re
clouded by the fanaticism which a long persecution had engendered. A
phrase in our description of the London housewife unconsciously tells
the story: "Loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and
profane." The godly were the sharers of her own faith, the "wicked and
profane" were all those without its pale. Here lay the weakness of
Puritanism: its narrowness, its lack of sympathy with the world at
large, its indifference to the sufferings of those who had no place in
the ranks of the elect.

Among such men we must look in vain for literary productions having the
aim of entertainment. The literature of the time was chiefly polemical,
and commentaries crowded on the book-shelves the volumes of classical
and Italian writers. To Puritanism, fiction was the invention of the
Evil One, but still to Puritanism we owe, what is now, and seems
destined ever to remain, the finest allegory in the English language.

[Footnote 82: See Green's "Short History of the English People," chap.
viii, sec. 1.]

[Footnote 83: John Wallington's description of his mother. Green's
"Short History of the English People," p. 451.]

II.

That John Bunyan, a poor, illiterate tinker, was able to take the first
place among writers of allegory, and to accomplish the extraordinary
intellectual feat of producing a work which charmed alike the ignorant,
who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who
viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own
natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought. To write
a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power. It requires,
in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give
to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality. These conditions
were combined in Bunyan's case to an unexampled degree. He possessed an
imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of
any less powerfully constituted man. His subject, the doctrine of
salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it,
impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive. In
"Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners," Bunyan left a description of
his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is
without a parallel in autobiography. The veil which hides the thoughts
of one man from another is withdrawn, and the reader is placed in the
closest communion with the mind of the wri