flame as Christian and Hopeful hurry by. Angels and archangels are at hand to warn and counsel, and finally to lead the souls of the faithful, with harpings and hosannas, from the border of the dread River of Death to the shining gates of the Celestial City. The love of color and imagery, the longing for incident and adventure, the zest for the marvellous, were not dead in the gloomy Bedfordshire cot- tages into which the little book obscurely stole; and there is small wonder that, falling, as the tale did, upon simple minds almost totally cut off from the delights of literature, it should have won for itself immediate love. There is small wonder, too, that its fame soon spread abroad. In the next few years it ran through eight editions, and before Bunyan's death it was read with delight by all classes of men, not only throughout England, but in France, in Hol- land, and in the far-off colonies of America.
The same charm which the book had for Bunyan's con- temporaries it has, with some additions and subtractions, for us. It belongs, to be sure, to a type of literature which has ceased to appeal strongly to our sympathies. The alle- gory, once so popular and fertile, we have discarded for more condensed forms of figurative expression. The alle- gories which survive are those which, like The Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, and The Pilgrim's Progress, possess high poetic qualities extraneous to their typical character. The modern reader may, indeed, find in Bun- yan's " similitudes " matter for religious contemplation, but it is not for that primarily that he goes to them. He goes to them, first, because they reveal much concerning the spiritual history of a remarkable man in a remarkable age. Every stage of Bunyan's " conversion," as set forth with such startling vividness in Grace Abounding, has gone to make up the story of Christian's journey. Bunyan knew what it was to fight with Apollyon, and to hear the mutterings and stealthy creepings of obscene devils in the valley of the shadow. He had been a prisoner to Giant
