The Pilgrim’s Progress

A tinker in Bedford gaol

John Bunyan was born in 1628 at Elstow, near Bedford, a tinker's son who served as a teenager in the Parliamentary army. In the early 1650s he passed through years of turmoil, comforted one day by a text of Scripture and sure the next that he had committed the unpardonable sin, as he tells in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). By the mid-1650s he belonged to the Separatist congregation at Bedford gathered by John Gifford, and was preaching.

With the monarchy's return in 1660, preaching outside the Church of England became a crime. Arrested that November at a farmhouse meeting, and refusing to promise silence, Bunyan spent most of twelve years in the county gaol at Bedford; parting from his wife and children, above all his blind daughter Mary, was to him like the pulling of flesh from his bones. Freed in 1672 under the Declaration of Indulgence, he served the Bedford church, which had already called him as pastor, until his death in 1688 (Protestant orthodoxy and the Puritans).

A Puritan, and a Calvinist in his teaching on grace, Bunyan is usually counted among the Baptists, though what exactly he held is debated: his congregation received those baptized as infants alongside those baptized as believers, and in 1673 he argued in print that differences over water baptism should be no bar to communion.

When he began the book is uncertain. The dreamer lies down in "a certain place where was a Den" 10, which a margin note in an early edition calls the gaol. Many scholars date the beginning to the end of the long imprisonment, others to a second, shorter one, probably in 1676–77. It appeared in 1678, and Bunyan added to later editions.

A dream in five stages

The title page calls it a progress from this world to that which is to come, under the similitude of a dream. The dreamer sees a man in rags with "a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back" 10, who cries, "What shall I do to be saved?" 12 The burden came, Christian says, "By reading this book in my hand" 41. It is the weight the psalmist knew:

For my iniquities have overwhelmed me; they are a burden too heavy to bear.

Psalm 38:4

The library holds five stages of Part One, numbered by its passages: From the City of Destruction to the Cross (10–102); Hill Difficulty, the Palace Beautiful, Apollyon and the Valley (103–168); Vanity Fair (209–244), where Faithful is martyred and Hopeful joins Christian; Doubting Castle (280–294); and Beulah, the River and the Celestial City (382–403). Conversion, combat, persecution, despair and death: these are the joints of the journey. Left out are the verse apology and conclusion, the stretches between the stages (Faithful's story, Talkative, Demas, the Delectable Mountains, Ignorance's first appearance, the Enchanted Ground) and Part Two (1684), Christiana's pilgrimage.

The burden and the cross

Evangelist gives Christian a roll, "Flee from the wrath to come" 16, but Mr. Worldly Wiseman soon turns him aside to Mr. Legality in the village of Morality, under a hill that flashes fire 46: Sinai, which can free no one of his burden 57, for "by works of the law no one will be justified" (Galatians 2:16).

At the wicket-gate Good-will makes "no objections against any, notwithstanding all that they have done before they came hither" 66, as Jesus promised: "the one who comes to Me I will never drive away" (John 6:37). Yet the burden stays until "the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back of itself" 68. At the Interpreter's House a dusty parlour pictures law and gospel: "He that began to sweep at first, is the Law; but she that brought water, and did sprinkle it, is the Gospel" 75.

Then, "just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back" 93 and rolled into the sepulchre below. He cries, "He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death" 94. Three Shining Ones pronounce him forgiven, clothe him anew, mark his forehead and give him a sealed roll. His new clothing, he says later, is "a coat that he gave me freely in the day that he stripped me of my rags" 101: justification as the Reformers taught it, Christ's righteousness reckoned to the sinner (imputation).

Why does the burden fall at the cross and not at the gate? Bunyan does not say. Puritan and Reformed readers have often seen here what they knew: a true believer may carry guilt until a clearer sight of the cross brings peace, and may wait long for assurance Westminster Confession 18.3. Wesley, asked whether saving faith is "the faith of assurance, or faith of adherence" Wesley, The Scripture Way of Salvation II.3, answered that Scripture knows no such distinction: true faith carries assurance. Lutherans send the burdened conscience to the promise spoken in baptism, absolution and the Supper; faith, Luther taught, unites the soul to Christ "as the wife to the husband" Luther, Concerning Christian Liberty, so that his righteousness is hers and her sins his. The Catholic Church teaches that sins are forgiven in baptism and afterwards in penance, and that we should hope firmly in God's mercy, though without special revelation none can know with the certainty of faith that he has obtained grace Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. The Orthodox speak of salvation as lifelong healing in Christ, and of humble hope more than assurance.

The road to the river

The road after the cross is no easier. Christian sleeps on the Hill Difficulty and loses his roll, though "this roll was the assurance of his life and acceptance at the desired haven" 109. When Apollyon throws his failures in his face, he owns them all, "but the Prince whom I serve and honour is merciful, and ready to forgive" 148. In the Valley of the Shadow of Death a fiend whispers blasphemies "which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind" 162; readers of Grace Abounding know that torment as Bunyan's own.

Vanity Fair is the world: whoever would avoid it "must needs go out of the world" 218. Asked what they will buy, the pilgrims answer, "We buy the truth" 223. Faithful is tried before Lord Hate-good and burned. "Thus, one died to bear testimony to the truth, and another rises out of his ashes, to be a companion with Christian in his pilgrimage" 244.

All these people died in faith, without having received the things they were promised. However, they saw them and welcomed them from afar. And they acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

Hebrews 11:13

Leaving the road for the easier By-path Meadow, Christian and Hopeful end up in the dungeon of Doubting Castle, where Giant Despair beats them and counsels them to kill themselves. Hopeful holds his brother back: "let us not be our own murderers" 286. After a night of prayer Christian remembers, "I have a Key in my bosom called Promise, that will, I am persuaded, open any Lock in Doubting Castle" 292. If you walk in that darkness, see also Is depression a lack of faith?

At the river the water is deeper or shallower "as you believe in the King of the place" 390. Christian sinks under the memory of his sins, and Hopeful holds his head up: "Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good" 392.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you go through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you.

Isaiah 43:2

But the book does not end at the shining gate. Ignorance, who trusted his own good heart, is ferried over by one Vain-hope, has no certificate to show, and is carried bound to a door in the hillside: "Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction" 403. The easy crossing did not save him; the man who nearly drowned was received.

The traditions read the road's end differently. The Reformed tradition in which Bunyan stood confesses that God keeps to the end those he calls, the perseverance of the saints Westminster Confession 17.1, and sees it in the Interpreter's fire, fed with oil from behind the wall: "This is Christ" 82. On this reading the man in the iron cage and Ignorance professed a faith they never had; true believers "sometimes tremble, overcome with terror" Calvin, Institutes 3.2.17, yet do not let go of God's mercy. Wesleyans and other Arminians read such warnings to mean that a true believer can wilfully fall away and return by repentance; Lutherans, that the justified can lose the Spirit and be forgiven again Augsburg Confession, Article XII; Catholics, that grace lost by grave sin is restored in penance and that perseverance is a great gift. Catholic teaching also names despair and presumption as the two sins against hope Catechism of the Catholic Church, and on Bunyan's road Presumption sleeps in fetters while Giant Despair keeps his castle. See Can salvation be lost? and Holiness and perseverance.

Ignorance stands where the Reformation divided over faith and justification: he trusts his own heart in place of Christ's righteousness, though Catholic teaching too denies that we are justified by our own powers, holding that grace justifies by renewing us within. In any tradition the ending means to wake the falsely secure, not to frighten the trembling.

Reading it well

Read the names as people. Obstinate, Pliable and Mr. Worldly Wiseman are not ideas on legs but neighbours Bunyan met in Bedford's streets: the name says what someone is, yet they talk, scoff and make excuses as real people do, and in them we meet ourselves. The places are seasons of the soul; the Slough of Despond is where "the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run" 33.

Read with the Bible open: Bunyan thought in its words, mostly the King James, and his margin references stand beside each passage. The English is his own of 1678, in the Project Gutenberg text: a wicket-gate is a small gate, a professor one who professes faith, conversation a way of life, amain at full speed, and to let is to hinder. James Scarth Gale's Korean translation of 1895 is often counted among the first works of Western literature in Korean.

Some pages are hard. Christian runs from his wife and children with his fingers in his ears 18, his margin pointing to Christ's call (Luke 14:26); he later weeps that they would not come 125, and Part Two brings them after him. The giant Pope grinning in his cave 167 and "the ware of Rome" pushed in the fair 217 carry the hostility of English Protestants who remembered Mary's fires, though the gaol that held Bunyan was kept by a Protestant state church. Many readers today, Catholic and Protestant, hear the voice of an age and grieve its wounds.

The book closes, "So I awoke, and behold it was a dream" 403, but the city is no dream. Watching its gates shut, the dreamer says, "I wished myself among them" 402. Blessed are those, says the psalm, "whose hearts are set on pilgrimage" (Psalm 84:5).