fferent as any two books, written in the same
language, and written on the same subject, could by any possibility be.
John Owen's book is the book of a great scholar who has read the Fathers
and the Schoolmen and the Reformers till he knows them by heart, and till
he has been able to digest all that is true to Scripture and to
experience in them into his rich and ripe book. A powerful reasoner, a
severe, bald, muscular writer, John Owen in all these respects stands at
the very opposite pole to that of John Bunyan. The author of the _Holy
War_ had no learning, but he had a mind of immense natural sagacity,
combined with a habit of close and deep observation of human life, and
especially of religious life, and he had now a lifetime of most fruitful
experience as a Christian man and as a Christian minister behind him;
and, all that, taken up into Bunyan's splendid imagination, enabled him
to produce this extraordinarily able and impressive book. A model of
English style as the _Holy War_ is, at the same time it does not attain
at all to the rank of the _Pilgrim's Progress_; but then, to be second to
the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is reward and honour enough for any book. Let
all genuine students, then, who would know the best that has been written
on experimental religion, and who would preach to the deepest and
divinest experience of their best people, let them keep continually
within their reach John Owen's _Temptation_, his _Mortification of Sin in
Believers_, his _Nature and Power of Indwelling Sin_, and John Bunyan's
_Holy War made for the Regaining of the Metropolis of this World_.

Well, then, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose
name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of Mansoul. And he, as his manner
was, did go listening up and down in Mansoul to see and hear, if at any
time he might, whether there was any design against it or no. For he was
always a jealous man, and feared some mischief would befall it, either
from within or from some power without. Mr. Prywell was always a lover
of Mansoul, a sober and a judicious man, a man that was no tattler, nor a
raiser of false reports, but one that loves to look into the very bottom
of matters, and talks nothing of news but by very solid arguments. And
then, after our historian has told us some of the eminent services that
Mr. Prywell was able to perform both for the King and for the city, he
goes on to tell us how the captains determined that public t