Mr. Campbell cites John Bunyan as a man who "rose above his environment." The fact being that Bunyan's good environment saved him from his bad environment. From the preface to my edition of _The Pilgrim's Progress_ I quote the following suggestive words: How was it, one naturally asks, that a man of little education could produce two centuries ago a masterpiece which is still read wherever the English language is spoken, and has been translated into every European tongue? It is not sufficient to answer that the author of the work was a genius: it is necessary to show _what the conditions were which enabled his genius to develop itself_, led him to find the form of expression which best suited its character, and secured for what if produced immediate popularity and lasting fame. Bunyan was a poor boy of very little education. But he was born with a great imagination, a sensitive nature, and keen powers of assimilation. He was, in short, a born literary genius. In his youth he got amongst bad companions, and led a lewd and wicked sort of life. How, then, came he to reform his life, and to write his wonderful book? To listen to Mr. Campbell, one would suppose that the tinker's boy rose against his environment, and without any help for good from that environment. But did he? We find he served for some years in Cromwell's army. Would the fierce religious atmosphere of Cromwellian camps have no effect upon his sensitive and imaginative nature? We find that he and his wife read together two religious books: _The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven_ and Bishop Bayley's _Practice of Piety_. Would such books, so read, make no impression upon his impressionable mind? We find that he was drawn to go to church. That he was "over-run with the spirit of superstition." Would that affect him naught? We find that his neighbours at last took him "to a very godly man, a new and religious man, _and did much marvel_ to see such a great and famous alteration in my life and manners." Beyond this we need not go. The religious soldiers of Cromwell, the pious books and the pious wife, the spirit of superstition, and the godly man, were all parts of John Bunyan's environment, and, acting upon the peculiar nature given to him by heredity, these and other facts of his environment lifted him up, made him what we know, and enabled him to write his glorious book. Instead of a man who rose above his environment we have in Bunyan a man who was led by one kind of environment to gamble and drink and blaspheme, and by another kind of environment was made into a fanatical religious enthusiast. John Bunyan was John Bunyan when he played tipcat, and used profane language on the Sabbath. Up to that time the "manhood that was in him" had not saved John Bunyan. If, as Mr. Campbell suggests, it is the inherent manhood that saves a man, how was it that Bunyan's manhood, up to a certain point in his life, failed to raise him above his environment.