Introduction

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul. 1 PETER 2:11

John Bunyan was a tinker, a mender of pots and kettles, from a village just south of Bedford. He had a little reading and writing and no other learning. He never went to university, never held a living in the Church of England, and spent twelve of his best years in the county gaol for preaching without a licence. And yet the book he began in that gaol has been read, for more than three hundred years, by more people in more languages than almost any book but the Bible. For generations of English-speaking households there were two books on the shelf: the Bible, and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

A man who had been there

The reason is not that Bunyan was clever, though he was, nor that he could tell a story, though he could tell one better than almost anyone in his century. The reason is that every mile of the road he described he had walked himself. The burden on Christian’s back was the weight he had carried through years of terror. The Slough of Despond was mud he had sunk in. Doubting Castle was a prison he had lain in long before the magistrates put him in theirs. When the burden rolls away at the cross, it rolls away because Bunyan’s own chains had fallen off in a field outside Bedford. He wrote in the preface to his autobiography that God did not play in convincing him, nor the devil in tempting him, and so he could not play in telling it. That is the secret of his power. He is plain because he is serious.

One road, and one Person on it

The thread that runs through everything Bunyan wrote is this: the Christian life is a journey, and the only way through it is Christ. It is a journey — not a single moment, not a settled estate, but a road with a beginning and an end, with gates and hills and valleys, with enemies and friends, with wrong turnings and hard climbs. Bunyan never pretended that the road was easy. And the whole of it depends on Christ — Christ at the cross, where the burden falls; Christ at God’s right hand, where the believer’s righteousness is kept safe; Christ at the river, where the pilgrim at last feels the bottom and finds it good.

Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. JOHN 14:6

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, twenty short chapters set out his teaching. Sixteen of them follow the pilgrim’s road through the First Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, from the burden and the book to the river and the Celestial City. Then three chapters turn to Grace Abounding and to Bunyan’s own soul: the temptation to sell Christ, the sentence that set him free, and the preacher in Bedford gaol. A last teaching chapter follows Christiana and her company in the Second Part, where Bunyan gathers up the weak and the fearful and brings them home.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Bunyan would not have wanted his dream admired and left on the shelf. At the close of the First Part he turns to the reader and bids him interpret the dream to himself. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own. And keep his books open beside this one; they are far better than any account of them.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say plainly at the start where Bunyan must be weighed rather than simply received.

First, The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory, not Scripture. It is a picture of the Christian life, drawn by a godly and gifted man, and it is full of Scripture — his margins are crowded with references. But a picture is not a doctrine, and not every detail of the dream is meant to be pressed. Some believers never pass through a Slough of Despond; some lose their burden in a different order from Christian. Bunyan knew this; the Second Part itself shows pilgrims travelling the same road very differently. Use the dream as a mirror and a map, never as a rule that God must follow in your life.

Second, Bunyan’s own soul-history includes years of extreme religious anxiety. Grace Abounding records blasphemous thoughts he could not stop, the terror that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and long seasons in which every verse he read seemed to condemn him. Many readers have found in it the comfort of company in the dark. But readers who are themselves prone to scrupulous fear, to obsessive doubts about their salvation, should read those chapters gently — perhaps with a wise friend or pastor — and should notice above all how Bunyan came out: not by finding a better feeling in himself but by looking away from himself to Christ. Chapters nineteen and twenty take particular care here.

Third, the Second Part of The Pilgrim’s Progress is a book of its time in its view of women. Christiana and Mercy are among the most lovely figures Bunyan drew, and the Second Part honours women’s faith warmly. But the women are guarded and guided by men as a matter of course, and some of his remarks reflect seventeenth-century assumptions rather than anything Scripture requires. He should be read as the man he was.

Why read him, then? Because on the central matter he was right. We are strangers and pilgrims. The road is narrow and the burden is real, but there is a place, somewhat ascending, where it falls from the back and is seen no more. The counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Bunyan is faithful — on sin and grace, on the cross, on perseverance, on the sufficiency of Christ — receive it gladly. Where the dream says more than the Bible, enjoy the story and let the Bible decide.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before going further, ask yourself honestly where you are on the road: still in the City of Destruction, struggling towards the gate, or somewhere along the way.

2. Choose a pace for this book, and decide now whether you will read The Pilgrim’s Progress alongside it. If you have never read it through, begin this week.

3. Write down one experience in your own life — a hard season, a deliverance — that you have never thought of as part of your journey with God.

4. If you are prone to anxious fears about your salvation, decide now to read the chapters on Bunyan’s temptations with a trusted friend, and to keep your eyes on Christ rather than on your feelings.

5. Resolve to test everything in these pages, and in Bunyan’s, against Scripture.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You are the way, and there is no other. I thank You for Your servant John Bunyan, who walked the road before me and drew it so plainly.

As I read of his burden, his fears and his deliverances, show me my own. Where I am off the road, call me back; where I am weary, strengthen me; where I am afraid, let me see You.

Keep me from admiring a dream and missing the Saviour at its heart. Let every page send me to Your cross and to Your Word.

And bring me at the last, with all Your pilgrims, safe over the river and home. Amen.