Bunyan, John

John (1628-1688), the author of Pilgrim's Progress. His father was an English tinker. He himself was taught to wander about mending the housewife's kettles and pans, sleeping in hedges, and spending his pennies at low taverns. According to his own story, told in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, he was so profane that even hardened sinners were shocked. He was so notorious a drunkard that his presence was not desired even in dramshops. He married a pious Baptist woman, was converted, and, though ignorant, turned the talents he possessed for wickedness into exhorting sinners to turn from their evil ways. He became a noted revivalist. Thousands crowded to hear him preach of wrath and salvation. His preaching drew from the attendance at the established churches and he was thrown into Bedford jail as a disturber of the peace.

While lying in jail he wrote an allegory called The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which is to Come. Christian is an anguished dweller in the City of Destruction. Evangelist warns him to flee. "Now he had run from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, 'Life! life! eternal life!'" Pliable runs with him, but turns aside and sinks in the Slough of Despond. Worldly Wiseman tells Christian he is a fool and turns him aside among burning mountains. Evangelist reappears and points out the Straight Gate. Interpreter shows him the way to the Celestial City. He climbs the Hill of Difficulty, is entertained by Watchful and his daughters, Piety and Prudence. His passage through the Valley of Humiliation is won after a hard fight with Apollyon. Unseen monsters terrify in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Vanity Fair with its buyers and sellers spreads a net of attractions for the weak. Faithful, his companion, is taken and bound at the stake. Christian going onward joins another friend, Hopeful, but turning from the straight and narrow road into a pleasant bypath through a meadow, is taken with his companion by Giant Despair and thrown into Doubting Castle. A key called Promise liberates them from the Dungeon, and the old giant is seized by rheumatism so that he cannot follow them. In the Delectable Mountains they see the Celestial City. The fogs and briers of Enchanted Ground and Beulah Land, with its flowers and songs of birds, bring them to the black, cold river which all must cross. Faith sustains them in its dark billows. A company in white and shining raiment with trumpets in their hands receive them on the other shore and crying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord," convey them to the fair city with streets of gold, and into the presence of the King, "which when I had seen, I wished myself among them," concludes Bunyan.

Later he wrote an account of Christiana, the wife, and her children who followed Christian to the Celestial City; but by that time the dangers of the trip had been abated and the journey is not so full of incident and fighting.

Ninety-three per cent of the words in Pilgrim's Progress are short, terse, Anglo-Saxon words such as Bunyan learned from his Bible. This allegory, written by a tinker preacher in a jail, is second only to the Bible in its influence on English-speaking people. The characters are such as may be found in any parish. Lord Hate-Good, the vile judge of Vanity Fair, is understood to be the infamous Lord Jeffreys who conducted the Bloody Assizes. A hundred thousand copies of the Pilgrim's Progress were printed during the author's lifetime. American colonists brought it with them to America. It has been translated into almost as many languages as the Scriptures. The omission of a few pages relative to old time persecution of heretics makes the book equally acceptable to Protestants and Catholics.

In his Essay on Bunyan, Macaulay concludes:

Though there were many clever men in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent degree. One of those minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim's Progress.

Of his own work Bunyan wrote: