THIS wonderful book, [the Pilgrim's Progress,] while it obtains
admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who
are too simple to admire it. Dr. Johnson, all whose studies were
desultory, and who hated, as he said, to read books through, made an
exception in favor of the Pilgrim's Progress. That work, he said,
was one of the two or three which he wished longer. In every nursery
the Pilgrim's Progress is a greater favorite than Jack the
Giant-killer. Every reader knows the strait and narrow path as well
as he knows a road in which he has gone backward and forward a
hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius--that things
which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations
of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
Cowper said, forty or fifty years ago, that he dared not name John
Bunyan in his verse, for fear of moving a sneer. We live in better
times; and we are not afraid to say, that though there were many
clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth
century, there were only two great creative minds. One of those
minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.
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 sufficient. There is no book in our
literature on which we could so readily stake the fame of the old
unpolluted English language--no book which shows so well how rich
that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has
been improved by all that it has borrowed. T. B. Macaulay--Essays.
To the names of Baxter and Howe must be added the name of a man far
below them in station and in acquired knowledge, but in virtue their
equal, and in genius their superior, John Bunyan. Bunyan had been
bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the
parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured
by remorse for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however,
to have been such as the world thinks venial. His keen sensibility
and his powerful imagination made his internal conflicts singularly
terrible. He fancied that he was under sentence of reprobation, that
he had committed blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, that he had sold
Christ, that he was actually possessed by a demon. Sometimes loud
voices from heaven cried out to warn him. Sometimes fiends whispered
impious suggestions in his ear. He saw visions of distant
mountain-tops, on which the sun shone brightly, but from which he
was separated by a waste of snow. He felt the devil behind him
pulling his clothes. He thought, that the brand of Cain had been set
upon him. He feared that he was about to burst asunder like Judas.
His mental agony disordered his health. One day he shook like a man
in the palsy. On another day he felt a fire within his breast. It is
difficult to understand how he survived sufferings so intense and so
long-continued. At length the clouds broke. From the depths of
despair the penitent passed to a state of serene felicity. An
irresistible impulse now urged him to impart to others the blessing
of which he was himself possessed. He joined the Baptists, and
became a preacher and writer. His education had been that of a
mechanic. He knew no language but the English, as it was spoken by
the common people. He had studied no great model of composition,
with the exception--an important exception undoubtedly--of our
noble translation of the Bible. His spelling was bad. He frequently
transgressed the rules of grammar. Yet his native force of genius,
and his experimental knowledge of all the religious passions, from
despair to ecstasy, amply supplied in him the want of learning. His
rude oratory roused and melted hearers who listened without interest
to the labored discourses of great logicians and Hebraists. His
works were widely circulated among the humbler classes. One of them,
the Pilgrim's Progress, was in his own lifetime translated into
several foreign languages. It was, however, scarcely known to the
learned and polite, and had been during nearly a century the delight
of pious cottagers and artisans before it was publicly commended by
any man of high literary eminence. At length critics condescended to
inquire where the secret of so wide and so durable a popularity lay.
They were compelled to own that the ignorant multitude had judged
more correctly than the learned, and that the despised little book
was really a masterpiece. Bunyan is indeed as decidedly the first of
allegorists as Demosthenes is the first of orators, or Shakspeare
the first of dramatists. Other allegorists have shown equal
ingenuity, but no other allegorist has ever been able to touch the
heart, and to make abstractions objects of terror, of pity, and of
love.
It may be doubted whether any English dissenter had suffered more
severely under the penal laws than John Bunyan. Of the twenty-seven
years which had elapsed since the Restoration, he had passed twelve
in confinement. He still persisted in preaching; but that he might
preach, he was under the necessity of disguising himself like a
carter. He was often introduced into meetings through back doors
with a smockfrock on his back, and a whip in his hand. If he had
thought only of his own ease and safety, he would have hailed the
indulgence with delight. He was now at length free to pray and
exhort in open day. His congregation rapidly increased; thousands
hung upon his words; and at Bedford, where he ordinarily resided,
money was plentifully contributed to build a meeting-house for him.
His influence among the common people was such that the government
would willingly have bestowed on him some municipal office; but his
vigorous understanding and his stout English heart were proof
against all delusion and all temptation. He felt assured that the
proffered toleration was merely a bait intended to lure the Puritan
party to destruction; nor would he, by accepting a place for which
he was not legally qualified, recognize the validity of the
dispensing power. One of the last acts of his virtuous life was to
decline an interview to which he was invited by an agent Of the
government. T. B. Macaulay--History of England.
The demeanor of Sir Matthew Hale in the case of John Bunyan, the
author of the Pilgrim's Progress, shows him paying respect both to
the rules of law and to the dictates of humanity. This wonderful
man--who, though bred a tinker, showed a genius little inferior to
that of Dante--having been illegally convicted by the court of
Quarter-sessions, was lying in prison under his sentence in the jail
of Bedford. Soon after the restoration of Charles II., the young
enthusiast had been arrested while he was preaching at a meeting in
a private house; and, refusing to enter into an engagement that he
would preach no more, had been indicted as "a person who devilishly
and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine
service, and a common upholder of unlawful meetings and
conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good
subjects of this realm."
Little do we know what is for our permanent good. Had Bunyan then
been discharged and allowed to enjoy liberty, he no doubt would have
returned to his trade, filling up his intervals of leisure with
field-preaching; his name would not have survived his own
generation, and he could have done little for the religious
improvement of mankind. The prison-doors were shut upon him for
twelve years. Being cut off from the external world, he communed
with his own soul; and inspired by Him who touched Isaiah's hallowed
lips with fire, he composed the noblest of allegories, the merit of
which was first discovered by the lowly, but which is now lauded by
the most refined critics, and which has done more to awaken piety
and to enforce the precepts of Christian morality, than all the
sermons that have been published by all the prelates of the Anglican
church. Lord Campbell.
The Pilgrim's Progress is a book which makes its way through the
fancy to the understanding and the heart. The child peruses it with
wonder and delight; in youth we discover the genius which it
displays; its worth is apprehended as we advance in years; and we
perceive its merits feelingly in declining age. If it is not a well
of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologist
must repair if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear
stream of current English, the vernacular of his age--sometimes
indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness
and its strength. Robert Southey.
No man of common-sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan,
the tinker of Elstow, was a practical atheist, a worthless
contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common
profligate. Now be astonished, O heaven, to eternity; and wonder, O
earth and hell, while time endures. Behold this very man become a
miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and
love. See his polluted soul cleansed and adorned by divine grace,
his guilt pardoned, the divine law inscribed upon his heart, the
divine image, or the resemblance of God's moral perfections
impressed upon his soul. Mr. Ryland.
It has been the lot of John Bunyan, an unlettered artisan, to do
more than one in a hundred millions of human beings, even in
civilized society, is usually able to do. He has produced a work of
imagination of such decided originality as not only to have
commanded profound admiration on its first appearance, but amidst
all changes of time and style and modes of thinking, to have
maintained its place in the popular literature of every succeeding
age, with the probability that, so long as the language in which it
is written endures, it will not cease to be read by a great number
of the youth of all future generations at that period of life when
their minds, their imaginations, and their hearts are most
impressible with moral excellence, splendid picture, and religious
sentiment. It would be difficult to name another work of any kind in
our native tongue, of which so many editions have been printed, of
which so many readers have lived and died, the character of whose
lives and deaths must have been more or less affected by its lessons
and examples, its fictions and realities. James Montgomery.
I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which
I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely
recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth,
according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim's
Progress. It is in my conviction the best Summa Theologiae
Evangelicae ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.
Coleridge's Remains.
So great was Bunyan's popularity as a preacher, that an eyewitness
says, when he preached in London, "If there were but one day's
notice given, there would be more people come together to hear him
preach than the meeting-house would hold. I have seen, to hear him
preach, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture, by seven o'clock
on a working-day, in the dark winter time." Charles Doe.
I hold John Bunyan to have been a man of incomparably greater genius
than any of them, [the old English divines,] 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. Thomas Arnold,
D. D
O thou whom, borne on fancy's eager wing Back to the season of
life's happy spring, I pleased remember, and while memory yet Holds
fast her office here, can ne'er forget; Ingenious Dreamer! in whose
weil-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-employed, 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. Cowper