A DREAM WORTH KNOWING by Mrs. M. F. Butts

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 18, 1889

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 7

A DREAM WORTH KNOWING.

By Mrs. M. F. Butts

I WONDER how many mothers teach their children nowadays to read Pilgrim’s Progress. It was the first romance that I read, and I cannot remember when I was not familiar with poor Christian and sweet Christiana; with Giant Despair, whose cave was strewn with pilgrims’ bones; with the lions in the way; the chamber looking to the east, that was called Peace; the Delectable Mountains, and the Land of Beulah. I have a vivid recollection of the resting-place where Christian lost his roll, and of my own childish emotion at his mishap. I do not think that I was more than five or six years old when I entered this dream world of John Bunyan’s. To me, at that time, the persons of the story and their experiences were perfectly real and most absorbing. In these days Pilgrim’s Progress is an old-fashioned book, allowed to lie on the library shelf. It would be well to introduce it to the children of the present generation.

Coleridge says: “This wonderful work is one of the very few books which may be read over repeatedly at different times, and each time with a new and different pleasure. I read it once as a theologian; once with devotional feeling; and once as a poet. I know of no book, the Bible excepted, which I could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress. I hold John Bunyan to be a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them [the divines], and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity.” Macaulay says: “The characteristic peculiarity of the Pilgrim’s Progress is that it is the only work of the kind that possesses a strong human interest. While it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, it is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. In the wildest part of Scotland it is the delight of the peasantry. Every reader knows the strait and narrow path as well as he knows the road in which he has gone backward and forward a hundred times. This is the highest miracle of genius—that things which are not, should be as though they were; and this miracle the tinker has wrought.”

John Bunyan was born in the village of Elstow, near Bedford, England, in the year 1628. He is said to have been “wild” in his youth,—he belonged at one time to the army of the Parliament, and afterward became a preacher, and fell under the ban of the persecutors

of the Restoration. He was confined in Bedford jail, with short intervals of freedom, for nearly fourteen years. It would seem that this wonderful allegory grew out of the author’s peculiar experience. He lived first in the Valley of Destruction; he made desperate efforts at self-improvement; and at last dropped his burden at the foot of the cross. In prison he was separated from the world, but at the same time became acquainted with many varieties of characters. He had long solitary months for meditation; his imagination was nourished by constant reading of the Bible.

Bunyan had a wife and children, who often gathered around him in his prison, and for whose support he worked industriously at lace-making. Among his children there was a little blind girl, who was especially dear to him. We can easily see that these human cares and loves tempered and sweetened his imagination. From his lofty flights he was lured to earth by the voices of his children. Work for those who depended upon him saved him from too intense egotism. Common emotions linked him to the common people, and enabled him to write the wonderful book that may be called the people’s classic.

Bunyan died in London, on August 12, 1688, in the sixty-first year of his age. The following stanza, written by him, well illustrates his courageous spirit:—

“For though men keep my outward man Within their locks and bars, Yet by the faith of Christ I can, Mount higher than the stars,” —Mrs. M. F. Butts, in S. S. Times.