manner." This bitter satirical vein in treating of sacred things is
unworthy of its author, and degrading to his sense of reverence. It has
its excuse in the hard measure he had received from those who were so
unwisely endeavouring to force the Prayer Book on a generation which had
largely forgotten it. In his mind, the men and the book were identified,
and the unchristian behaviour of its advocates blinded his eyes to its
merits as a guide to devotion. Bunyan, when denouncing forms in worship,
forgot that the same apostle who directs that in our public assemblies
everything should be done "to edification," directs also that everything
should be done "decently and in order."

By far the most important of these prison works--"The Pilgrim's
Progress," belonging, as will be seen, to a later period--is the "Grace
Abounding," in which with inimitable earnestness and simplicity Bunyan
gives the story of his early life and his religious history. This book,
if he had written no other, would stamp Bunyan as one of the greatest
masters of the English language of his own or any other age. In graphic
delineation of the struggles of a conscience convicted of sin towards a
hardly won freedom and peace, the alternations of light and darkness, of
hope and despair, which chequered its course, its morbid self-torturing
questionings of motive and action, this work of the travelling tinker, as
a spiritual history, has never been surpassed. Its equal can hardly be
found, save perhaps in the "Confessions of St. Augustine." These,
however, though describing a like spiritual conflict, are couched in a
more cultured style, and rise to a higher metaphysical region than Bunyan
was capable of attaining to. His level is a lower one, but on that level
Bunyan is without a rival. Never has the history of a soul convinced of
the reality of eternal perdition in its most terrible form as the most
certain of all possible facts, and of its own imminent danger of
hopeless, irreversible doom--seeing itself, to employ his own image,