Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/105

 JOHN BUNYAN 67 were never written. It is the entire unveiling of a human heart, the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of its sin. The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not so much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the last solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to self-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to convey to others, in all truth- fulness and sincerity, the lesson of his inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses and dangers- and to give glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him, like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Cas- tle, and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and pleasant, and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and the Shining Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant heaven. In the introductory pages he says : " I could have dipped into a style higher than this in which I have dis- coursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do ; but I dared not. God did not play in tempting me ; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me ; wherefore, I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was." This book, as well as " Pilgrim's Progress," was written in Bedford prison, and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his " children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his ministry." In his introduc- tion he tells them, that, although taken from them and tied up, " sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the moun- tain of leopards, would look after them with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are tempted to blaspheme ; if you are drowned in despair ; if you think God fights against you, or if heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it was so with your father. But out of all the Lord delivered me." He gives no dates ; he affords scarcely a clew to his localities ; of the man, as he worked and ate and drank and lodged, of his neighbors and contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we have only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is the story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and place to do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of an immortal nature, and about whom fell alter nately the shadows of hell and the splendors of heaven ? We gather, indeed from his record that he was not an idle on-looker in the time of England's great struggle for freedom, but a soldier of the Parliament in his young years, among the praying sworders and psalm-singing pikemen, the Greathearts and Holdfasts whom he has immortalized in his allegory ; but the only allusion which he makes to this portion of his experience is by way of illustration of the goodness of God in preserving him on occasions of peril.