e Delectable Mountains of Youth, the deep river that Christian
must cross, and the city of All Delight and the glorious company of angels
that come singing down the streets. At the very end, when in sight of the
city and while he can hear the welcome with which Christian is greeted,
Ignorance is snatched away to go to his own place; and Bunyan quaintly
observes, "Then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of
heaven as well as from the city of Destruction. So I awoke, and behold it
was a dream!"

Such, in brief, is the story, the great epic of a Puritan's individual
experience in a rough world, just as _Paradise Lost_ was the epic of
mankind as dreamed by the great Puritan who had "fallen asleep over his
Bible."

The chief fact which confronts the student of literature as he pauses
before this great allegory is that it has been translated into seventy-five
languages and dialects, and has been read more than any other book save one
in the English language.

As for the secret of its popularity, Taine says, "Next to the Bible, the
book most widely read in England is the _Pilgrim's Progress_....
Protestantism is the doctrine of salvation by grace, and no writer has
equaled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood." And this opinion is
echoed by the majority of our literary historians. It is perhaps sufficient
answer to quote the simple fact that _Pilgrim's Progress_ is not
exclusively a Protestant study; it appeals to Christians of every name, and
to Mohammedans and Buddhists in precisely the same way that it appeals to
Christians. When it was translated into the languages of Catholic
countries, like France and Portugal, only one or two incidents were
omitted, and the story was almost as popular there as with English readers.
The secret of its success is probably simple. It is, first of all, not a
procession of shadows repeating the author's declamations, but a real
story, the first extended story in our language. Our Puritan fathers may
have read the story for religious instruction; but all classes of men have
read it because they found in it a true personal experience told with
strength, interest, humor,--in a word, with all the qualities that such a
story should possess. Young people have read it, first, for its intrinsic
worth, because the dramatic interest of the story lured them on to the very
end; and second, because it was their introduction to true allegory. The
child with his imaginative mind--t