with a love of virtue, who were ready to undergo every hardship, and to sacrifice every personal inclination to attain it.  Growing up among the people at large, Puritanism showed a strong national love of religion and morality.  The resolution with which its devotees pursued their aims, the serene content with which the martyrs welcomed the flames which were to open the gates of Heaven, were backed by a strength of faith not exceeded by that of the early Christians.  The self-control and self-sacrifice of the Puritans moulded the armies of the Commonwealth, and overthrew the tyranny of Charles.  But their finer qualities were clouded by the fanaticism which a long persecution had engendered.  A phrase in our description of the London housewife unconsciously tells the story:  “Loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane.”  The godly were the sharers of her own faith, the “wicked and profane” were all those without its pale.  Here lay the weakness of Puritanism:  its narrowness, its lack of sympathy with the world at large, its indifference to the sufferings of those who had no place in the ranks of the elect.

Among such men we must look in vain for literary productions having the aim of entertainment.  The literature of the time was chiefly polemical, and commentaries crowded on the book-shelves the volumes of classical and Italian writers.  To Puritanism, fiction was the invention of the Evil One, but still to Puritanism we owe, what is now, and seems destined ever to remain, the finest allegory in the English language.

[Footnote 82:  See Green’s “Short History of the English People,” chap. viii, sec. 1.]

[Footnote 83:  John Wallington’s description of his mother.  Green’s “Short History of the English People,” p. 451.]

II.

That John Bunyan, a poor, illiterate tinker, was able to take the first place among writers of allegory, and to accomplish the extraordinary intellectual feat of producing a work which charmed alike the ignorant, who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought.  To write a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power.  It requires, in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality.  These conditions were combined in Bunyan’s case to an unexampled degree.  He possessed an imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of any less powerfully constituted man.  His subject, the doctrine of salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it, impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive.  In “Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners,” Bunyan left a description of his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is without a parallel