he seventeenth century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory."
In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight of the
fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of
his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and
arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no
longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
of its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary prisoner,
addressed to his Muse:--

"The dull loneness, the black shade
Which these hanging vaults have made,
The rude portals that give light
More to terror than delight;
This my chamber of neglect,
Walled about with disrespect,--
From all these, and this dull air,
A fit object for despair,
She hath taught me by her might,
To draw comfort and delight."

That stony cell of his was to him like the rock of Padan-aram to the
wandering Patriarch. He saw angels ascending and descending. The House
Beautiful rose up before him, and its holy sisterhood welcomed him. He
looked, with his Pilgrim, from the Chamber of Peace. The Valley of
Humiliation lay stretched out beneath his eye, and he heard "the curious,
melodious note of the country birds, who sing all the day long in the
spring time, when the flowers appear, and the sun shines warm, and make
the woods and groves and solitary places glad." Side by side with the
good Christiana and the loving Mercy, he walked through the green and
lowly valley, "fruitful as any the crow flies over," through "meadows
beautiful with lilies;" the song of the poor but fresh-faced shepherd