book is the book of a great scholar who has read the Fathers and the Schoolmen and the Reformers till he knows them by heart, and till he has been able to digest all that is true to Scripture and to experience in them into his rich and ripe book.  A powerful reasoner, a severe, bald, muscular writer, John Owen in all these respects stands at the very opposite pole to that of John Bunyan.  The author of the Holy War had no learning, but he had a mind of immense natural sagacity, combined with a habit of close and deep observation of human life, and especially of religious life, and he had now a lifetime of most fruitful experience as a Christian man and as a Christian minister behind him; and, all that, taken up into Bunyan’s splendid imagination, enabled him to produce this extraordinarily able and impressive book.  A model of English style as the Holy War is, at the same time it does not attain at all to the rank of the Pilgrim’s Progress; but then, to be second to the Pilgrim’s Progress is reward and honour enough for any book.  Let all genuine students, then, who would know the best that has been written on experimental religion, and who would preach to the deepest and divinest experience of their best people, let them keep continually within their reach John Owen’s Temptation, his Mortification of Sin in Believers, his Nature and Power of Indwelling Sin, and John Bunyan’s Holy War made for the Regaining of the Metropolis of this World.

Well, then, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of Mansoul.  And he, as his manner was, did go listening up and down in Mansoul to see and hear, if at any time he might, whether there was any design against it or no.  For he was always a jealous man, and feared some mischief would befall it, either from within or from some power without.  Mr. Prywell was always a lover of Mansoul, a sober and a judicious man, a man that was no tattler, nor a raiser of false reports, but one that loves to look into the very bottom of matters, and talks nothing of news but by very solid arguments.  And then, after our historian has told us some of the eminent services that Mr. Prywell was able to perform both for the King and for the city, he goes on to tell us how the captains determined that public thanks should be given by the town of Mansoul to Mr. Prywell for his so diligent seeking of the welfare of the town; and, further, that, forasmuch as he was so naturally inclined to seek their good, and also to undermine their foes, they gave him the commission of Scoutmaster-general for the good of Mansoul.  And Mr. Prywell managed his charge and the trust that Mansoul had put into his hands with great conscience and good fidelity; for he gave himself wholly up to his employ, and that not only within the town, but he also went outside of the town to pry, to see, and to hear.  Now, that being so, it may interest and perhaps instruct you to-night to look for a little at some of the features and at some of the feats of the Scoutmaster-general of the Holy War, Mr. Prywell, of the town of Mansoul.