that, when he wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, he was not definitely thinking of the edification of his neighbours, goes far towards explaining the absence of commonplace arguments and exhortations.  “I did it mine own self to gratify,” he declared in his rhymed “apology for his book.”  Later on, in reply to some brethren of the stricter sort who condemned such dabbling in fiction, he defended his book as a tract, remarking that, if you want to catch fish,

  They must be groped for, and be tickled too,
  Or they will not be catch’t, whate’er you do.

But in its origin The Pilgrim’s Progress was not a tract, but the inevitable image of the experiences of the writer’s soul.  And what wild adventures those were every reader of Grace Abounding knows.  There were terrific contests with the Devil, who could never charm John Bunyan as he charmed Eve.  To Bunyan these contests were not metaphorical battles, but were as struggles with flesh and blood.  “He pulled, and I pulled,” he wrote in one place; “but, God be praised, I overcame him—­I got sweetness from it.”  And the Devil not only fought him openly, but made more subtle attempts to entice him to sin.  “Sometimes, again, when I have been preaching, I have been violently assaulted with thoughts of blasphemy, and strongly tempted to speak the words with my mouth before the congregation.”  Bunyan, as he looked back over the long record of his spiritual torments, thought of it chiefly as a running fight with the Devil.  Outside the covers of the Bible, little existed save temptations for the soul.  No sentence in The Pilgrim’s Progress is more suggestive of Bunyan’s view of life than that in which the merchandise of Vanity Fair is described as including “delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.”  It is no wonder that one to whom so much of the common life of man was simply Devil’s traffic took a tragic view of even the most innocent pleasures, and applied to himself, on account of his love of strong language, Sunday sports and bell-ringing, epithets that would hardly have been too strong if he had committed all the crimes of the latest Bluebeard.  He himself, indeed, seems to have become alarmed when—­probably as a result of his own confessions—­it began to be rumoured that he was a man with an unspeakable past.  He now demanded that “any woman in heaven, earth or hell” should be produced with whom he had ever had relations before his marriage.  “My foes,” he declared, “have missed their mark in this shooting at me.  I am not the man.  I wish that they themselves be guiltless.  If all the fornicators and adulterers in England were hanged up by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan, the object of their envy, would still be alive and well.”  Bunyan, one observes, was always as ready to defend as to attack himself.  The verses he prefixed to The Holy War are an indignant reply to those who accused him of not being the real author of The Pilgrim’s Progress.  He wound up a fervent defence of his claims to originality by pointing out the fact that his name, if “anagrammed,” made the words:  “NU HONY IN A B.”  Many worse arguments have been used in the quarrels of theologians.