable Sacrifice,” 1689; “Last Sermon,” 1688; “Works” (including ten posthumous works), 1692; “Heavenly Footman,” ed. by C. Doe, 1698; “Pilgrim’s Progress,” pt. i. and ii. together, 1728; “Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. J. Bunyan” (written in Bedford Gaol), 1765. Collected Works: ed. by S. Wilson (2 vols.), 1736; ed. by H. Stebbing (4 vols.), 1859.

Personal

To the Constables of Bedford and to every of them,

  Whereas information and complaint is made unto us that (notwithstanding the King’s Majities late Act of most gracious generall and free pardon to all his subjects for past misdemeanors that by his said clemencie and indulgent grace and favor they might bee moved and induced for the time to come more carefully to observe his Highness’ lawes and Statutes and to continue in theire loyall and due obedience to his Majtie) Yett one John Bunnyon of youre said Towne Tynker hath divers times within one month last past in contempt of his Majties Good Lawes preached or teached at a Conventicle Meeting, or Assembly under color or ptence of exercise of Religion in other manner than according to the Liturgie or practiss of the Church of England. These are therefore in his Majties name to command you forthwith to apprehend and bring the Body of the said John Bunnion before us or any of us or other his Majties Justice of Peace within the said County to answer the premisses and further to doo and receave as to Lawe and Justice shall appertaine and hereof you are not to faile. Given under our handes and seales this fforth day of March in the seven and twentieth yeare of the Raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles the Second. A^o que Dni juxta &c 1674

    J. Napier
    W. Beecher
    G. Blundell
    Hum: Monoux
    Will ffranklin
    John Ventris
    Will Gery
    Will Spencer
    St Jo Chernocke
    Wm Daniels
    T Browne
    W ffoster
    Gaius Squire.

  What hath the devil, or his agents, gotten by putting our great gospel minister Bunyan, in prison? For in prison he wrote many excellent books, that have published to the world his great grace, and great truth, and great judgment, and great ingenuity; and to instance in one, the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” he hath suited to the life of a traveller so exactly and pleasantly, and to the life of a Christian, that this very book, besides the rest, hath done the superstitious sort of men more good than if he had been let alone at his meeting at Bedford, to preach the gospel to his own auditory.

  He was not only well furnished with the helps and endowments of nature beyond ordinary, but eminent in the graces and gifts of the Spirit and fruits of holiness. He was a true lover of all that love our Lord Jesus and did often bewail the different and distinguishing appellations that are among the godly, saying, he did believe a time would come when they should be all buried. His carriage was condescending, affable and meek to all; yet bold and couragious for Christ’s and the gospel’s sake. He was much struck at in the late times of persecution and his sufferings were great, under all which he behaved himself like Christ’s soldier, being far from any sinful compliance to save himself, but did chearfully bear the cross of Christ. As a minister of Christ he was laborious in his work of preaching, diligent in his preparation for it and faithful in dispensing the word, not sparing reproof for outward circumstances whether in the pulpit or no, yet ready to succour the tempted; a son of consolation to the broken-hearted, yet a son of thunder to secure and dead sinners…. His remembrance is sweet and refreshing to many and so will continue: For the righteous shall be had in everlasting remembrance.

  I heard Mr. Bagford (some time before he dyed) say, that he walked once into the country on purpose to see the study of John Bunyan. When he came, John received him very civilly and courteously, but his study consisted only of a Bible and a parcell of books, (the “Pilgrim’s Progress” chiefly,) written by himself, all lying on a shelf or shelves.

  Of gipsey descent or otherwise, Bunyan was bred up with, and speedily forgot, the slender proportion of schooling then accessible to the children of the poor in England. He was by nature of enthusiastic feelings, and so soon as the subject of religion began to fix his attention, his mind appears to have been agonized with the retrospect of a misspent youth. A quick and powerful imagination was at work on a tender conscience; for it would appear that his worst excesses fell far short of that utter reprobation to which he conceived them entitled.

  John Bunyan was a decided Baptist; and in his days, the most incredible falsehoods were invented, and actively circulated, to bias the minds of all classes against this proscribed sect, or any of their writings. Although he had carefully come to a decision upon this subject, he never obtruded it upon public notice; so that, in nearly all his works, water baptism is swallowed up in his earnest desire to win souls to Christ. All his effort is, to fix attention upon that spiritual baptism, or regeneration, which is essential to salvation, and by which the soul passeth from death unto life. He appeared, in one respect, as an Ishmaelite, and differed with all the numerous sects by which he was surrounded. In his early days, the sectarian spirit was very exclusive; Episcopalians. Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, rarely permitted any but members of their own community to partake with them at the Lord’s table. Bunyan was the leader in publicly breaking through this practice. He considered that water baptism was not a church ordinance, but a personal duty, upon which, as to the outward form of ceremony, every one should be left to his own judgment; and he firmly believed that all, who, by the baptism of the Spirit, called God their father, were entitled to a seat at his table, notwithstanding any peculiar or sectarian bias about days, meats, and ceremonies. This drew upon him the severest censures of his brethren in the ministry, particularly of the Baptist denomination.

  “As I walked through the wilderness of this world I lighted upon a certain place where was a den.” These words have been translated into hundreds of languages, and hundreds and thousands in all parts of the world and all classes of mankind have asked, “Where was that place, and where was that den?” and the answer has been given that the name of the “place” was Bedford, and that the “den” was Bedford gaol. This it is which has given to the town of Bedford its chief—may I say, without offence, its only title to universal and everlasting fame. It is now two hundred years ago since Bunyan must have resolved on the great venture—so it seemed to him—of publishing the work which has given to Bedford this immortal renown; and Bedford is this day endeavouring to pay back some part of the debt which it owes to him.

  It has been the fashion to dwell on the disadvantages of his education, and to regret the carelessness of nature which brought into existence a man of genius in a tinker’s hut at Elstow. Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them. Circumstances, I should say, qualified Bunyan perfectly well for the work which he had to do. If he had gone to school, as he said, with Aristotle and Plato; if he had been broken in at a university and been turned into a bishop; if he had been in any one of the learned professions, he might easily have lost, or might have never known, the secret of his powers. He was born to be the Poet-apostle of the English middle classes, imperfectly educated like himself; and, being one of themselves, he had the key of their thoughts and feelings in his own heart. Like nine out of ten of his countrymen, he came into the world with no fortune but his industry. He had to work with his hands for his bread, and to advance by the side of his neighbours along the road of common business. His knowledge was scanty, though of rare quality. He knew his Bible probably by heart. He had studied history in Foxe’s “Martyrs,” but nowhere else that we can trace. The rest of his mental furniture was gathered at first hand from his conscience, his life, and his occupations. Thus, every idea which he received falling into a soil naturally fertile, sprouted up fresh, vigorous, and original.

  The County Gaol in which Bunyan spent the twelve years of his life, from 1660 to 1672, was taken down in 1801. It stood on what is now the vacant piece of land at the corner of the High Street and Silver Street, used as a market-place. Silver Street, so named because it was the quarter where the Jews in early times trafficked in the precious metals, was afterwards known as Gaol Lane, but, since the disappearance of the gaol, has become Silver Street again. The only trace of the gaol itself still left on the spot is the rough stone wall on the north side of the market-place, which was the wall of the small courtyard used by the prisoners. From the interior of the prison, a massive door made of three transverse layers of oak fastened through with iron bolts, and having bars across an open centre, is preserved in the vestry of Bunyan Meeting, Bedford, as a relic of Bunyan’s imprisonment; but no sketch of the building itself of any kind has come down to us. There were iron-grated windows on the Gaol Lane, or Silver Street side, and the older people of the last generation used to tell how the prisoners hung purses out of these windows on Sunday mornings, asking the pitiful help of such passers by as were on their way to church or chapel.

  Bunyan’s personal appearance is thus described by a contemporary: “He was tall of stature, strong-boned though not corpulent, somewhat of a ruddy face with sparkling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper lip after the old British fashion; his hair reddish, but in his latter days had sprinkled with grey; his nose well-set, but not declining or bending, and his mouth moderately large, his fore-head something high, and his habit always plain and modest.” Another contemporary writes: “His countenance was grave and sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame of his heart, that it was convincing to the beholders, and did strike something of awe into them that had nothing of the fear of God.” A third thus describes his manner and bearing: “He appears in countenance to be of a stern and rough temper, but in his conversation mild and affable, not given to loquacity or much discourse in company, unless some urgent occasion required it, observing never to boast of himself in his parts, but rather seem low in his own eyes, and submit himself to the judgment of others.”

  Buckingham, who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than toward him. Yet he was more pious than they; had more humor than Buckingham; and for imaginative power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton.

  Our result can be briefly stated. This is unquestionably a fairly typical case of a now often described mental disorder. The peculiarities of this special case lie largely in the powers of the genius who here suffered from the malady. A man of sensitive and probably somewhat burdened nervous constitution, whose family history, however, so far as it is known to us, gives no positive evidence of serious hereditary weakness, is beset in childhood with frequent nocturnal and even diurnal terrors of a well-known sort. In youth, after an early marriage, under the strain of a life of poverty and of many religious anxieties, he develops elementary insistent dreads of a conscientious sort, and later a collection of habits of questioning and of doubt which erelong reach and obviously pass the limits of the normal. His general physical condition meanwhile failing, in a fashion that, in the light of our very imperfect information concerning this aspect of the case, still appears to be of some neurasthenic type, there now appears a highly systematized mass of insistent motor speech-functions of the most painful sort, accompanied with still more of the same fears, doubts, and questions. After enduring for a pretty extended period, after one remission, and also after a decided change in the contents of the insistent elements, the malady then more rapidly approaches a dramatic crisis, which leaves the sufferer for a long period in a condition of secondary melancholic depression, of a somewhat benign type—a depression from which, owing to a deep change of his mental habits, and to an improvement of his physical condition, he finally emerges cured, although with defect, of his greatest enemy—the systematized insistent impulses. This entire morbid experience has lasted some four years. Henceforth, under a skilful self-imposed mental regimen, this man, although always a prey to elementary insistent temptations and to fits of deep depression of mood, has no return of his more systematized disorders, and endures heavy burdens of work and of fortune with excellent success. Such is the psychological aspect of a story whose human and spiritual interest is and remains of the very highest.

Grace Abounding, 1666

  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,” is a study for a philosopher.

  The author of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” has also left an autobiography, under the title of “Grace Abounding,” which is as remarkable from a psychological as from an historical point of view. This book is the best study for the origin and essence of Puritanism. It is a work which, in spite of its being specifically English, has the significance for the seventeenth century that the “Confessiones” of St. Augustin have for the fifth, and the “Confessions” of Rousseau for the eighteenth. In these three books beats the full and living pulse of the times in which they were composed.

  This proved to be one of his most memorable compositions, and associates itself in one’s mind with Augustine’s confessions and the heart-utterances of Luther…. This book, which in parts is weird and terrible as his own picture of the valley of the shadow of death, is yet in its alternations a faithful transcript of the writer’s soul, and must be read in order to a right understanding of the man as he was, both in strength and weakness.

  The value of the “Grace Abounding,” however, as a work of experimental religion may be easily overestimated. It is not many who can study Bunyan’s minute history of the various stages of his spiritual life with real profit. To some temperaments, especially among the young, the book is more likely to prove injurious than beneficial; it is calculated rather to nourish morbid imaginations, and a dangerous habit of introspection, than to foster the quiet growth of the inner life.

  “Grace Abounding” resembles thousands of similar narratives in essentials, differing principally in the vigour with which a terrifying religious experience is portrayed. It does not, as some seem to have taken for granted, terminate with what would be technically considered as Bunyan’s conversion; on the contrary, a large portion is employed in recording his agonies of apprehension long after he had become a recognized religious instructor, even so late as the beginning of his imprisonment, when he was so little acquainted with the law as to suppose himself in jeopardy of the gallows. Much might be said in censure or compassion of his lamentably distorted views of divine things; but one thing cannot be said, there is not from first to last the slightest symptom of cant. The book is more sincere than Rousseau’s “Confessions,” but could not, like that book, have helped a Carlyle or a George Eliot to learn that there was something in them. As Pilgrim’s Progress may be termed a prosaic Divine Comedy, so might the Bunyan of “Grace Abounding” rank as a prosaic Augustine, but an Augustine without a Monica.

Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678–84

	Well, when I had thus put mine ends together,
	I shew’d them others, that I might see whether
	They would condemn them, or them justify:
	And some said, let them live; some, let them die.
	Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so:
	Some said, It might do good; others said, No.
	Now was I in a strait, and did not see
	Which was the best thing to be done by me:
	At last I thought, Since you are thus divided,
	I print it will; and so the case decided.

  I have been better entertained, and more informed, by a few pages in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” than by a long discourse upon the will and the intellect, and simple or complex ideas.

  My life and opinions will be no less read than the “Pilgrim’s Progress” itself.

  His “Pilgrim’s Progress” has great merit, both for invention, imagination, and the conduct of the story; and it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind. Few books, I believe, have had a more extensive sale. It is remarkable, that it begins very much like the poem of Dante; yet there was no translation of Dante when Bunyan wrote. There is reason to think that he had read Spenser.

	Ingenious dreamer, in whose well-told tale
	Sweet fiction and sweet truth alike prevail;
	Whose humorous vein, strong sense, and simple style,
	May teach the gayest, make the gravest smile;
	Witty, and well employ’d, and, like thy Lord,
	Speaking in parables his slighted word;
	I name thee not, lest so despised a name
	Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame;
	Yet e’en in transitory life’s late day,
	That mingles all my brown with sober gray,
	Revere the man, whose pilgrim marks the road,
	And guides the progress of the soul to God.

  The plan of this work is admirable, being drawn from the circumstances of his own life, as a stranger and pilgrim, who had left the “City of Destruction” upon a journey towards the “Celestial Country.” The difficulties he met with in his determination to serve Jesus Christ, suggested the many circumstances of danger through which this pilgrim passed. The versatile conduct of some professors of religion, suggested the different characters which Christian met with in his way; these, most probably, were persons whom he well knew, and who, perhaps, would be individually read at the time.

  A splendid edition of “Bunyan’s Pilgrim!” Why, the thought is enough to turn one’s moral stomach. His cockle-hat and staff transformed to a smart cock’d beaver and a jemmy cane; his amice gray, to the last Regent Street cut; and his painful palmer’s pace to the modern swagger. Stop thy friend’s sacreligious hand. Nothing can be done for B. but to reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible. The Vanity Fair, and the Pilgrims there—the silly-soothness in his setting-out countenance—the Christian Idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the shepherds on the Delectable Mountains; the lions, so truly allegorical, and remote from any similitude to Pidcock’s; the great head (the author’s), capacious of dreams and similitudes, dreaming in the dungeon. Perhaps you don’t know my edition, what I had when a child. If you do, can you bear new designs from Martin, enamelled into copper or silver plate by Heath, accompanied with verses from Mrs. Hemans’s pen, O how unlike his own!

  His is a homespun style, not a manufacture one; and what a difference is there between its homeliness and the flippant vulgarity of the Roger L’Estrange and Tom Brown school! If it is not a well of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologer must repair if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English, the vernacular speech of his age; sometimes, indeed, in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength. To this natural style Bunyan is in some degree beholden for his general popularity; his language is everywhere level to the most ignorant reader and to the meanest capacity; there is a homely reality about it; a nursery tale is not more intelligible, in its manner of narration, to a child.

  The parable of the Pilgrim’s Progress is, of course, tinged with the tenets of the author, who might be called a Calvinist in every respect, save his aversion to the institution of a regular and ordained clergy. To these tenets he has, of course, adapted the pilgrimage of Christian, in the incidents which occur, and opinions which are expressed. The final condemnation of Ignorance, for instance, who is consigned to the infernal regions when asking admittance to the celestial city, because unable to produce a certificate of his calling, conveys the same severe doctrine of fatalism which had well nigh overturned the reason of Bunyan himself. But the work is not of a controversial character,—it might be perused without offence by sober-minded Christians of all persuasions; and we all know that it is read universally, and has been translated into many languages. It, indeed, appears from many passages in Bunyan’s writings, that there was nothing which he dreaded so much as divisions amongst sincere Christians.

  Bunyan’s imagination was powerful enough, in connection with his belief in God’s superintending Providence, to array his inward trials with a sensible shape, and external events with a light reflected from his own experience; hopes and fears were friends and enemies; acting in concert with these, all things he met with in the world were friends or enemies likewise, according as they aided or opposed his spiritual life. He acted always under one character, the Christian Soldier, realizing, in his own conflicts and conquests, the Progress of his own Pilgrim. Therefore his book is a perfect Reality in oneness as a whole, and in every page a book not of imaginations and shadows, but of Realities experienced. To those who have never set out on this pilgrimage, nor encountered its dangers, it is interesting, as would be a book powerfully written of travels in an unknown, romantic land. Regarded as a work of original genius simply, without taking into view its spiritual meaning, it is a wonder to all, and cannot cease to be.

  There is no long allegory in our literature at all comparable to Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and one principal reason why this is the most delightful thing of the kind in the world is, that, though “written under the similitude of a dream,” there is very little of pure allegory in it, and few abstract qualities or passions are personified. From the very constitution of the latter, the reader almost certainly foresees what such typical beings will say, suffer, or do, according to the circumstances in which they are placed. The issue of every trial, of every contest, is known as soon as the action is commenced.

  I wish I could sympathize with you in what you say of our old Divines. I quite agree as to their language; it is delightful to my taste; but I cannot find in any of them a really great man…. I never yet found one of them who was above mediocrity…. But if I could find a great man amongst them, I would read him thankfully and earnestly. As it is, I hold John Bunyan to have been a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them, and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity. His “Pilgrim’s Progress” seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture, with none of the rubbish of the theologians mixed up with it.

  John Bunyan may pass for the father of our novelists. His success in a line of composition like the spiritual romance or allegory, which seems to have been frigid and unreadable in the few instances where it had been attempted, is doubtless enhanced by his want of all learning, and his low station in life. He was therefore rarely, if ever, an imitator: he was never enchained by rules. Bunyan possessed, in a remarkable degree, the power of representation: his inventive faculty was considerable; but the other is his distinguishing excellence. He saw, and makes us see, what he describes: he is circumstantial without prolixity, and, in the variety and frequent change of his incidents, never loses sight of the unity of his allegorical fable. His invention was enriched, and rather his choice determined, by one rule he had laid down to himself,—the adaptation of all the incidental language of Scripture to his own use. There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in the story of the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and this peculiar artifice has made his own imagination appear more creative than it really is.

  In childhood, we sit, as it were, on Christian’s knee, listening to the tale of his

	“Hair-breadth escapes
	By flood and field.”

In youth we join him upon his perilous journey, to obtain directions for our own intended pilgrimage in the narrow way. Before manhood is matured, we know experimentally that the Slough of Despond, and Doubting Castle, are no fictions. And even in old age, Christians are more than ever convinced of the heights, and depths, and breadths, and lengths of Bunyan’s spiritual wisdom.

  The “Pilgrim’s Progress” is an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one.

  It is a significant circumstance that, till a recent period, all the numerous editions of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” were evidently meant for the cottage and the servant’s hall. The paper, the printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description. In general, when the educated minority and the common people differ about the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally prevails. The “Pilgrim’s Progress” is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.

  What were bars and bolts and prison walls to him, whose eyes were anointed to see, and whose ears opened to hear, the glory and the rejoicing of the City of God, when the pilgrims were conducted to its golden gates, from the black and bitter river, with the sounding trumpeters, the transfigured harpers with their crowns of gold, the sweet voices of angels, the welcoming peal of bells in the holy city, and the songs of the redeemed ones? In reading the concluding pages of the first part of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” we feel as if the mysterious glory of the Beatific Vision was unveiled before us. We are dazzled with the excess of light. We are entranced with the mighty melody; overwhelmed by the great anthem of rejoicing spirits. It can only be adequately described in the language of Milton in respect to the Apocalypse, as “a seven-fold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.”

  Out of that old notion of the Christian life as a pilgrimage, which had existed in hundreds of minds before till it had become a commonplace, there grew and grew in Bunyan’s mind the whole visual allegory of his book—from the Wickedgate seen afar over the fields under the Shining Light, on, by the straight undeviating road itself, with all its sights and perils, and through the Enchanted Ground and the pleasant land of Beulah, to the black and bridgeless river by whose waters is the passage to the glimmering realms, and the brightness of the Heavenly City.

  But what can we say of the Prison Book of John Bunyan? Dear to all people, the favourite of every nation, it is scarcely possible to add one word to what has been long ago said in its glory. The simple fact that from the day of its publication to the present time, it has been the delight and instructor of thousands, is its greatest eulogy. Translated into every known tongue, all sects and all religions have done honour to its wonderful powers. With one little curtailment, our Roman Catholic friends have a “Pilgrim’s Progress;” and though Giant Pope be taken out, we are sure that thousands of them must have been made a little more catholic by reading the work of the sectarian tinker of Elstow. All men alike, learned and ignorant, gentle and simple, bear their testimony to the genius of the great Baptist.

  After the Bible, the book most widely read in England is the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” by John Bunyan…. Poor in ideas, full of images, given up to a fixed and single thought, plunged into this thought by his mechanical pursuit, by his prison and his readings, by his knowledge and his ignorance, circumstances, like nature, make him a visionary and an artist, furnish him with supernatural impressions, and sensible images, teaching him the history of grace and the means of expressing it…. As children, countrymen, and all uncultivated minds, he transforms arguments into parables; he only grasps truth when it is made simple by images; abstract terms elude him; he must touch forms and contemplate colours.

  It is in this amazing reality of impersonation that Bunyan’s imaginative genius specially displays itself. But this is far from being his only excellence. In its range, in its directness, in its simple grace, in the ease with which it changes from living dialogue to dramatic action, from simple pathos to passionate earnestness, in the subtle and delicate fancy which often suffuses its childlike words, in its playful humor, its bold character-painting, in the even and balanced power which passes without effort from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the land “where the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was on the borders of Heaven,” in its sunny kindliness, unbroken by one bitter word, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is among the noblest of English poems.

  There are many little defects in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” yet for two centuries it has been, and it seems likely to continue, the most popular of allegories. This is due to its vivid painting; its stirring action; its all-important theme; its quiet humor, whose lambent flames light many a dark page; its tenderness for the weak; its perfectly intelligible language, whole pages of which contain no word which any child of eight years may not understand; and, above all, its strong human interest, which makes every Christian feel that he is reading the story of his own inner life, while he recognizes the portrait of many a neighbor in those representative characters, which Bunyan delineates with a pen hardly less felicitous than Shakespeare’s.

  It might, perhaps, have been thought that Bunyan, with his rough and imperfect education, must have erred—as it may be he has sometimes erred—in defective appreciation of virtues and weaknesses not his own; but one prevailing characteristic of his work is the breadth and depth of his intellectual insight. For the sincere tremors of poor Mrs. Muchafraid he has as good a word of consolation as he has for the ardent aspirations of Faithful and Hopeful. For the dogmatic nonsense of Talkative he has a word of rebuke as strong as he has for the gloomy dungeons of Doubting Castle; and for the treasures of the past he has a feeling as tender and as pervasive as if he had been brought up in the cloisters of Oxford or Westminster Abbey.

  Bunyan then achieved one of the greatest marvels of human fancy. But in order to appreciate its full worth we must understand the difficulties in the face of which he produced such an effect, difficulties of which some were quite peculiar to him, while others have not been present in the same degree to other poets…. No poet, I suppose, ever lived in so limited a circle of ideas and emotions as Bunyan…. “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” if comparable to the greatest poems of all time for other artistic excellences, is not so in respect of the expression of the passions. Its personages have in the highest degree the qualities of objectivity, and, if I may say so, visibility, but their action upon the mind of the spectator is not equally great, indeed it is much more subdued than is usually the case with the personages of other great poems. Speaking generally it may be said that Bunyan’s story masters the whole of our imagination and our faith, but barely half our emotion. His characters let us see all that they are, but they do not let us see the growth, the outburst, the shock, of their passions. Even those amongst them who are continually upon the scene, who perform before our eyes the whole of their journey to the celestial city, brief, rapid, and true as are the actions in which their personality unfolds itself, yet never give us any great development of emotion, anything to suggest the hidden tragedy that is going on within them.

  The Pilgrim, though in a Puritan dress, is a genuine man. His experience is so truly human experience, that Christians of every persuasion can identify themselves with him; and even those who regard Christianity itself as but a natural outgrowth of the conscience and intellect, and yet desire to live nobly and make the best of themselves, can recognise familiar footprints in every step of Christian’s journey. Thus “The Pilgrim’s Progress” is a book which, when once read, can never be forgotten. We too, every one of us, are pilgrims on the same road, and images and illustrations come back upon us from so faithful an itinerary, as we encounter similar trials, and learn for ourselves the accuracy with which Bunyan has described them.

  Bunyan’s writings have formed the subject of commentaries and essays immensely exceeding themselves in aggregate bulk, and all the fine things which could be said about them have been said. There are two things, however, with which, in reading them once more in connection with Mr. Brown’s biography, we are specially struck. One is the entire absence of fanaticism. Bunyan believes that the world is evil, and that the Christian must separate himself from it; but in this he was like the other Christians of his time, and indeed of all times down to the present. He believes that there is a wrath to come, and that we must flee from it; but so do the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not only is there no fanaticism, but there is hardly even anything sectarian in his writings; saving one or two passages about the Pope, they might almost have been used by Francis of Assisi, to whose spiritual character that of Bunyan has a certain affinity. The “Pilgrim’s Progress” is simple Christianity of primitive type, and almost as unadulterated and unsophisticated by secular learning or science, as it was in its Galilean birthplace.

  Lastly, I must name the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion.

  Among this heterogeneous mass of reading two or three books stand out in my memory towering above all the rest. Unquestionably the book which most seized my imagination was the immortal “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It still seems to me the book which has influenced the minds of Englishmen more than any other outside the covers of the Bible. While it survives, and is read by our boys and girls, two or three great truths will remain deeply burned into the English soul. The first is the personal responsibility of each man; the next is that Christianity does not want, and cannot have, a priest. I confess that the discovery, by later reading, that the so-called Christian priest is a personage borrowed from surrounding superstition, and that the great ecclesiastical structure is entirely built by human hands, filled me with only a deeper gratitude to John Bunyan.

  The “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been translated into the following languages and dialects:—Aneityumese, 1880: Arabic, 1834; Modern Arminian, 1882; Armeno-Turkish, 1881; Assamese, 1856; Bengali, 1821, 1854, 1877; Bohemian, 1871; Bulgarian, 1866; Burmese, 1841; Canarese, 1861, 1867; Chinese—(Wenli or Classical Style, 1874; Mandarin or Court Dialect, 1872; Canton Vernacular, 1870–1; Amoy Dialect, 1865); Dakota, 1858; Danish, 1862; Dutch, 1682, etc.; Dyak, 1879; Efik (Old Calabar), Part 1, 1868, Part 2, 1882; Esthonian, 1870; Fanti, 1887; Fijian, 1867; Finnish, —; French, 1685, etc.; Gaelic, 1812, 1869; German, 1703, etc.; Modern Greek, 1824, 1831, 1854; Greco-Turkish, 1879; Gujarati, —; Hawaiian, 1842; Hebrew, 1844, 1851; Hindi, —; Hungarian, 1867; Icelandic, 1876; Irish, 1837; Italian, 1851? 1855, 1863; Japanese, —; Kafir, 1868; Khasi, —; Lettish, —; Lithuanian, 1878; Malagasy, 1838, etc.; Malay, 1854; Malayalim, 1847; Maori, 1854; Marathi-Balbodh, —; Mexican, 1880; Norwegian, 1868, 1874; Otyiheroro, 1873; Panjabi or Sikh, 1843; Pashtu or Afghani, 1877; Persian, —; Polish, 1728; Portuguese, 1782; Raratongan, 1846; Romaic, 1824, 1831, 1854; Russian, 1881; Sechuana, 1848; Servian, 1879; Sesuto, 1877; Sgau-Karen, 1863; Sindi, —; Singhalese, 1826, 1867; Spanish, 1851; Swedish, 1743; Modern Syriac, 1848; Tahitian, 1847; Tamil, 1793, 1882; Telugu, 1882; Tshi or Ashanti, 1885; Urdu or Hindustani, 1841, 1847; Persian Urdu, —; Roman Urdu, —; Uriya or Orissa, 1873; Welsh, 1688, etc.; Yoruba, —.

  A few years ago I witnessed, in a London suburb, a stage performance of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” by George Macdonald and his family. The audience consisted mainly of young people from the surrounding churches, interested in Macdonald’s religious romances, but they were unable to restrain laughter at Christiana’s lamentations about her soul, or their contempt for Christian when he abandoned his family to the City of Destruction. It occurred to me that the newer generation has, happily, known too little of the catechetical cavern in which their fathers were affectionately prisoned, to realize the splendor of Bunyan’s many-colored torch for imaginations which but for it had been eyeless. I had got hold of “Don Quixote,” and was scandalized that the noblest enthusiasms should be mocked; from that cynical Slough the Pilgrim rescued me.

  It is worth remembering that out of Puritanism, which is regarded as a narrow creed and life, came the only book since the Reformation which has been acceptable to the whole of Christendom, and is still regarded as the substantial truth of the Christian life in all the churches that preach it under any creed of orthodoxy.

  The “Pilgrim’s Progress” was doubtless not written in any special sense for young readers; but successive generations of children have so fastened upon it and made it their own, that we cannot exclude the book from their literature…. The intense earnestness of the Elstow tinker appeals to that stratum of seriousness which is the foundation of the English character, and expresses itself in a directness and simplicity of diction which goes straight to the heart of a child.

  The people are living now—all the people: the noisy bullying judges, as of the French Revolutionary Courts, or the Hanging Courts after Monmouth’s war; the demure, grave Puritan girls; and Matthew, who had the gripes; and lazy, feckless Ignorance, who came to so ill an end, poor fellow; and sturdy Old Honest, and timid Mr. Fearing; not single persons, but dozens arise on the memory. They come, as fresh, as vivid, as if they were out of Scott or Molière; the Tinker is as great a master of character and fiction as the greatest, almost; his style is pure, and plain, and sound, full of old idioms, and even of something like old slang. But even his slang is classical. Bunyan is everybody’s author. The very Catholics have their own edition of the Pilgrim: they have cut out Giant Pope, but have been too good-natured to insert Giant Protestant in his place. Unheralded, unannounced, though not uncriticised (they accused the Tinker of being a plagiarist, of course), Bunyan outshone the Court wits, the learned, the poets of the Restoration, and even the great theologians.

  We get in the Pilgrim’s Progress an inimitable picture of social life in the lower middle class of England, and in this second part a very vivid glimpse of a Puritan household. The glimpse is corrective of a too stern and formal apprehension of social Puritanism, and in the story are exhibited the natural charms and graces which not only could not be expelled by a stern creed, but were essentially connected with the lofty ideals which made Puritanism a mighty force in history. Bunyan had a genius for story-telling, and his allegory is very frank; but what he showed as well as what he did not show in his picture of Christiana and the children indicates the constraint which rested upon the whole Puritan conception of childhood. It is seen at its best in Bunyan, and this great Puritan poet of common life found a place for it in his survey of man’s estate; nature asserted itself in spite of and through Puritanism.

  We find at last in the “Pilgrim’s Progress” a sentence which belongs to the essential paragraph structure. Bunyan has mastered the short sentence. He can vary it with longer ones—not very periodic ones—and produce effects of severe variety and of sober rhythm. The most important outcome of the age that ends with Bunyan is this short sentence. The vernacular stream that has found its way through the obstacles of the age emerges bright and strong in Bunyan. When the next period of development sets in the writers gradually bring this short sentence into the service of the longer thought-integer, and so the new unit of style is evolved.

  John Bunyan, rough vagrant tinker that he had been, unlearned but for the homely wisdom of the Scriptures and that inborn genius for the comprehending of humanity that Chaucer and Shakespeare had before him,—John Bunyan, reprobate but converted, dreamed in the little room at Bedford Jail a dream that made his prison a classic place, and gave England of the seventeenth century its one true picture of human life and human victory. We cannot doubt that many a devout Puritan of Bunyan’s day, with head bent over the record of Christian’s falls and Christian’s triumphs, whispered softly to himself, as tears rolled down his cheeks, “It is I, it is I!” One step more, and but one step, and to paint men and women in the relations familiar to us and amid the surroundings of the world wherein we live.

  About my favorite copy of the “Pilgrim’s Progress” many a pleasant reminiscence lingers, for it was one of the books my grandmother gave my father when he left home to engage in the great battle of life; when my father died this thick, dumpy little volume, with its rude cuts and poorly printed pages, came into my possession. I do not know what part this book played in my father’s life, but I can say for myself that it has brought me solace and cheer a many times.

  Its language, the language of the Bible, and its allegorical form, initiated a plentiful prose literature of a similar kind. But none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic: its dramatic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, have given an equal but a different pleasure to children and men, to the villager and the scholar.

  Its origin and its history combine to make it one of the most interesting of literary masterpieces which the world possesses. In graphic characterization, in breadth of sympathy, in richness of imagination, in clearness and force of homely Saxon speech, it is the greatest of all the monuments created by the English Bible. As a product of the influences of the Reformation, it stands beside the works of Milton, with which it is spiritually akin.

  Next to the Bible, the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is probably the book which has exercised more influence over the Religion of England than any other. It did for Protestantism what Dante did for Roman Catholicism—whilst exposing sometimes naïvely its weak points, it affirmed its doctrines, and popularized their application to current life. It supplied what Milton’s “Paradise Lost” failed to give—some account of the ethics of the soul. From Milton we get our plan of salvation, but from Bunyan we get our conceptions of morality and our theory of spiritual development. Perhaps few of those many who believe that the Bible is their sole spiritual guide realize the extent to which they see the Old Testament through Milton’s eyes, and believe in the Gospel according to Bunyan. There is yet another parallel. Bunyan supplied that imaginative touch and that glow of pictorial sentiment without which no religious message seems to win the masses. He did with his “Pilgrim’s Progress”—for a somewhat arid and stern Evangelicalism which repudiated the saintly legends and the material splendors of Rome—what Keble, with his “Christian Year,” did for the dry bones of Anglicanism. Keble made Anglicanism poetical. Bunyan made Evangelicalism romantic. A greater than Bunyan or Keble adopted a similar method, when, as we read, “Without a parable He taught not the people.” The extraordinary popularity of Bunyan’s great book, one hundred thousand copies of which were circulated in his own lifetime, is not far to seek. He embodied his age—not its secular, but its religious side. No man could have been less influenced by the decapitation of Charles I, the accession of Cromwell, the restoration of that mundane merry monarch, Charles II. He lived through all these, in and out of prison, married and single, with his finger ever on the religious pulse of England; he was as little disturbed by wars and rumors of wars, political cabals and commercial bubbles, as were the great violin-makers of Brescia and Cremona by the political disturbances and bloody squabbles of the small Italian princelets of their day.

  In Bunyan’s beautiful book, we have a social document of the highest value, witnessing to the habits and modes of life of the new burgher-class with a vivid simplicity unsurpassed. Christian’s house and the Town of Destruction, Vanity Fair with its chaffer and gossip, the talk of the pilgrims by the way, are the best pictures we possess of middle-class life in seventeenth century England.

  To John Bunyan the English novel owes a very great debt. What fiction needed, if it was ever to come near a portrayal of real life, was first of all to rid itself of the extravagances of the romancer and the cynicism of the picaresque story-teller. Though Bunyan was despised by his contemporary men of letters, it surely could be but a little time before the precision of his imagination and the force and charm of his simple and idiomatic English would be felt and then imitated. As no writer preceding him, Bunyan knew the artistic effect of minute detail in giving reasonableness to an impossible story. In the “Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678–84) he so mingled with those imaginative scenes of his own familiar Scripture imagery and the still more familiar incidents of English village life, that the illusion of reality must have been to the readers for whom he wrote well-nigh perfect. The allegories of Barclay and Scudéri could not be understood without keys; Bunyan’s “Palace Beautiful” needed none.

  In the last chapters of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” where the company wait in the land of Beulah by the side of the great river for the summons to cross to the eternal city, Bunyan reaches a dignified pathos unexampled in all literature. If this book were in an unknown tongue, the scholars of the world would sound its praises, but as it is folk literature and perfectly intelligible, it is neglected for matter entirely inferior. It remains one of the greatest books in the English language, and no other nation has anything of the same kind to compare with it. In devotion to what he considered his religious duty, Bunyan was not less heroic than Milton.

Holy War, 1682

  If the Pilgrim’s Progress did not exist, would be the best allegory that ever was written.

  Though far less varied and fascinating than the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is a more perfect allegory, full of passages of exquisite symbolism and tenderness. As a piece of metaphysical writing, it seems to me wonderful, from its profound, thoroughly uncalvinistic recognition of the native powers of the soul…. It is the most useful book I ever met with to lecture on to poor men, or an intelligent class of boys.

  I cannot agree with Macaulay in thinking that, if there had been no “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Holy War” would have been the first of religious allegories…. “The Holy War” would have entitled Bunyan to a place among the masters of English Literature. It would never have made his name a household word in every English-speaking family on the globe.

  There was not much literature in that early home of ours, and what little there was by no means attracted me. Boston’s “Fourfold State” and Hervey’s “Meditations” were not lively reading. Happily, they were relieved by “The Pilgrim’s Progress” and “The Holy War;” and in those years I had the bad taste to prefer the latter; to boys pilgrims’ are by no means so interesting as soldiers.

  The style of “Pilgrim’s Progress” is the very perfection of what the style of such a book should be—homely and yet distinguished, exquisitely simple, yet tuned to music at all its finer moments. The allegory is successful above all other allegories in literature. The abstractions which people it, even when they are mentioned only in one or two lines, never fail to live and stand out vividly as human beings. Admirers of “The Holy War” have tried to assert as much for that longer and more laborious work. But popular taste has rightly determined that there should be a thousand readers of the first story to ten of the second. There are very fine passages in “The Holy War;” the opening, especially all the first siege of Mansoul, is superbly conceived and executed. But the personages which are introduced are too incongruous, the intrigues of Shaddei and the resistance of Diabolus are too incredible, the contest is too one-sided from the first, to interest us as we are interested in the human adventures of Christian. Bunyan seems powerless to close “The Holy War,” and before he is able to persuade himself to drop the threads, the whole skein of the allegory is hopelessly entangled.

  There can, in fact, be little doubt that the idea is consciously derived from “Paradise Lost.” In both the banished fiends cast about for some means of retaliating upon their omnipotent foe; in Milton their attack is levelled against the Garden of Eden, in Bunyan against the soul of man. All human attributes, virtuous or vicious, are allegorized with graphic liveliness, but at length one wearies of the crowd of abstractions; and where strength was most necessary, Bunyan is weak. Emanuel is not godlike, and Diabolus is not terrible. The book is perhaps chiefly interesting as an index to the great progress effected since Bunyan’s time in spirituality as regards men’s religious conceptions, and in freedom and enlightenment as concerns the things of earth. No one would now depict the offended majesty of Heaven as so like the offended majesty of the Stuarts; or deem that the revolters’ offence could be mitigated by the abjectness of their submission; or try criminals with such unfairness; or lecture them upon conviction with such lack of judicial decorum. Bunyan’s own spirit seems narrower than of old; among the traitors upon whom Emanuel’s ministers execute justice he includes not only Notruth and Pitiless, but also Election-doubter and Vocation-doubter, who represent the majority of the members of the Church of England. The whole tone, in truth, is such as might be expected from one nurtured upon the Old rather than the New Testament, and who had never conceived any doubts of the justice of the Israelites’ dealings with the Canaanites. The literary power, nevertheless, is unabated; much ingenuity is shown in keeping up the interest of the story; and there is the old gift of vitalizing abstractions by uncompromising realism of treatment.

  The singular similarity both in the drama and in the spirit of the history and of the allegory cannot be explained, so far as I can see, except by supposing that Bunyan had heard and assimilated the story of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster, and had heard it, not through distorted histories, but by the living voice of tradition. And if it be admitted that the struggle of which Münster became the centre was the archetype of Bunyan’s “Holy War,” then we not only get an interesting literary fact, but, what is more important, a vivid light on the mind of the religious common people of England during a period when this country was as virile in its character as at any period in its history.

Poems

  Bunyan’s muse is clad in russet, wears shoes and stockings, has a country accent, and walks along the level Bedfordshire roads. If as a poet he is homely and idiomatic, he is always natural, straightforward, and sincere. His lines are unpolished, but they have pith and sinew, like the talk of a shrewd peasant. In the “Emblems” there are many touches of pure poetry, shewing that in his mind there was a vein of silver which, under favourable circumstances, might have been worked to rich issues; and everywhere there is an admirable homely pregnancy and fulness of meaning. He has the strong thought, and the knack of the skilled workman to drive, by a single blow, the nail home to the head.

  It has been the fashion to call Bunyan’s verse doggerel; but no verse is doggerel which has a sincere and rational meaning in it. Goethe, who understood his own trade, says that the test of poetry is the substance which remains when the poetry is reduced to prose. Bunyan had infinite invention. His mind was full of objects which he had gathered at first-hand, from observation and reflection. He had excellent command of the English language, and could express what he wished with sharp, defined outlines, and without the waste of a word. The rhythmical structure of his prose is carefully correct. Scarcely a syllable is ever out of place. His ear for verse, though less true, is seldom wholly at fault, and, whether in prose or verse, he had the superlative merit that he could never write nonsense. If one of the motives of poetical form be to clothe thought and feeling in the dress in which it can be most easily remembered, Bunyan’s lines are often as successful as the best lines of Quarles or George Herbert.

  The more we read of these poems, not given to the world till twelve years after Bunyan’s death, and that by a publisher who was “a repeated offender against the laws of honest dealing,” the more we are inclined to agree with Dr. Brown, that the internal evidence of their style renders their genuineness at the least questionable. In the dull prosaic level of these compositions there is certainly no trace of the “force and power” always present in Bunyan’s rudest rhymes, still less of the “dash of genius” and the “sparkle of soul” which occasionally discover the hand of a master. Of the authenticity of Bunyan’s “Divine Emblems,” originally published three years after his death under the title of “Country Rhymes for Children,” there is no question. The internal evidence confirms the external. The book is thoroughly in Bunyan’s vein, and in its homely naturalness of imagery recalls the similitudes of the “Interpreter’s House,” especially those expounded to Christiana and her boys.

General

  His masterpiece is his “Pilgrim’s Progress,” one of the most popular, and, I may add, one of the most ingenious books in the English language. The works of Bunyan, which had been long printed on tobacco-paper, by Nicholas Boddington and others, were, in 1736 and 1737, reprinted in two decent volumes folio. They are now come forth in a fairer edition than ever, with the recommendation of Mr. George Whitfield.

  Bunyan is the Spenser of the people. The fire burned towards Heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic.

  The style of Bunyan is delightful to every reader, and invaluable as a study to every person who wishes to obtain a wide command over the English language. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people. There is not an expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, which would puzzle the rudest peasant. We have observed several pages which do not contain a single word of more than two syllables. Yet no writer has said more exactly what he meant to say. For magnificence, for pathos, for vehement exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for every purpose of the poet, the orator, and the divine, this homely dialect—the dialect of plain working men—was perfectly sufficient.

  One of the greatest poets that ever lived—we mean John Bunyan, homely as may be the associations connected with the inspired tinker’s name has left some most pertinent instances in his writings of the sway exercised by the imagination over the external senses. In describing the dark internal conflicts which convulsed him, during one stage of his religious experience, he says:—“I lifted up my head, and methought I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me light; as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did band themselves against me.” This is as perfect poetry as ever was written.

  The impressiveness of Bunyan resembles that of the old woodcuts executed in the infancy of the art of engraving: there is in both cases a rude vigour and homeliness of outline, a strange ignorance of costume, and a powerful tendency to realise even the most abstract things by connecting them with the ordinary details of every day life; there is also the same earnest intensity of purpose, and incessant struggle to bring the objects within the comprehension of the uncultivated minds to which the work was addressed. Above all there is visible, in the rude woodcut of the old German artist, as in the hardly less rude narrative morality of the English tinker, the unmistakable and inimitable originality of genius.

  The more we study the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Holy War,” in connection with his own history and times, the more will we see reason to believe that their numerous characters directly and broadly reflect both the outer and inner characteristics of the religious world familiar to him…. There is also everywhere, in his allegories, the evidence of a rare power of actual observation,—of sharp insight into the living characteristics around him,—and great fulness of artistic skill in drawing these from the life as he knew and saw them…. It is, above all, this realistic element that gives to Bunyan’s great allegory its special interest. It is because he draws so much from outward fact that we find his pages so living—and linger over them—and return to them—and find them not only instructive, but entertaining. Spenser in his great allegory is richer,… but he has nowhere caught life and mirrored it, as Bunyan has done…. Puritanism lives in his pages—spiritually and socially—in forms and in colouring which must ever command the sympathy and enlist the love of all good Christians.

  He is the prince of dreamers, as Homer is the prince of poets. The scenery of his vision has become familiar as the scenery which surrounds our homes. We know the whole course of the journey—from the City of Destruction to the Slough of Despond; past the House of the Interpreter; up Hill Difficulty; the meeting of Christian with the Maidens, Piety, Prudence, and Charity; Christian’s rest in the “large upper chamber whose window opened towards the sun-rising,” the name of which chamber was Peace; the journey down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death: the combat which took place there; Vanity Fair and the burning of Faithful; the imprisonment of Hopeful and Christian by the Giant, and their escape; the Delectable Mountains, with the Golden City seen in the distance shining like a star; the Land of Beulah; the passage across the dark river, with troops of angels, and melody of hymns and trumpets, waiting the pilgrims on the further bank;—all this every boy knows as he knows the way to school—with this every man is familiar as with his personal experience—and the curious thing is, that the incidents and the scenery which we accept with such belief are but the dark conceits and shadows of things; in all there is more than meets the eye. Under everything lies the most solemn meanings. “The Pilgrim’s Progress” is not only the most enchanting story in the world, it is one of the best manuals of theology.

  These two men were living together at the same time. There are no such men living now as they were; no such religious genius as Bunyan; no spirit so deeply absorbed in philosophy as Spinoza. They had probably never heard of one another’s names; but if they had, one would have devoted the other to eternal flames, and that other would have regarded him as an ignorant fellow and a madman. Such awful misunderstandings there have been in this world. If we could imagine them knowing one another intimately (for all persons think differently of those whom they know), then perhaps a feeling of surprise might have arisen at so much good being united with so much evil. They might have wondered to see how by different roads they had arrived, if not quite, yet nearly, at a common end. They might have learned partly to understand one another, and the calmness and wisdom of the one might have tempered the fire and enthusiasm of the other.

  We are apt to view him too exclusively as the author of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and to search there, and there only, for the signs of his intellectual power…. Imaginative power and knowledge of men (which may be said to be different aspects of the constructive faculty) are the main secrets of his success as a writer. Perhaps too much has been made of his style, viewed merely as written composition. His language is simple and often forcible, and, particularly in “Grace Abounding,” has a soft melodious flow. The most pleasing element is the graphic force of the similitudes. And this is almost all that can be said…. As for the “Old unpolluted English language,” it needs no microscopical eye to detect in the “Pilgrim’s Progress” a considerable sprinkling of vulgar provincialisms, and even of such Latin idioms as are to be found in his favourite old martyrologist Fox.

  The immortal “Dreamer” of Bedford had a miniature successor in the dreamer of Salem; and there was not a wide divergence, in some respects, in the character of the genius of the two men.

  The very homeliness of Bunyan’s names and the every dayness of his scenery, too, put us off our guard, and we soon find ourselves on as easy a footing with his allegorical beings as we might be with Adam or Socrates in a dream. Indeed, he has prepared us for such incongruities by telling us at setting out that the story was of a dream. The long nights of Bedford jail had so intensified his imagination, and made the figures with which it peopled his solitude so real to him, that the creatures of his mind become things, as clear to the memory as if we had seen them.

  John Bunyan dipped his pen in the Catholicism of Catholicity. He had no sympathy with any ism, however novel, or specious, or popular, which corrupted or darkened the simplicity of the Gospel. With him charity was not a mere clap-trap sentiment for the platform; but a deep conviction, a strong principle, a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

  His service to humanity was not that of massively grouping great truths into systematic form and opening the way to new realms of light. What he did, and did powerfully, was to make vital with the warm life-blood of his own strong heart truths and systems already in existence around him. With the wealth of his own opulent imagination he places these in vivid and striking light, and in such fervid shape that at once they lay hold of the popular mind and heart. Beautiful images, vivid expressions, forcible arguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings, solemn warnings, these, all through his writings as through his preaching, make those to whom he speaks all eye, all ear, all soul. To use a phrase which has come to have an equivocal significance, he was a popular preacher and writer, but only in a high and noble sense. He never panders to the mere love of excitement and novelty. His errand is much too serious, and men’s need and peril much too urgent, for him to waste time and power in merely playing before them on a pleasant instrument. He would beseech them with tears, as Paul did, and like him, too, speak with authority as a messenger from heaven. To him the burning pit was a reality, from which he had himself barely escaped, and heaven a substantial verity he could all but see.

  Read not Addison nor Johnson, read Bunyan, who employed direct and true English…. The man who would speak good English should take for his company the authorized version of the Bible and Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan’s is chapel English, man’s English, woman’s English, the English spoken anywhere by the native sons and daughters of the soil.

  If by a “Great Writer” we understand one who combines the power of expressing thoughts of universal acceptability in a style of the most perfect clearness, with a high degree of imaginative genius, and a vivid descriptive faculty; whose works are equally attractive to readers of all ages and every variety of mental culture, which are among the first to be taken up in the nursery and among the last to be laid down when life is closing in on us, which have filled the memory with pictures and peopled it with characters of the most unforgetable reality, which have been probably translated into more languages, and attained popularity in more lands, than any books ever written—then the claim of the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Holy War,” and “Grace Abounding” to a place, and that a very high one, in the catalogue of “Great Writers,” is undeniable.

  The work of John Bunyan hardly finds its proper place in a history of prose fiction; he regarded it as anything but fictitious. Moreover, in form and outline it bears something the same relation to the novel proper that the “Morality” bears to the drama proper. Yet how rich are his works, not only the “Pilgrim’s Progress” (1678), but the “Holy War” (1682), and the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman” (1680), in literary, as well as practical and moral lessons, in demonstrations whereby the novelists might profit to learn character-painting, admirable narrative, and the attainment of the illusion of reality. Where was the professed writer of fiction in the seventeenth century who could enthral the reader’s imagination by his two opening sentences, and hold him spell-bound to the end?

  While in all his writing there is abundant evidence of brain-power, and his skill in marshalling texts to defend his dogmatic positions is admirable, yet this general cleverness would not have raised him above the rank of the popular preacher whose performances in the next generation cumber the book-stalls, had it not been for that drop of precious elixir which nature infused into his eyes at birth, as into those of such different people as Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen. It is this which divides Bunyan from one in other respects so like him as George Fox. Both were children of the people, both were intensely religious, both were given to hearing voices in their ears speaking the words of God or of Satan, both for their faith were “in prisons oft;” but the discriminating eye, and the sense of humour which accompanies it, were lacking to Fox, as his “Journal” makes abundantly conspicuous.

  The Bunyan literature now constitutes a library by itself, while every year new editions appear in still more elaborate forms. The book has been criticised and sneered at as few writings ever were, but it has steadily risen to the highest level in the world of letters. Bunyan’s place is beside Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante. His allegory is a worthy companion for the immortal work of Dante, with the difference that while the Englishman endeavors to delineate the growth of a soul on the earth, the Florentine seeks to follow its upward movement beyond death.

  The sermons of Bunyan, a number of which have been preserved, are in keeping with the general style of preaching then in vogue. Compared with sermons of the present day, they are tediously long. They are designed to be comprehensive in treatment; and therefore, instead of leaving something to the intelligence of the hearer, they abound in the most obvious commonplaces. There is scarcely any end to the divisions and subdivisions. They are more concerned with thought than style; and instead of rhetorical grace, we find only simplicity and directness. Their remarkable effectiveness was due to the intellectual vigor and moving earnestness of the speaker—a fact that emphasizes for us the importance of the personal element in public discourse.

  In the first place, his style is simple. Secondly, rare earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had something to say, and in his inmost soul he felt that this something was of supreme importance for all time. Only a great man can tell such truths without a flourish of language, or without straining after effect…. Thirdly, Bunyan has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic power. His abstractions become living persons…. It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest, strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan’s style felt the shaping influence of the Bible more than of all other works combined. He knew the Scriptures almost by heart.

  Cromwell, Milton, Bunyan—what can non-Puritan England, of their day, show to match these three names?