all ear, all soul.”  This native vigour is attributable, in no small degree, to the manner in which for the most part Bunyan’s works came into being.  He did not set himself to compose theological treatises upon stated subjects, but after he had preached with satisfaction to himself and acceptance with his audience, he usually wrote out the substance of his discourse from memory, with the enlargements and additions it might seem to require.  And thus his religious works have all the glow and fervour of the unwritten utterances of a practised orator, united with the orderliness and precision of a theologian, and are no less admirable for the excellence of their arrangement than for their evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine.  Originally meant to be heard, they lose somewhat by being read.  But few can read them without being delighted with the opulence of his imagination and impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions.  Like the subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the Interpreter, he stands “like one who pleads with men, the law of truth written upon his lips, the world behind his back, and a crown of gold above his head.”

These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer from most of his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the works by which he is chiefly known, “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” the “Holy War,” the “Grace Abounding,” and we may add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject the book is now scarcely read at all, the “Life and Death of Mr. Badman.”

One great charm of these works, especially of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are written, which render them models of the English speech, plain but never vulgar, homely but never coarse, and still less unclean, full of imagery but never obscure, always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to the point in the fewest and simplest words; “powerful and picturesque,” writes Hallam, “from concise simplicity.”  Bunyan’s style is recommended by Lord Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide command over his mother tongue.  Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the common people.  “There is not,” he truly says, “in ’The Pilgrim’s Progress’ a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant.”  We may, look through whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables.  Nor is the source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.  Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best, not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the English Bible.  “In no book,” writes Mr. J. R. Green, “do we see more clearly than in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ the new imaginative force which had been given to the common life of Englishmen by their study of the Bible.  Bunyan’s English is the simplest and homeliest English that has ever been used by any great English writer, but it is the English of the Bible.  His images are the images of prophet and evangelist.  So completely had the Bible become Bunyan’s life that one feels its phrases as the natural expression of his thoughts.  He had lived in the Bible till its words became his own.”