24 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS. 
(Continued from Page 1, top of page.) 
“T name thee not, lest so despised a name 
Should move a sneer at thy deserved fame.” 
But the time of its recognition as 
one of the master-pieces of English 
literature was at hand. With the 
growth of purer and more correct 
principles of literary taste, in the 
latter part of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, 
the allegory of the once despised Bap- 
tist tinker, poet and preacher took its 
place among the choicest of English 
classics. Macaulay, in his Essay on 
Southey’s Life of Bunyan, in 1831, 
affirmed that he “was not afraid to 
say that, though there were many 
clever men in England during the 
latter part of the seventeenth century, 
there were only two great creative 
minds; one of these minds produced 
the ‘Paradise Lost,’ the other the 
‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’’’ Twenty years 
later, in 1851, the same great authority 
reiterated this eulogy in the seventh 
chapter of his History of England, 
«Bunyan is as decidedly the first of 
allegorists as Demosthenes is the first 
of orators, or Shakespeare the first ‘of 
dramatists. Other allegorists have 
shown great ingenuity, but no other 
allegorist has ever been able soto 
touch the heart.” 
One great secret of the charm of 
Pilgrim’s Progress is the simplicity of 
its language and style. With the 
exception of a few theological terms, 
there is hardly an expression above 
the comprehension of the common 
reader. It is a book for the people. 
An edition was published many years 
ago with notes by Dr. Thomas Scott, 
the commentator, intended to elucidate 
the text. A good anecdote is told of 
a poor woman who received a present 
of this book, and on being asked if she 
understood it, replied, “ Yes, all but 
the notes.” Bunyan drew the mate- 
rials of his work from the common 
life and daily experience of the ordi- 
nary Englishman of the seventeenth 
century. The idea of pilgrimage had 
not faded out of the public mind. 
Memories of chivalry and feudalism 
were not extinct. The ‘ Progress” 
is an adaptation of medizval journey- 
ings to the Holy Land, to the thoughts 
and habits of Puritan England and to 
the purposes of religious allegory. 
Great Heart is such a knight as in the 
preceding century had protected some 
company of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and 
proved himself a valient defender of 
women and children and slayer of 
dragons. 
It may be, too, in drawing this 
heroic character, Bunyan had in mind 
some redoubtable captain of Crom- 
well’s Ironsides, under whom he had 
served at Leicester, and who, with 
the high praises of God in his mouth 
and a two-edged sword in his hand, 
alternately exhorted his men in the 
prayer-meeting and led the charge 
against the Royalists. The castle of 
Giant Despair with its donjon is a 
robber baron’s. stronghold, such as 
still frowned on many a hill top in old 
England. Vanity Fair is a picture 
from life of the games, cheats and 
juggleries witnessed in Bunyan’s time 
on many a village green. The Slough 
of Despond, the Hill Difficulty, the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death, had 
their originals in the almost impassa- 
ble roads, the rough, wild districts, 
peopled by popular superstition, with 
hobgoblins and sprites, which abound- 
ed in England as late as the Restora- 
tion. Mr. Honest isa good. old London 
tradesman in pilgrim’s coat and scallop 
hat. Mercy is the young gentle- 
woman, and Christiana the matron, 
who made many of the common homes 
of England the abodes of order and 
purity, as the Nell Gwynnes made the 
Court the abode of corruption and 
license. Christian and Faithful and 
Hopeful were the tradesmen and yeo- 
men that made the bone and sinew of 
the English race. Pliable and Obsti- 
nate might have been Bunyan’s next- 
door neighbors, as were also Mr. 
Legality and his son-in-law, Mr. Civil- 
ity. Mr. No-Good, Mr. Heady, Mr. 
Loveloose, Mr. Anything and Mr. Fac- 
ing-both-ways were certainly among 
his acquaintances, while Lord Luxri- 
ous kept state in the neighboring 
castle, and the Judge who condemned 
Faithful to the stake might have been 
a predecessor of the brutal and in- 
famous Jeffreys himself. 
There are few books which soabound 
in pictorial illustrations. It may be 
said hardly to need the help of the 
engraver’s art. We actually see the 
wicket-gate across the fields, and the 
arbor where Christian lost his roll, 
and the Interpreter’s house, and the 
Delectable Mountains, and the Shin- 
ing City. We thing we should know 
Evangelist if we met him, and are 
sure that we have talked with Igno- 
rance and By-Ends and Talkative. 
The whole way from the City of De- 
struction to the Dark river is mapped 
out with almost the detail of a railway 
survey. The whole scene passes be- 
fore us like a living panorama. A 
work that can make the spiritual and 
unseen so present and real; that can 
clothe abstract virtues and vices with 
such personal interest that they seem 
to walk before us in flesh and blood, 
in the doublet and hose, the kirtle and 
gown of the sturdy peasantry of Bed- 
fordshire in the seventeenth century ; 
that can so charm the imagination of 
youth and stir the pulses of manhood ; 
that loses none of its power with age, 
but, like good wine, gathers richness 
and flavor with time; which has out- 
lived criticism and neglect, and ex- 
torted praise from the most unfriendly 
and fastidious; which is equally at 
home in the hut and the-palace; which 
is the joy of the learned and the 
ignorant, the companion of childhood, 
the comforter of old age, and the staff 
of the dying —such a work must be 
a work of transcendent genius and 
power. 
Human nature and experience are 
the same always and everywhere ; 
they do not change, as fashions of 
dress, habits of speech, social cus- 
toms and political institutions change. 
Hence, the genius of Bunyan, rooting 
itself as it did in the permanent and 
universal, not in the evanescent and 
local, takes hold of men in this coun- 
try and in this century, as it did in 
England in the time of the Stuarts. 
Despite its local coloring, its antique 
garb, its scenery drawn from the lanes 
and villages of the Midland shires, its 
language saturated with the theolog- 
ical thought of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, the book has in it that ‘touch 
of nature’”’ that ‘‘makes the whole 
world kin,” and hence has a sure title 
to immortality. So long as human 
hearts are bowed under a conscious 
load of sin and sorrow, so long as they 
experience the alternations of joy and 
despair, of conflict and victory, as 
they press with wearied yet deter- 
mined feet all the way from the Cross 
and Sepulchre to the Land of Beulah 
-—will this book bea heart-treasure to 
Zion’s pilgrims. It will never become 
obsolete so long as the road to the 
Celestial City is trodden by men flee- 
ing for their lives from the City of 
Destruction. 
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Commercial 
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Admits New Pupils 
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126 Washington St., Salem. 
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