im 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.

Few who read Bunyan nowadays think of him as one of the brave old
English confessors, whose steady and firm endurance of persecution
baffled, and in the end overcame, the tyranny of the Established
Church in the reign of Charles II. What Milton and Penn and Locke
wrote in defence of liberty, Bunyan lived out and acted. He made no
concessions to worldly rank. Dissolute lords and proud bishops he
counted less than the humblest and poorest of his disciples at
Bedford. When first arrested and thrown into prison, he supposed he
should be called to suffer death for his faithful testimony to the
truth; and his great fear was, that he should not meet his fate with
the requisite firmness, and so dishonor the cause of his Master. And
when dark clouds came over him, and he sought in vain for a sufficient
evidence that in the event of his death it would be well with him, he
girded up his soul with the reflection that, as he suffered for the
word and way of God, he was engaged not to shrink one hair's breadth
from it. "I will leap," he says, "off the ladder blindfold into
eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell. Lord Jesus, if thou
wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture in thy name!"

The English revolution of the seventeenth century, while it humbled
the false and oppressive aristocracy of rank and title, was prodigal
in the development of the real nobility of the mind and heart. Its
history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still
stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say
what we may of its fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant
enjoyment of newly-acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now
venture to deny that it was the golden age of England? Who that
regards freedom above slavery, will now sympathize with the outcry and
lamentation of those interested in the continuance of the old order of
things, against the prevalence of sects and schism, but who at the
same time, as Milton shrewdly intimates, dreaded more the rending of
their pontifical sleeves than the rending of the Church? Who shall now
sneer at Puri