acher. Hence also the dramatic unity
and methodic perfectness of the story. Its byways all lead to its
highway; its episodes are as vitally related to the main theme as are
the ramifications of a tree to its central stem. The great diversities
of experience in the true pilgrims are dominated by one supreme motive.
As for the others, they appear incidentally to complete the scenes, and
make the world and its life manifold and real. The Pilgrim is a most
substantial person, and once well on the way, the characters he meets,
the difficulties he encounters, the succor he receives, the scenes in
which he mingles, are all, however surprising, most natural. The names,
and one might almost say the forms and faces, of Pliable, Obstinate,
Faithful, Hopeful, Talkative, Mercy, Great-heart, old Honest,
Valiant-for-truth, Feeble-mind, Ready-to-halt, Miss Much-afraid, and
many another, are familiar to us all. Indeed, the pilgrimage is our
own--in many of its phases at least,--and we have met the people whom
Bunyan saw in his dream, and are ourselves they whom he describes. When
Dean Stanley began his course of lectures on Ecclesiastical History at
Oxford, his opening words were those of the passage where the Pilgrim is
taken to the House Beautiful to see "the rarities and histories of that
place, both ancient and modern"; and at the end of the same course,
wishing to sketch the prospects of Christendom, he quoted the words in
which, on leaving the House Beautiful, Christian was shown the distant
view of the Delectable Mountains.

But for one glance at Pope and Pagan, there is almost nothing to
indicate the writer's ecclesiastical standing. But for here and there a
marking of time in prosaic passages which have nothing to do with the
story, there is nothing to mar the catholicity of its spirit. Romanists
and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans, Calvinists and Arminians,--all
communions and sects have edited and circulated it. It is the completest
triumph of truth by fiction in all literature. More than any other human
book, it is "a religious bond to the whole of English Christendom." The
second part is perhaps inferior to the first, but is richer in incident,
and some of its characters--Mercy, old Honest, Valiant-for-truth, and
Great-heart, for instance--are exquisitely conceived and presented. Here
again the reader will do well to carefully peruse the author's rhymed
introduction:--

"What Christian left locked up, and went his