who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who
viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own
natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought. To write
a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power. It requires,
in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give
to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality. These conditions
were combined in Bunyan's case to an unexampled degree. He possessed an
imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of
any less powerfully constituted man. His subject, the doctrine of
salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it,
impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive. In
"Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners," Bunyan left a description of
his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is
without a parallel in autobiography. The veil which hides the thoughts
of one man from another is withdrawn, and the reader is placed in the
closest communion with the mind of the writer. In "Grace Abounding" is
easily detected the secret of Bunyan's success in allegory. "My sins
did so offend the Lord, that even in my childhood He did scare and
affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful
visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with
apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then
thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be
rid. I was afflicted with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, night and
day, trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire."
One Sunday, "as I was in the midst of a game at cat, and having struck
it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second
time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said,
'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to
Hell?' At this I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat
on the ground, and looking up to Heaven, saw, as with the eyes of my