'Ye did run well, who did hinder you?'--Paul.
It startles us not a little to come suddenly upon three pilgrims fast
asleep with fetters on their heels on the upward side of the
Interpreter's House, and even on the upward side of the cross and the
sepulchre. We would have looked for those three miserable men somewhere
in the City of Destruction or in the Town of Stupidity, or, at best,
somewhere still outside of the wicket-gate. But John Bunyan did not lay
down his _Pilgrim's Progress_ on any abstract theory, or on any easy and
pleasant presupposition, of the Christian life. He constructed his so
lifelike book out of his own experiences as a Christian man, as well as
out of all he had learned as a Christian minister. And in nothing is
Bunyan's power of observation, deep insight, and firm hold of fact better
seen than just in the way he names and places the various people of the
pilgrimage. Long after he had been at the Cross of Christ himself, and
had seen with his own eyes all the significant rooms in the Interpreter's
House, Bunyan had often to confess that the fetters of evil habit, unholy
affection, and a hard heart were still firmly riveted on his own heels.
And his pastoral work had led him to see only too well that he was not
alone in the temptations and the dangers and the still-abiding bondage to
sin that had so surprised himself after he was so far on in the Christian
life. It was the greatest sorrow of his heart, he tells us in a powerful
passage in his _Grace Abounding_, that so many of his spiritual children
broke down and came short in the arduous and perilous way in which he had
so hopefully started them. 'If any of those who were awakened by my
ministry did after that fall back, as sometimes too many did, I can truly
say that their loss hath been more to me than if one of my own children,
begotten of my body, had been going to its grave. I think, verily, I may
speak it without an offence to the Lord, nothing hath gone so near me as
that, unless it was the fear of the salvation of my own soul. I have
counted as if I had goodly buildings and lordships in those places where
my children were born; my heart has been so wrapped up in this excellent
work that I counted myself more blessed and honoured of God by this than
if He had made me the emperor of the Christian world, or the lord of all
the glory of the earth without it.' And I have no doubt that we have
here the three things that above everything else bereft Bunyan of so many
of his spiritual children personified and then laid down by the heels in
Simple, Sloth, and Presumption.