And who, that has reperused the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age,
and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the
soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or
grateful encouragement? Where is the scholar, the poet, the man of taste
and feeling, who does not, with Cowper,

"Even in transitory life's late day,
Revere the man whose Pilgrim marks the road,
And guides the Progress of the soul to God!"

We have just been reading, with no slight degree of interest, that simple
but wonderful piece of autobiography, entitled Grace abounding to the
Chief of Sinners, from the pen of the author of Pilgrim's Progress. It
is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim;
"truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit
from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air of
Hope and Faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entire
unveiling of a human heart; the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of
its sin. The voice which speaks to us from these old pages seems not so
much that of a denizen of the world in which we live, as of a soul at the
last solemn confessional. Shorn of all ornament, simple and direct as
the contrition and prayer of childhood, when for the first time the
Spectre of Sin stands by its bedside, the style is that of a man dead to
self-gratification, careless of the world's opinion, and only desirous to
convey to others, in all truthfulness and sincerity, the lesson of his
inward trials, temptations, sins, weaknesses, and dangers; and to give
glory to Him who had mercifully led him through all, and enabled him,
like his own Pilgrim, to leave behind the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
the snares of the Enchanted Ground, and the terrors of Doubting Castle,
and to reach the land of Beulah, where the air was sweet and pleasant,