“Christian perceiving that made at him again, saying ’Nay in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’  And with that Apollyon spread forth his dragon’s wings and sped him away, and Christian saw him no more.”

Bunyan wrote a second part or sequel to the Pilgrim’s Progress, in which he tells of the adventures of Christian’s wife and children on their way to Zion.  But the story does not interest us as the story of Christian does.  Because we love Christian we are glad to know that his wife and children escaped destruction, but except that they belong to him we do not really care about them.

Bunyan wrote several other books.  The best known are The Holy War and Grace Abounding.  The Holy War might be called a Paradise Lost and Regained in homely prose.  It tells much the same story, the story of the struggle between Good and Evil for the possession of man’s soul.

In Grace Abounding Bunyan tells of his own struggle with evil, and it is from that book that we learn much of what we know of his life.

He also wrote the Life and Death of Mr. Badman.  Instead of telling how a good man struggles with evil and at last wins rest, it tells of how a bad man yields always to evil and comes at last to a sad end.  It is not a pretty story, and is one, I think, which you will not care to read.

Bunyan, too, wrote a good deal of rime, but for the most part it can hardly be called poetry.  It is for his prose that we remember him.  Yet who would willingly part with the song of the shepherd-boy in the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress:—­

    “He that is down needs fear no fall;
        He that is low, no pride: 
    He that is humble, ever shall
        Have God to be his guide.

    I am content with what I have,
        Little be it or much: 
    And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
        Because thou savest such.

    Fullness to such a burden is
        That go on pilgrimage: 
    Here little, and hereafter bliss,
        Is best from age to age.”

When Bunyan had been in prison for six years he was set free, but as he at once began to preach he was immediately seized and reimprisoned.  He remained shut up for six years longer.  Then King Charles II passed an Act called the Declaration of Indulgence.  By this Act all the severe laws against those who did not conform to the Church of England were done away with, and, in consequence, Bunyan was set free.  Charles passed this Act, not because he was sorry for the Nonconformists—­as all who would not conform to the Church of England were called—­but because he wished to free the Roman Catholics, and he could not do that without freeing the Nonconformists too.  Two years later Bunyan was again imprisoned because “in contempt of his Majesty’s good laws he preached or teached in other manner than according to the Liturgy or practice of the Church of England.”  But this time his imprisonment lasted only six months.  And I must tell you that many people now think that it was during this later short imprisonment that Bunyan wrote the Pilgrim’s Progress, and not during the earlier and longer.