Bunyan might very easily indeed have been a pagan of the most worldly type.  It was extremely difficult for him to be a Puritan, not only on account of outward troubles, but also of inward ones belonging to his own disposition and experience.  Accepting Puritanism, the easiest course for him would have been that of fanaticism, and had he taken that course he would certainly have had no lack of companions.  It was far more difficult to remain a Puritan and yet to keep his heart open to the beauty and fascination of human life.  Yet he was interested in what men were writing or had written.  All manner of songs and stories, heard in early days in pot-houses, or in later times in prison, kept sounding in his ears, and he wove them into his work.  The thing that he meant to say, and did say, was indeed one about which controversy and persecution were raging, but, except in a very few general references, his writing shows no sign of this.  His eye is upon far-off things, the things of the soul of man and the life of God, but the way in which he tells these things shows innumerable signs of the bright world of English books.

It is worth while to consider this large and human Bunyan, who has been very erroneously supposed to be a mere literary freak, detached from all such influences as go to the making of other writers.  He tells us, indeed, that “when I pulled it came,” and that is delightfully true.  Yet, it came not out of nowhere, and it is our part in this essay to inquire as to the places from which it did come.  As we have said, it came out of two worlds, and the web is most wonderfully woven and coloured, but our present concern is rather with the earthly part of it than the heavenly.

No one can read John Bunyan without thinking of George Herbert.  Few of the short biographies in our language are more interesting reading than Isaac Walton’s life of Herbert.  That master of simplicity is always fascinating, and in this biography he gives us one of the most beautiful sketches of contemporary narrative that has ever been penned.  Herbert was the quaintest of the saints.  He lived in the days of Charles the First and James the First, a High Churchman who had Laud for his friend.  Shy, sensitive, high-bred, shrinking from the world, he was at the same time a man of business, skilful in the management of affairs, and yet a man of morbid delicacy of imagination.  The picture of his life at Little Gidding, where he and Mr. Farrer instituted a kind of hermitage, or private chapel of devotion, in which the whole of the Psalms were read through once in every twenty-four hours, grows peculiarly pathetic when we remember that the house and chapel were sacked by the parliamentary army, in which for a time John Bunyan served.  No two points of view, it would seem, could be more widely contrasted than those of Bunyan and Herbert, and yet the points of agreement are far more important than the differences between them, and The Temple has so much in common with the Pilgrim’s Progress that one is astonished to find that the likenesses seem to be entirely unconscious.  Matthew Henry is perpetually quoting The Temple in his Commentary.  Writing only a few years earlier, Bunyan reproduces in his own fashion many of its thoughts, but does not mention its existence.