The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book which makes its way through the fancy to the understanding and the heart.  The child peruses it with wonder and delight; in youth we discover the genius which it displays; its worth is apprehended as we advance in years; and we perceive its merits feelingly in declining age.  If it is not a well of English undefiled, to which the poet as well as the philologist must repair if they would drink of the living waters, it is a clear stream of current English, the vernacular of his age—­sometimes indeed in its rusticity and coarseness, but always in its plainness and its strength.  Robert Southey.

No man of common-sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan, the tinker of Elstow, was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate.  Now be astonished, O heaven, to eternity; and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures.  Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love.  See his polluted soul cleansed and adorned by divine grace, his guilt pardoned, the divine law inscribed upon his heart, the divine image, or the resemblance of God’s moral perfections impressed upon his soul.  Mr. Ryland.

It has been the lot of John Bunyan, an unlettered artisan, to do more than one in a hundred millions of human beings, even in civilized society, is usually able to do.  He has produced a work of imagination of such decided originality as not only to have commanded profound admiration on its first appearance, but amidst all changes of time and style and modes of thinking, to have maintained its place in the popular literature of every succeeding age, with the probability that, so long as the language in which it is written endures, it will not cease to be read by a great number of the youth of all future generations at that period of life when their minds, their imaginations, and their hearts are most impressible with moral excellence, splendid picture, and religious sentiment.  It would be difficult to name another work of any kind in our native tongue, of which so many editions have been printed, of which so many readers have lived and died, the character of whose lives and deaths must have been more or less affected by its lessons and examples, its fictions and realities.  James Montgomery.

I know of no book, the Bible excepted as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth, according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress.  It is in my conviction the best Summa Theologiae Evangelicae ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.  Coleridge’s Remains.

So great was Bunyan’s popularity as a preacher, that an eyewitness says, when he preached in London, “If there were but one day’s notice given, there would be more people come together to hear him preach than the meeting-house would hold.  I have seen, to hear him preach, about twelve hundred at a morning lecture, by seven o’clock on a working-day, in the dark winter time.”  Charles Doe.