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It was a type or shadow of good things which were to come. Bunyan possessed a heavenly store of these apt illustrations.-ED. 29 "Branglings"; noisy quarrels or squabbles. "The payment of tithes is subject to many brangles."-Swift. It is now obsolete, and is substituted by wranglings.-ED.
She was then scrupulous, timid and superstitious, a mystical, a psychopathic temperament, taking her place all the same with John Bunyan and other chief of sinners whose self-depreciation and absorption in the struggle for salvation from sin and the power of the Devil, though morbid in character was not pathological.
I have here before me an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, bound in green, without a date, and described as 'illustrated by nearly three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan. On the outside it is lettered 'Bagster's Illustrated Edition, and after the author's apology, facing the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial 'Plan of the Road' is marked as 'drawn by the late Mr.
Happily they are now better known, and the truths of Christianity are more appreciated. I have been careful to guard the reader upon this subject, lest it should be thought that Bunyan had in any degree manifested the spirit of those, who even to the present day misrepresent the opinions of the Quakers.
He wrestled with the thought as it rose, thrust it from him 'with his hands and elbows, body and mind convulsed together in a common agony. As fast as the destroyer said, 'Sell Him, Bunyan said, 'I will not; I will not; I will not, not for thousands, thousands, thousands of worlds! One morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came again, and would not be driven away.
In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the text, and that point is one rather of the difference of arts than the difference of artists. Throughout his best and worst, in his highest and most divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism, the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses the reader.
As an allegorist Bunyan had many predecessors, not a few of whom, dating from early times, had taken the natural allegory of the pilgrimage of human life as the basis of their works. But as a novelist he had no one to show him the way.
The only way to describe sin, he feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin, is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin by the commandment became exceeding sinful. And, in like manner, John Bunyan, who has only his own mother tongue to work with, in his straits to get a proper name for this terrible fellow who was next to Diabolus himself, cannot find a proud enough name for him but just by giving him his own name, and then doubling it.
When reproached, as Bunyan was, for resorting to the art of fiction when teaching in parables, he justifies himself on the ground that art is the only way in which the people can be taught. He is, in short, what we should call an artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life.
Here is the immortal Bunyan, spending his best years in Bedford jail because he insisted on giving men the message God had first given him; but he, too, opened his mind only to good thoughts. For him, also, dawned the heavenly vision. As the prison doors opened before Peter and the angel, so the dungeon walls parted before his thoughts.
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