ul, leaving his wife and
family. But Bunyan shrank from showing us how difficult, if not
impossible, it is for a married man to be a saint. Christiana was really
with him all through that pilgrimage; and how he must have been hampered
by that woman of the world! But had the allegory clung more closely to
the skirts of truth, it would have changed from a romance to a satire,
from "The Pilgrim's Progress" to "Vanity Fair." There was too much love
in Bunyan for a satirist of that kind; he had just enough for a
humourist.

Born in another class, he might have been, he would have been, a writer
more refined in his strength, more uniformly excellent, but never so
universal nor so popular in the best sense of the term.

In the change of times and belief it is not impossible that Bunyan will
live among the class whom he least thought of addressing--scholars,
lovers of worldly literature--for devotion and poverty are parting
company, while art endures till civilisation perishes.

Are we better or worse for no longer believing as Bunyan believed, no
longer seeing that Abyss of Pascal's open beside our armchairs? The
question is only a form of that wide riddle, Does any theological or
philosophical opinion make us better or worse? The vast majority of men
and women are little affected by schemes and theories of this life and
the next. They who even ask for a reply to the riddle are the few: most
of us take the easy-going morality of our world for a guide, as we take
Bradshaw for a railway journey. It is the few who must find out an
answer: on that answer their lives depend, and the lives of others are
insensibly raised towards their level. Bunyan would not have been a
worse man if he had shared the faith of Izaak Walton. Izaak had his
reply to all questions in the Church Catechism and the Articles. Bunyan
found his in the theology of his sect, appealing more strongly than
orthodoxy to a nature more bellicose than Izaak's. Men like him, with
his indomitable courage, will never lack a solution of the puzzle of the
earth. At worst they will live by law, whether they dare to speak of it
as God's law, or dare not. They will always be our leaders, our Captain
Greathearts, in the pilgrimage to the city where, led or unled, we must
all at last arrive. They will not fail us, while loyalty and valour are
human qualities. The day may conceivably come when we have no Christian
to march before us, but we shall never lack the