Galatians, he found something that spoke to his condition; how he came to think with horror that he had been guilty like Judas of selling Christ, and that he had committed the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit; we are told what comfort he had got from various Scriptures-including a saying which after long search he found to his surprise and almost to his dismay was not in the canonical books but in the Apocrypha At last by associating with the poor women whose talk had so deeply impressed him, and with other like-minded people to whom they introduced him, he learnt the secret of their joy and peace. And having learnt it he could not keep it to himself; he must make it known to others. "I thought I could have spoken of God's love and have told of his mercy even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood me." (92.) He began to preach here and there to little groups of people, and by and by he became a recognised minister. At the Restoration in 1660, he was arrested and thrown into prison in Bedford as an "upholder and maintainer of unlawful conventicles." It was during the first half of his twelve years in prison that he wrote Grace Abounding. In the preface, addressed specially to the members of his congregation, he bids them recall the word that first laid hold upon them. "Have you," he asks, "forgot the close, the milk-house, the stable, the barn, and the like, where God did visit your souls?" And he goes on to say, in view of any criticism of the book," I could have stepped into a style much higher than this, in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than I have seemed to do, but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of Hell gat hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. He that liketh it, let him receive it; and he that doth not, let him produce a better. Farewell." And then he adds: “My little children, the milk and the honey is beyond this wilderness; God be merciful to you, and grant that you be not slothful to go in to possess the land.” Such, then, is the personality, and such the personal history behind the Pilgrim's Progress. "The Creator," says the author of Mark Rutherford in his book on Bunyan, "gets the appointed task out of his servants in many ways. It is sufficient to give some of them love, sunrises and sunsets, and primrose woods in Spring; others have to be scourged with bloody whips or driven nearly mad with dreams, sleeping and waking, before they do what God has determined for them." It was in this latter way mainly that the writer of the Pilgrim's Progress was trained for his task. Yet not in this way alone. His dreams had not all been of the kind that tend to madness; his life had not all been spent in sore conflict between the flesh and the spirit; his years had not all been passed in prison. A great deal of experience of a happier nature had gone to the making of him and to the preparation of him for his work. He had been born an English peasant boy. He had found delight in the beautiful open Bedfordshire scenery, in trees and flowers and birds, in the voices of little children, and in all the innocent comedy of human life. And all this happy experience is reflected in the pages of the Pilgrim's Progress. It has been well said that Bunyan "drew more from the world around him than from books. One of the most remarkable qualities of his story is the faithfulness with which it pictures the life of the times. The road on which the pilgrims travel is as realistically described as the pilgrims themselves. It is like an old Roman road in some respects, for it goes up the hill called Difficulty, and across the delicate plain called Ease as straight as a rule can make it.' Sometimes there is a high wall by the side of it, and fruit trees hang their branches over the wall to tempt the children. Dogs bark at the travellers as they pass by, and frighten the women 'with the great voice of their roaring.' Other travellers overtake them or meet them on the road; they see men lying asleep by the roadside; they see criminals hanging in irons a little way from it. Sometimes' a fine pleasant green lane comes down into the road; on one side of it there is 'a meadow and a stile to go over into it,' or a by-path such as that which leads Christian and Hopeful into the grounds of Giant Despair. It may be called the road to the Celestial City, but it is very like a common English seventeenth-century high-road." So too in the allegory we find the pilgrims encountering the same kind of troubles and dangers as beset the seventeenth-century traveller; getting stuck in the mud of the wretched roads, which had many a Slough of Despond; being attacked by highwaymen, such as those that set upon Valiant-for-Truth and Little-Faith. The Valley of Humiliation, which was green and beautified with lilies,” and in which Christiana and her companions heard the shepherd boy sing: " 1 C. H. Firth, Introduction to The Pilgrim's Progress. He that is down needs fear no fall; He that is low, no pride; He that is humble ever shall Have God to be his guide, has been described as an English Arcadia, which indeed it is. The original of Vanity Fair was probably the annual Fair in Bunyan's native village. When he was describing the country of Beulah, "whose air was very sweet and pleasant," he was doubtless thinking of some familiar landscape-though over it, as over everything else on his pilgrim's way, he casts the gleam that never was on sea or land. To literature, apart from the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Bunyan does not seem to have owed much. Some have tried, but apparently without success, to show that he knew Spenser's Faerie Queen and that he derived certain of his ideas from it. The probability is that he had little acquaintance with anything in the way of poetry except the metrical Psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, and other rather doggerel verses such as he found in the Book of Martyrs. That he was capable of fairly good verse himself is shown by his poetical prefaces to the Pilgrim's Progress; and by the song which he puts into the mouth of Valiant-for-Truth : Who would true valour see, Let him come hither; One here will constant be, Come wind, come weather; There's no discouragement Shall make him once relent Whoso beset him round Do but themselves confound; But he will have a right Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend, Then, fancies, fly away; He'll not fear what men say; To be a pilgrim. But although Bunyan owed little to anything that is commonly dignified by the name of literature, he was conversant with what passed as literature in the humble class to which he belonged, and especially was he well read in the chap-books which had a great circulation at the time. It was from them probably that he got his Enchanted Land, his dragons and giants and other figures of old romance. With Francis Quarles' Emblems, Divine and Moral (which was published in 1635) he may |