g to. His level is a lower one, but on that level
Bunyan is without a rival. Never has the history of a soul convinced of
the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most
certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger of
hopeless, irreversible doom--seeing itself, to employ his own image,
hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might
snap any moment--been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring
language. And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth.
Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, but
simply telling in plain unadorned language what he had felt. The
experience was a very tremendous reality to him. Like Dante, if he had
not actually been in hell, he had been on the very threshold of it; he
had in very deed traversed "the Valley of the Shadow of Death," had heard
its "hideous noises," and seen "the Hobgoblins of the Pit." He "spake
what he knew and testified what he had seen." Every sentence breathes
the most tremendous earnestness. His words are the plainest, drawn from
his own homely vernacular. He says in his preface, which will amply
repay reading, as one of the most characteristic specimens of his style,
that he could have stepped into a higher style, and adorned his narrative
more plentifully. But he dared not. "God did not play in convincing
him. The devil did not play in tempting him. He himself did not play
when he sunk as into a bottomless pit, and the pangs of hell caught hold
on him. Nor could he play in relating them. He must be plain and simple
and lay down the thing as it was. He that liked it might receive it. He
that did not might produce a better." The remembrance of "his great
sins, his great temptations, his great fears of perishing for ever,
recalled the remembrance of his great help, his great support from
heaven, the great grace God extended to such a wretch as he was." Having
thus enlarged on his own experience, he calls on his spiritual children,
for whose use the work was originally composed and to whom it is
dedicated,--"those whom God had counted him worthy to beget to Faith by
his ministry in the Word"--to survey their own religious history, to
"work diligently and leave no corner unsearched." He would have them
"remember their tears and prayers to God; how they sighed under every
hedge for mercy. Had they never a hill Mizar (Psa. xlii. 6) to remember?
Had they forgo