in a figurative dress, the narrative, with all its vividness of
description in parts, its clearly drawn characters with their picturesque
nomenclature, and the stirring vicissitudes of the drama, is necessarily
wanting in the personal interest which attaches to an individual man,
like Christian, and those who are linked with or follow his career. In
fact, the tremendous realities of the spiritual history of the human race
are entirely unfit for allegorical treatment as a whole. Sin, its
origin, its consequences, its remedy, and the apparent failure of that
remedy though administered by Almighty hands, must remain a mystery for
all time. The attempts made by Bunyan, and by one of much higher
intellectual power and greater poetic gifts than Bunyan--John Milton--to
bring that mystery within the grasp of the finite intellect, only render
it more perplexing. The proverbial line tells us that--

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Bunyan and Milton were as far as possible from being "fools"; but when
both these great writers, on the one hand, carry us up into the Council
Chamber of Heaven and introduce us to the Persons of the ever-blessed
Trinity, debating, consulting, planning, and resolving, like a sovereign
and his ministers when a revolted province has to be brought back to its
allegiance; and, on the other hand, take us down to the infernal regions,
and makes us privy to the plots and counterplots of the rebel leaders and
hearers of their speeches, we cannot but feel that, in spite of the
magnificent diction and poetic imagination of the one, and the homely
picturesque genius of the other, the grand themes treated of are degraded
if not vulgarized, without our being in any way helped to unravel their
essential mysteries. In point of individual personal interest, "The Holy
War" contrasts badly with "The Pilgrim's Progress." The narrative moves
in a more shadowy region. We may admire the workmanship; but the same