ABSTRACT
In some parts of the country there was little disposition to wait the lead of Parliament. In Bedford there was a notable minister—a converted tinker, John Bunyan, and he, on the Restoration of Charles II and the Church, became a marked man at once. Bunyan found, with many before and since, that shame can take men deeper than the shows of things, and that when, robbed of the ordinary satisfactions, a chance comes to us of seeing things in earnest, as they are, sub specie aeternitatis. Bunyan, like many other men, wrote all his books out of the experience of an individual soul. In the preface to Badman he says that he has “as little as may be gone out of the road of mine own observation of things.” Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress almost involuntarily. In prison in 1675, he began some literary work about “the way and race of Saints in this our Gospel day”.
