The Pilgrim's Progress [antikvár]

Introduction No Christian can afford to remain ignorant of The Pilgrim's Progress. In universality of spiritual appeal it stands second only to the Bible itself. To an extent matched by few other of the great books, it is "the echo of a great soul." John Bunyan, the tinker and nonconformist preacher who wrote this greatest of Christian classics, was born in 1628 at Elstow near Bedford, England. As a young man he served briefly in the Parliamentary forces. Then, after years of spiritual struggle, he found salvation in Christ and began to preach to groups of dissenters. Arrested and condemned to Bedford jail for illegal preaching, a punishment from which he might have been freed by promising to give up his ministry, he remained in prison for nearly twelve years, and, after several years of liberty, was again jailed for another six months. Thereafter he continued preaching and writing until his death in 1688. His was an imprisonment unique in English literature for the quality of the fruit it bore—notably, the remarkable spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding, and the incomparable Pilgrim's Progress.* More than any other major English author, Bunyan shows the heights to which a man fully committed to God and saturated with the Bible can attain. There is no more beautifully plain English style than his, and outside the King James * Part II, though wholly written after the prison years, is, of course, the direct outcome of Part I.