prayer at their fingers’ ends; they set such a prayer for such a day, and that twenty years before it comes:  one for Christmas, another for Easter, and six days after that.  They have also bounded how many syllables must be said in every one of them at their public exercises.  For each saint’s day also they have them ready for the generations yet unborn to say.  They can tell you also when you shall kneel, when you shall stand, when you should abide in your seats, when you should go up into the chancel, and what you should do when you come there.  All which the apostles came short of, as not being able to compose so profound a 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, hanging, as it were, over the pit of hell by a thin line, which might snap any moment—­been portrayed in more nervous and awe-inspiring language.  And its awfulness is enhanced by its self-evident truth.  Bunyan was drawing no imaginary picture of what others might feel, but simply telling in plain unadorned language