but what would we not give for a description from his vivid pen of the famous fields and the great sieges in which he took part?  What a find John Bunyan’s ‘Journals’ and ’Letters Home from the Seat of War’ would be to our historians and to their readers!  But, alas! such journals and letters do not exist.  Bunyan’s complete silence in all his books about the battles and the sieges he took his part in is very remarkable, and his silence is full of significance.  The Puritan soldier keeps all his military experiences to work them all up into his Holy War, the one and only war that ever kindled all his passions and filled his every waking thought.  But since John Bunyan was a man of genius, equal in his own way to Cromwell and Milton themselves, if I were a soldier I would keep ever before me the great book in which Bunyan’s experiences and observations and reflections as a soldier are all worked up.  I would set that classical book on the same shelf with Caesar’s Commentaries and Napier’s Peninsula, and Carlyle’s glorious battle-pieces.  Even Caesar has been accused of too great dryness and coldness in his Commentaries, but there is neither dryness nor coldness in John Bunyan’s Holy War.  To read Bunyan kindles our cold civilian blood like the waving of a banner and like the sound of a trumpet.

The situation of the city of Mansoul occupies one of the most beautiful pages of this whole book.  The opening of the Holy War, simply as a piece of English, is worthy to stand beside the best page of the Pilgrim’s Progress itself, and what more can I say than that?  Now, the situation of a city is a matter of the very first importance.  Indeed, the insight and the foresight of the great statesmen and the great soldiers of past ages are seen in nothing more than in the sites they chose for their citadels and for their defenced cities.  Well, then, as to the situation of Mansoul, ‘it lieth,’ says our military author, ’just between the two worlds.’  That is to say:  very much as Germany in our day lies between France and Russia, and very much as Palestine in her day lay between Egypt and Assyria, so does Mansoul lie between two immense empires also.  And, surely, I do not need to explain to any man here who has a man’s soul in his bosom that the two armed empires that besiege his soul are Heaven above and Hell beneath, and that both Heaven and Hell would give their best blood and their best treasure to subdue and to possess his soul.  We do not value our souls at all as Heaven and Hell value them.  There are savage tribes in Africa and in Asia who inhabit territories that are sleeplessly envied by the expanding and extending nations of Europe.  Ancient and mighty empires in Europe raise armies, and build navies, and levy taxes, and spill the blood of their bravest sons like water in order to possess the harbours, and the rivers, and the mountains, and the woods amid which their besotted owners roam in