That John Bunyan, a poor, illiterate tinker, was able to take the first place among writers of allegory, and to accomplish the extraordinary intellectual feat of producing a work which charmed alike the ignorant, who could not perceive its literary merits, and cultivated critics, who viewed it only from a literary standpoint, depended partly on his own natural gifts, and partly on the character of Puritan thought. To write a good allegory requires an imagination of unusual power. It requires, in addition, a realization of the subject sufficiently strong to give to immaterial and shadowy forms a living personality. These conditions were combined in Bunyan's case to an unexampled degree. He possessed an imagination the activity of which would have unsettled the reason of any less powerfully constituted man. His subject, the doctrine of salvation by grace, was, by the absorbing interest then attached to it, impressed upon his mind with a vividness difficult to conceive. In "Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners," Bunyan left a description of his life, and the workings of his mind on religious subjects, which is without a parallel in autobiography. The veil which hides the thoughts of one man from another is withdrawn, and the reader is placed in the closest communion with the mind of the writer. In "Grace Abounding" is easily detected the secret of Bunyan's success in allegory. "My sins did so offend the Lord, that even in my childhood He did scare and affright me with fearful dreams, and did terrify me with dreadful visions. I have been in my bed greatly afflicted, while asleep, with apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits, who still, as I then thought, labored to draw me away with them, of which I could never be rid. I was afflicted with thoughts of the Day of Judgment, night and day, trembling at the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell fire." One Sunday, "as I was in the midst of a game at cat, and having struck it one blow from the hole, just as I was about to strike it the second time, a voice did suddenly dart from heaven into my soul, which said, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell?' At this I was put to an exceeding maze; wherefore leaving my cat on the ground, and looking up to Heaven, saw, as with the eyes of my understanding, Jesus Christ looking down upon me very hotly displeased with me, and severely threatening me with some grievous punishment for my ungodly practices. * * * I cannot express with what longing I cried to Christ to call me. I saw such glory in a converted state that I could not be contented without a share therein. Had I had a whole world it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state." After Bunyan's conversion he says of his conscience: "As to the act of sinning, I was never more tender than now. I durst not take up a pin or a stick, though but so big as a