So it was all useless labor, neither side could or would give way one inch.  Bursting into tears the poor young wife turned away.  But she wept “not so much because they were so hard-hearted against me and my husband, but to think what a sad account such poor creatures will have to give at the coming of the Lord, when they shall then answer for all things whatsoever they have done in the body, whether it be good, or whether it be bad.”

Seeing there was no help for it, Bunyan set himself bravely to endure his imprisonment.  And, in truth, this was not very severe.  Strangely enough he was allowed to preach to his fellow-prisoners, he was even at one time allowed to go to church.  But the great thing for us is that he wrote books.  Already, before his imprisonment, he had written several books, and now he wrote that for which he is most famous, the Pilgrim’s Progress.

It is a book so well known and so well loved that I think I need say little about it.  In the form of a dream Bunyan tells, as you know, the story of Christian who set out on his long and difficult pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the City of the Blest.  He tells of all Christian’s trials and adventures on the way, of how he encounters giants and lion, of how he fights with a great demon, and of how at length he arrives at his journey’s end in safety.  A great writer has said, “There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed."*

Macaulay.

For the power of imagination this writer places Bunyan by the side of Milton.  Although there were many clever men in England towards the end of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds which had great powers of imagination.  “One of those minds produced the Paradise Lost, the other the Pilgrim’s Progress.”  That is very great praise, and yet although Milton and Bunyan are thus placed side by side no two writers are more widely apart.  Milton’s writing is full of the proofs of his leaning, his English is fine and stately, but it is full of words made from Latin words.  As an early writer on him said “Milton’s language is English, but it is Milton’s English."*

Richardson.

On the other hand, Bunyan’s writing is most simple.  He uses strong, plain, purely English words.  There is hardly one word in all his writing which a man who knows his Bible cannot easily understand.  And it was from the Bible that Bunyan gathered nearly all his learning.  He knew it from end to end, and the poetry and grandeur of its language filled his soul.  But he read other books, too, among them, we feel sure, the Faery Queen.  Some day you may like to compare the adventures of the Red Cross Knight with the adventures of Christian.  And perhaps in all the Faery Queen you will find nothing so real and exciting as Christian’s fight with Apollyon.  Apollyon comes from a Greek word meaning the destroyer.  This is how Bunyan tells of the fight:—­