Such, in brief, is the story, the great epic of a Puritan’s individual experience in a rough world, just as Paradise Lost was the epic of mankind as dreamed by the great Puritan who had “fallen asleep over his Bible.”

The chief fact which confronts the student of literature as he pauses before this great allegory is that it has been translated into seventy-five languages and dialects, and has been read more than any other book save one in the English language.

As for the secret of its popularity, Taine says, “Next to the Bible, the book most widely read in England is the Pilgrim’s Progress....  Protestantism is the doctrine of salvation by grace, and no writer has equaled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood.”  And this opinion is echoed by the majority of our literary historians.  It is perhaps sufficient answer to quote the simple fact that Pilgrim’s Progress is not exclusively a Protestant study; it appeals to Christians of every name, and to Mohammedans and Buddhists in precisely the same way that it appeals to Christians.  When it was translated into the languages of Catholic countries, like France and Portugal, only one or two incidents were omitted, and the story was almost as popular there as with English readers.  The secret of its success is probably simple.  It is, first of all, not a procession of shadows repeating the author’s declamations, but a real story, the first extended story in our language.  Our Puritan fathers may have read the story for religious instruction; but all classes of men have read it because they found in it a true personal experience told with strength, interest, humor,—­in a word, with all the qualities that such a story should possess.  Young people have read it, first, for its intrinsic worth, because the dramatic interest of the story lured them on to the very end; and second, because it was their introduction to true allegory.  The child with his imaginative mind—­the man also, who has preserved his simplicity—­naturally personifies objects, and takes pleasure in giving them powers of thinking and speaking like himself.  Bunyan was the first writer to appeal to this pleasant and natural inclination in a way that all could understand.  Add to this the fact that Pilgrim’s Progress was the only book having any story interest in the great majority of English and American homes for a full century, and we have found the real reason for its wide reading.

The Holy War, published in 1665, is the first important work of Bunyan.  It is a prose Paradise Lost, and would undoubtedly be known as a remarkable allegory were it not overshadowed by its great rival. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published in 1666, twelve years before Pilgrim’s Progress, is the work from which we obtain the clearest insight into Bunyan’s remarkable life, and to a man with historical or antiquarian tastes it is still excellent reading.  In 1682 appeared The Life and Death