CHAPTER IX.

We have, in this concluding chapter, to take a review of Bunyan’s merits as a writer, with especial reference to the works on which his fame mainly rests, and, above all, to that which has given him his chief title to be included in a series of Great Writers, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”  Bunyan, as we have seen, was a very copious author.  His works, as collected by the late industrious Mr. Offor, fill three bulky quarto volumes, each of nearly eight hundred double-columned pages in small type.  And this copiousness of production is combined with a general excellence in the matter produced.  While few of his books approach the high standard of “The Pilgrim’s Progress” or “Holy War,” none, it may be truly said, sink very far below that standard.  It may indeed be affirmed that it was impossible for Bunyan to write badly.  His genius was a native genius.  As soon as he began to write at all, he wrote well.  Without any training, is he says, in the school of Aristotle or Plato, or any study of the great masters of literature, at one bound he leapt to a high level of thought and composition.  His earliest book, “Some Gospel Truths Opened,” “thrown off,” writes Dr. Brown, “at a heat,” displays the same ease of style and directness of speech and absence of stilted phraseology which he maintained to the end.  The great charm which pervades all Bunyan’s writings is their naturalness.  You never feel that he is writing for effect, still less to perform an uncongenial piece of task-work.  He writes because he had something to say which was worth saying, a message to deliver on which the highest interests of others were at stake, which demanded nothing more than a straightforward earnestness and plainness of speech, such as coming from the heart might best reach the hearts of others.  He wrote as he spoke, because a necessity was laid upon him which he dared not evade.  As he says in a passage quoted in a former chapter, he might have stepped into a much higher style, and have employed more literary ornament.  But to attempt this would be, to one of his intense earnestness, to degrade his calling.  He dared not do it.  Like the great Apostle, “his speech and preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and in power.”  God had not played with him, and he dared not play with others.  His errand was much too serious, and their need and danger too urgent to waste time in tricking out his words with human skill.  And it is just this which, with all their rudeness, their occasional bad grammar, and homely colloquialisms, gives to Bunyan’s writings a power of riveting the attention and stirring the affections which few writers have attained to.  The pent-up fire glows in every line, and kindles the hearts of his readers.  “Beautiful images, vivid expressions, forcible arguments all aglow with passion, tender pleadings, solemn warnings, make those who read him all eye,