In order to know Bunyan’s early life, and indeed to understand the Pilgrim’s Progress at all adequately, one must read Grace Abounding.  It is a short book, written in the years when he was already growing old, for those whom he had brought into the fold of religion.  From this autobiography it has usually been supposed that he had led a life of the wildest debauchery before his Christian days; but the more one examines the book, and indeed all his books, the less is one inclined to believe in any such desperate estimate of the sins of his youth.  The measure of sin is the sensitiveness of a man’s conscience; and where, as in Bunyan’s case, the conscience is abnormally delicate and subject to violent reactions, a life which in another man would be a pattern of innocence and respectability may be regarded as an altogether blackguardly and vicious one.  It was, however evidently a life of strong and intense worldly interest stepping over the line here and there into positive wrong-doing, but for the most part blameworthy mainly on account of its absorption in the passing shows of the hour.

What then was that world which interested Bunyan so intensely, and cost him so many pangs of conscience?  No doubt it was just the life of the road as he travelled about his business; for though by no means a tinker in the modern sense of the word, he was an itinerant brazier, whose business took him constantly to and fro among the many villages of the district of Bedford.  He must have heard in inns and from wayside companions many a catch of plays and songs, and listened to many a lively story, or read it in the chap-books which were hawked about the country then.  It must also be remembered that these were the days of puppet shows.  The English drama, as we have already mentioned in connection with Faust, was by no means confined to the boards of actual theatres where living actors played the parts.  Little mimic stages travelled about the country in all directions reproducing the plays, very much after the fashion of Punch and Judy; and even the solemnest of Shakespeare’s tragedies were exhibited in this way.  There is no possibility of doubt that Bunyan must have often stood agape at these exhibitions, and thus have received much of the highest literature at second hand.

As to how much of it he had actually read, that is a different question.  One is tempted to believe that he must have read George Herbert, but of this there is no positive proof.  We are quite certain about five books, for which we have his own express statements.  His wife brought him as her dowry the very modest furniture of two small volumes, Baily’s Practice of Piety and Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven.  The first is a very complicated and elaborate statement of Christian dogma, which Bunyan passes by with the scant praise, “Wherein I also found some things that were somewhat pleasing to me.”  The other is a much more vital production.  Even to this day it is an immensely interesting piece of reading.  It consists of conversations between various men who stand for types of worldling, ignoramus, theologian, etc., and there are very clear traces of it in the Pilgrim’s Progress, especially in the talks between Bunyan’s pilgrims and the man Ignorance.