OHN BUNYAN § 1 1 literature for Puritan culture, Bunyan / in fervour. n's Progress is a human drama. Most and many of them are apt to be tedious. ; dramatic. His allegory is ingenious in soned by homely wit, and it has, as Mad by many thousands with tears." The en moved by The Pilgrim's Progress to son hated to read books through, but he f The Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, he y says, was "almost the only writer who ract the interest of the concrete." His cive that "personifications, when he dealt en." His mind was so dramatic that a qualities in The Pilgrim's Progress has a sm than "a dialogue between two human And what a marvel it is that this great n written by a tinker, and the son of a s told us: "I never went to school, to Arisbrought up in my father's house in a very g a company of poor countrymen." ohn Bunyan a great writer born with a xpression, he was, and he remains, the 405 spokesman of the people articulate among the generally inarticulate, one of the two great English writers (Dickens was the other) who belonged to the common people, loved the common people, and possessed a perfect knowledge of what the common people dream and hope and fear. Bunyan's Life John Bunyan was born at Elstow, a village near Bedford, in 1628; the son of "an honest poor labouring man, who, like Adam unparadised, had all the world to get his bread in, and was very careful to maintain his family." He was sent to the Grammar School at Bedford, where he was taught "to read and write, according to the rate of other poor men's children." After he left school, his father taught him his own trade of a tinker, and he went on living in Elstow. Bunyan was a passionate and imaginative boy, the ringleader in most of the village mischief. After his conversion, he was fond of referring in lurid terms to the wickedness of his youth, but there is little doubt that this wickedness was grotesquely exaggerated. In our days at every Salvation Army meeting, one can hear from the simple converted obviously over-coloured accounts of sins committed in unregenerate days. This is indeed quite natural, nothing more than perfectly harmless vanity, as well as the desire to emphasise the "saving power of grace." Bunyan tells us that he swore and lied and poached and robbed orchards. But he was never drunk, and he more than once declares that he was never unchaste. However great a sinner Bunyan may have been, he suffered grievously for his sins. The English people in the seventeenth century had learned to read the Bible, which they accepted literally, and Bunyan, as a boy, was convinced that the sins he committed would bring him awful and eternal punishment. Like Joan of Arc he had visions, and all his visions were prophecies of torment. At the beginning of the Civil War Bunyan served as a |