s Progress_ was written at a time when
every man had to take sides in a savage and atrocious ecclesiastical
controversy. The absolute judgments passed on either side by the other,
the cruelties practised and the dangers run, were such as to lead the
reader to expect extreme bitterness and sectarian violence in every
religious writing of the time. Bunyan was known to his contemporaries as
a religious writer, pure and simple, and a man whose convictions had
caused him much suffering at the hands of his enemies. Most of the first
readers of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ had no thought of any connection
between that book and worldly literature; and the pious people who shook
their heads over his allegory as being rather too interesting for a
treatise on such high themes as those which it handled, might perhaps
have shaken their heads still more solemnly had they known how much of
what they called the world was actually behind it. Bunyan was a
voluminous writer of theological works, and the complete edition of them
fills three enormous volumes, closely printed in double column. But it
is the little allegory embedded in one of these volumes which has made
his fame eternal, and for the most part the rest are remembered now only
in so far as they throw light upon that story. One exception must be
made in favour of _Grace Abounding_. This is Bunyan's autobiography, in
which he describes, without allegory, the course of his spiritual
experience. For an understanding of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ it is
absolutely necessary to know that companion volume.

It is very curious to watch the course of criticism as it was directed
to him and to his story. The eighteenth century had lost the keenness of
former controversies, and from its classic balcony it looked down upon
what seemed to it the somewhat sordid arena of the past. _The Examiner_
complains that he never yet knew an author that had not his admirers.
Bunyan and Quarles have passed through several editions and pleased as
many readers as Dryden and Tillotson. Even Cowper, timidly appreciative
and patronising, wrote of the "ingenious dreamer"--

"I name thee not, lest so despised a name
Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame,"

--lines which have a pathetic irony in them, as we contrast the anxious
Cowper, with the occasional revivals of interest and the age-long tone
of patronage which have been meted out to him, with the robust and
sturdy immortality of the man he shrank