notoriety and usefulness for these overlooked legacies of a good and great man of a former age, has been the editor’s object in the prolonged sifting to which he has subjected all Bunyan’s writings.  Of that patient and conscientious study the present selection has been the result.  It is not hoped, or even wished for them, that in the case of any readers able to give the requisite leisure, these excerpts should supersede the original writings.  But these last, in mass, are beyond the means and the time which are at the command of many Christians, who would yet greatly prize the briefer examples of Bunyan’s experience and Bunyan’s teachings that are here presented.  And even to others of more affluence and leisure, this manual may serve to commend the author’s works in their entireness.  Mr. Chaplin himself would most anxiously disavow any claim to have exhausted the mines from which he brings these gatherings.  His specimens resemble rather those laces which the good Bunyan tagged in Bedford jail—­not in themselves garments, but merely adjuncts and ornaments of larger fabrics.  He who would see the entire wardrobe of the Dreamer’s mind, and the shape and proportions of the goodly vestures of truth in which he sought to array himself and his readers, must, after handling these the laces, turn to the robes, from whose edge these have been skilfully detached.

In the character and history of John Bunyan, the great Head of the church seems to have provided a lesson of special significance, and singular adaptedness, for the men and the strifes of our own time.  Born of the people, and in so low a condition, that one of Bunyan’s modern reviewers, by a strange mistake, construed Bunyan’s self-disparaging admissions to mean that he was the offspring of gypsies—­bred to one of the humblest of handicrafts, and having but the scantiest advantages as to fortune or culture, he yet rose, under the blessings of God’s word and providence and Spirit, to widest usefulness, and to an eminence that shows no tokens of decline.  Down to our own times, the branches of his expanding influence seem daily spreading and extending themselves; and the roots of his earthly renown seem daily shooting themselves deeper, and taking a firmer hold on the judgment of critics and the hearts of the churches.  When the English houses of Parliament were recently rebuilt, among the imagery commemorative of the nation’s literary glories, a place was voted for the bust of the Bedford pastor, once so maligned and persecuted.  Once tolerated by dainty Christians for the sake of his piety, while they apologized for what they deemed his uncouthness; he is now, at last, even from men of the world, who do not value that piety, receiving the due acknowledgment of his rare genius and witching style.  It is not many years since Gilpin, an English clergyman of cultivated taste—­himself a ready and popular writer—­issued an edition of the Pilgrim’s Progress, modified, if not