Christians hold it only second to the Bible; the infidel himself would
not willingly let it die. Men of all sects read it with delight, as in
the main a truthful representation of the 'Christian pilgrimage, without
indeed assenting to all the doctrines which the author puts in the month
of his fighting sermonizer, Great-heart, or which may be deduced from
some other portions of his allegory. A recollection of his fearful
sufferings, from misapprehension of a single text in the Scriptures,
relative to the question of election, we may suppose gave a milder tone
to the theology of his Pilgrim than was altogether consistent with the
Calvinism of the seventeenth century. "Religion," says Macaulay, "has
scarcely ever worn a form so calm and soothing as in Bunyan's allegory."
In composing it, he seems never to have altogether lost sight of the
fact, that, in his life-and-death struggle with Satan for the blessed
promise recorded by the Apostle of Love, the adversary was generally
found on the Genevan side of the argument. Little did the short-sighted
persecutors of Bunyan dream, when they closed upon him the door of
Bedford jail, that God would overrule their poor spite and envy to His
own glory and the worldwide renown of their victim. In the solitude of
his prison, the ideal forms of beauty and sublimity, which had long
flitted before him vaguely, like the vision of the Temanite, took shape
and coloring; and he was endowed with power to reduce them to order, and
arrange them in harmonious groupings. His powerful imagination, no
longer self-tormenting, but under the direction of reason and grace,
expanded his narrow cell into a vast theatre, lighted up for the display
of its wonders. To this creative faculty of his mind might have been
aptly applied the language which George Wither, a contemporary prisoner,
addressed to his Muse:--

"The dull loneness, the black shade
Which these hanging vaults have made,