composition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. For Holy Scripture is full of
wars and rumours of wars: the wars of the Lord; the wars of Joshua and
the Judges; the wars of David, with his and many other magnificent battle-
songs; till the best known name of the God of Israel in the Old Testament
is the Lord of Hosts; and then in the New Testament we have Jesus Christ
described as the Captain of our salvation. Paul's powerful use of armour
and of armed men is familiar to every student of his epistles; and then
the whole Bible is crowned with a book all sounding with the
battle-cries, the shouts, and the songs of soldiers, till it ends with
that city of peace where they hang the trumpet in the hall and study war
no more. Military metaphors had taken a powerful hold of our author's
imagination even in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, as his portraits of
Greatheart and Valiant-for-truth and other soldiers sufficiently show;
while the conflict with Apollyon and the destruction of Doubting Castle
are so many sure preludes of the coming _Holy War_. Bunyan's early
experiences in the great Civil War had taught him many memorable things
about the military art; memorable and suggestive things that he
afterwards put to the most splendid use in the siege, the capture, and
the subjugation of Mansoul.

The _Divine Comedy_ is beyond dispute the greatest book of personal and
experimental religion the world has ever seen. The consuming intensity
of its author's feelings about sin and holiness, the keenness and the
bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the severity of his
revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning, all set ablaze
by his splendid imagination--all that combines to make the _Divine
Comedy_ the unapproachable masterpiece it is. John Bunyan, on the other
hand, had no learning to be called learning, but he had a strong and a
healthy English understanding, a conscience and a heart wholly given up
to the life of the best religion of his religious day, and then, by sheer