As there is but one poet great enough to express the Puritan spirit, so there is but one commanding prose writer, John Bunyan.  Milton was the child of the Renaissance, inheritor of all its culture, and the most profoundly educated man of his age.  Bunyan was a poor, uneducated tinker.  From the Renaissance he inherited nothing; but from the Reformation he received an excess of that spiritual independence which had caused the Puritan struggle for liberty.  These two men, representing the extremes of English life in the seventeenth century, wrote the two works that stand to-day for the mighty Puritan spirit.  One gave us the only epic since Beowulf; the other gave us our only great allegory, which has been read more than any other book in our language save the Bible.

LIFE OF BUNYAN.  Bunyan is an extraordinary figure; we must study him, as well as his books.  Fortunately we have his life story in his own words, written with the same lovable modesty and sincerity that marked all his work.  Reading that story now, in Grace Abounding, we see two great influences at work in his life.  One, from within, was his own vivid imagination, which saw visions, allegories, parables, revelations, in every common event.  The other, from without, was the spiritual ferment of the age, the multiplication of strange sects,—­Quakers, Free-Willers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Millenarians,—­and the untempered zeal of all classes, like an engine without a balance wheel, when men were breaking away from authority and setting up their own religious standards.  Bunyan’s life is an epitome of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of the English Reformation.

He was born in the little village of Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son of a poor tinker.  For a little while the boy was sent to school, where he learned to read and write after a fashion; but he was soon busy in his father’s shop, where, amid the glowing pots and the fire and smoke of his little forge, he saw vivid pictures of hell and the devils which haunted him all his life.  When he was sixteen years old his father married the second time, whereupon Bunyan ran away and became a soldier in the Parliamentary army.

The religious ferment of the age made a tremendous impression on Bunyan’s sensitive imagination.  He went to church occasionally, only to find himself wrapped in terrors and torments by some fiery itinerant preacher; and he would rush violently away from church to forget his fears by joining in Sunday sports on the village green.  As night came on the sports were forgotten, but the terrors returned, multiplied like the evil spirits of the parable.  Visions of hell and the demons swarmed in his brain.  He would groan aloud in his remorse, and even years afterwards he bemoans the sins of his early life.  When we look for them fearfully, expecting some shocking crimes and misdemeanors, we find that they consisted of playing ball on Sunday and swearing.  The latter sin,