The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to that which is to Come: Part 1

John Bunyan

Jan 1904 · Cassell

Ratings and reviews

Review: This particular edition is my favorite because of Chesterton’s introduction. G.K. Chesterton is the best writer of his time, and he masterfully puts his own creative spin of sanity to the book and the author. The following quotes from his introduction will illustrate the point: “…the most actually dangerous thing is to be alive.” P.14 “Nobody will ever plumb the real depths and meaning of that extraordinary thing, the English Puritan movement. Why the English whose nature it is to be particularly happy and particularly muddle-headed, should have been the one people in Europe to be influenced in so startling a manner by the bitterness and the logic of Calvin, must remain a riddle. It must remain a riddle for two reasons. First, that it was a religious thing and therefore unfathomable; and second, that it was a successful thing, and therefore we are all its heirs; we are looking at it through our Puritan spectacles, and talking about it through our Puritan noses.” P.7-8. “But whatever else the Puritan revolution was, there is one thing that it was not, and that is what a vast mass of opinion constantly represents that it was. It was not a step towards greater rationalism, or what we choose to call progress, it was not an advance in inquiry; and it was not, in the ordinary sense, an advance in civilization.” P.8 “To put the matter shortly, it was emphatically not a continuation of the Renaissance. If anything, it was a reaction against the Renaissance. It was essentially a barbaric thing, an outburst of the fierce, mysterious part of man.” P.8 “I think the probability of the matter was really this, the Puritanism was a blind and heroic protest against a world that was growing more and more rational.” P.8 “It had no culture, no guidance, no tradition, no dignity, no manners.” P.10 “Before the Puritans were swept off the scene forever, they had done two extraordinary things.” They broke to pieces the chivalry of the great nation and “brought forth from their agony a small book, called ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ which was greater literature than the whole contemporary culture of the great Renaissance, founded on three generations of the worship of learning and art.” P.11 “The peculiar frame of mind of Puritanism was a sense of the deadly danger of existence.” P.12 “…the most actually dangerous thing is to be alive.” P.14