substance of his discourse from memory, with the
enlargements and additions it might seem to require. And thus his
religious works have all the glow and fervour of the unwritten utterances
of a practised orator, united with the orderliness and precision of a
theologian, and are no less admirable for the excellence of their
arrangement than for their evangelical spirit and scriptural doctrine.
Originally meant to be heard, they lose somewhat by being read. But few
can read them without being delighted with the opulence of his
imagination and impressed with the solemn earnestness of his convictions.
Like the subject of the portrait described by him in the House of the
Interpreter, he stands "like one who pleads with men, the law of truth
written upon his lips, the world behind his back, and a crown of gold
above his head."

These characteristics, which distinguish Bunyan as a writer from most of
his Puritan contemporaries, are most conspicuous in the works by which he
is chiefly known, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the "Holy War," the "Grace
Abounding," and we may add, though from the repulsiveness of the subject
the book is now scarcely read at all, the "Life and Death of Mr. Badman."

One great charm of these works, especially of "The Pilgrim's Progress,"
lies in the pure Saxon English in which they are written, which render
them models of the English speech, plain but never vulgar, homely but
never coarse, and still less unclean, full of imagery but never obscure,
always intelligible, always forcible, going straight to the point in the
fewest and simplest words; "powerful and picturesque," writes Hallam,
"from concise simplicity." Bunyan's style is recommended by Lord
Macaulay as an invaluable study to every person who wishes to gain a wide
command over his mother tongue. Its vocabulary is the vocabulary of the
common people. "There is not," he truly says, "in 'The Pilgrim's
Progress' a single expression, if we except a few technical terms of
theology, that would puzzle the rudest peasant." We may, look through
whole pages, and not find a word of more than two syllables. Nor is the
source of this pellucid clearness and imaginative power far to seek.
Bunyan was essentially a man of one book, and that book the very best,
not only for its spiritual teaching but for the purity of its style, the
English Bible. "In no book," writes Mr. J. R. Green, "do we see more
clearly than in 'The Pilgrim's Progress' the new imaginat