ABSTRACT
The lyrics of the nineteenth-century hymn would have resonated for John Bunyan, who was a soldier in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. Bunyan enlisted in the Parliamentary army at the age of sixteen, when the town of Bedford was called upon to supply some 225 recruits; his active-duty military service took place between the years 1644-1647. Throughout his adulthood, he fought to preach the Gospel according to his own lights, whether via sermons or books. The conflation of the allegory of conversion of the individual soul with that of the history of the English revolution as played out in Bedford would not have seemed forced to Bunyan's readers. Greaves notes that Bunyan would have heard about struggles between Presbyterians and New Model groupings. Bunyan's seventeenth-century readers may have found the transitions back and forth between Bedford, Mansoul and a man's soul to be smooth, or in current usage, seamless.
