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Bunyan is so evidently an idealist and a prince of spiritual men, that
no one needs to point out this characteristic of the great dreamer, nor
to advertise so obvious a thing as his spiritual idealism. We have
accordingly taken that for granted and left it to the reader to
recognise in every page for himself. We have sought in this to show what
has sometimes been overlooked, how very human the man and his work are.
Yet his humanism is ever at the service of the spirit, enlivening his
book and inspiring it with a perpetual and delicious interest, but never
for a moment entangling him again in the old yoke of bondage, from which
at his conversion he had been set free. For the human as opposed to the
divine, the fleshly as the rival of the spiritual, he has an open and
profound contempt, which he expresses in no measured terms in such
passages as that concerning Adam the First and Madam Wanton. These are
for him sheer pagans. At the cave, indeed, which his pilgrim visits at
the farther end of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we read that Pope
and Pagan dwelt there in old time, but that Pagan has been dead many a
day. Yet the pagan spirit lives on in many forms, and finds an abiding
place and home in Vanity Fair. As Professor Firth has pointed out, Ben
Jonson, in his play _Bartholomew Fair_, had already told the adventures
of two Puritans who strayed into the Fair, and who regarded the whole
affair as the shop of Satan. There were many other Fairs, such as that
of Sturbridge, and the Elstow Fair itself, which was instituted by the
nuns on the ground close to their convent, and which is held yearly to
the present day. Such Fairs as these have been a source of much
temptation and danger to the neighbourhood, and represent in its popular
form the whole spirit of paganism at its worst.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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