and the birds sang and the flowers sprang up around him, and the Shining
Ones walked in the brightness of the not distant Heaven. In the
introductory pages he says "he could have dipped into a style higher than
this in which I have discoursed, and could have adorned all things more
than here I have seemed to do; but I dared not. God did not play in
tempting me; neither did I play when I sunk, as it were, into a
bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell took hold on me; wherefore, I may
not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the
thing as it was."

This book, as well as Pilgrim's Progress, was written in Bedford prison,
and was designed especially for the comfort and edification of his
"children, whom God had counted him worthy to beget in faith by his
ministry." In his introduction he tells them, that, although taken from
them, and tied up, "sticking, as it were, between the teeth of the lions
of the wilderness," he once again, as before, from the top of Shemer and
Hermon, so now, from the lion's den and the mountain of leopards, would
look after then with fatherly care and desires for their everlasting
welfare. "If," said he, "you have sinned against light; if you are
tempted to blaspheme; if you are drowned in despair; if you think God
fights against you; or if Heaven is hidden from your eyes, remember it
was so with your father. But out of all the Lord delivered me."

He gives no dates; be affords scarcely a clue to his localities; of the
man, as he worked, and ate, and drank, and lodged, of his neighbors and
contemporaries, of all he saw and heard of the world about him, we have
only an occasional glimpse, here and there, in his narrative. It is the
story of his inward life only that he relates. What had time and place
to do with one who trembled always with the awful consciousness of an
immortal nature, and about whom fell alternately the shadows of hell and