such strength and glory as it never saw before.  No Diabolonian shall be able to creep into its streets, burrow in its walls, or be seen in its borders.  No evil tidings shall trouble its inhabitants, nor sound of Diabolian drum be heard there.  Sorrow and grief shall be ended, and life, always sweet, always new, shall last longer than they could even desire it, even all the days of eternity.  Meanwhile let those who have such a glorious hope set before them keep clean and white the liveries their Lord has given them, and wash often in the open fountain.  Let them believe in His love, live upon His word; watch, fight, and pray, and hold fast till He come.

One more work of Bunyan’s still remains to be briefly noticed, as bearing the characteristic stamp of his genius, “The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.”  The original idea of this book was to furnish a contrast to “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”  As in that work he had described the course of a man setting out on his course heavenwards, struggling onwards through temptation, trials, and difficulties, and entering at last through the golden gates into the city of God, so in this later work his purpose was to depict the career of a man whose face from the first was turned in the opposite direction, going on from bad to worse, ever becoming more and more irretrievably evil, fitter and fitter for the bottomless pit; his life full of sin and his death without repentance; reaping the fruit of his sins in hopeless sinfulness.  That this was the original purpose of the work, Bunyan tells us in his preface.  It came into his mind, he says, as in the former book he had written concerning the progress of the Pilgrim from this world to glory, so in this second book to write of the life and death of the ungodly, and of their travel from this world to hell.  The new work, however, as in almost every respect it differs from the earlier one, so it is decidedly inferior to it.  It is totally unlike “The Pilgrim’s Progress” both in form and execution.  The one is an allegory, the other a tale, describing without imagery or metaphor, in the plainest language, the career of a “vulgar, middle-class, unprincipled scoundrel.”  While “The Pilgrim’s Progress” pursues the narrative form throughout, only interrupted by dialogues between the leading characters, “Mr. Badman’s career” is presented to the world in a dialogue between a certain Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive.  Mr. Wiseman tells the story, and Mr. Attentive supplies appropriate reflections on it.  The narrative is needlessly burdened with a succession of short sermons, in the form of didactic discourses on lying, stealing, impurity, and the other vices of which the hero of the story was guilty, and which brought him to his miserable end.  The plainness of speech with which some of these evil doings are enlarged upon, and Mr. Badman’s indulgence in them described, makes portions of the book very disagreeable, and indeed hardly profitable reading.