Pictures from Pilgrim’s Progress

PICTURES FROM PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

almost like reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and, though his writings are charmingly full of poetry, yet he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress —that sweetest of all prose poems—without continually making us feel and say, ‘Why, this man is a living Bible!’ Prick him anywhere; his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the word of God. I commend his example to you, beloved. Moreover, the language of the Illustrious Dreamer was to the mind of the Tabernacle pastor. They spake the same tongue. In an address delivered in 1862 on the occasion of the restoration of Bunyan’s tomb, Mr Spurgeon assured his hearers that Bunyan’s works would not try their constitutions as might those of Gill and Owen. ‘They are pleasant reading,’ said he, ‘for Bunyan wrote and spoke in simple Saxon, and was a diligent reader of the Bible in the old version.’ It was doubtless my dear father’s intention to publish these addresses, for he had commenced the revision of them. Would that he had been able to accomplish the task. They would have been much more perfect then. As it is, we have them very much as he uttered them. There is no mistaking his voice in these sententious sentences. I fancy that if he had been spared to issue these homilies, and to write an introduction, he would have urged his readers, as he did his hearers on the occasion referred to above,

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