Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier edition, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
‘—the book of the wars of the Lord.’—Moses.
John Bunyan’s Holy War was first published in 1682,six years before its illustrious author’s death. Bunyanwrote this great book when he was still in all the fulness of his intellectualpower and in all the ripeness of his spiritual experience. TheHoly War is not the Pilgrim’s Progress—thereis only one Pilgrim’s Progress. At the same time,we have Lord Macaulay’s word for it that if the Pilgrim’sProgress did not exist the Holy War would be the best allegorythat ever was written: and even Mr. Froude admits that the Holy Waralone would have entitled its author to rank high up among the acknowledgedmasters of English literature. The intellectual rank of the HolyWar has been fixed before that tribunal over which our accomplishedand competent critics preside; but for a full appreciation of its religiousrank and value we would need to hear the glad testimonies of tens ofthousands of God’s saints, whose hard-beset faith and obediencehave been kindled and sustained by the study of this noble book. The Pilgrim’s Progress sets forth the spiritual life underthe scriptural figure of a long and an uphill journey. The HolyWar, on the other hand, is a military history; it is full of soldiersand battles, defeats and victories. And its devout author hadmuch more scriptural suggestion and support in the composition of theHoly War than he had even in the composition of the Pilgrim’sProgress. For Holy Scripture is full of wars and rumours ofwars: the wars of the Lord; the wars of Joshua and the Judges; the warsof David, with his and many other magnificent battle-songs; till thebest known name of the God of Israel in the Old Testament is the Lordof Hosts; and then in the New Testament we have Jesus Christ describedas the Captain of our salvation. Paul’s powerful use ofarmour and of armed men is familiar to every student of his epistles;and then the whole Bible is crowned with a book all sounding with thebattle-cries, the shouts, and the songs of soldiers, till it ends withthat city of peace where they hang the trumpet in the hall and studywar no more. Military metaphors had taken a powerful hold of ourauthor’s imagination even in the Pilgrim’s Progress,as his portraits of Greatheart and Valiant-for-truth and other soldierssufficiently show; while the conflict with Apollyon and the destructionof Doubting Castle are so many sure preludes of the coming Holy War. Bunyan’s early experiences in the great Civil War had taught himmany memorable things about the military art; memorable and suggestivethings that he afterwards put to the most splendid use in the siege,the capture, and the subjugation of Mansoul.
The Divine Comedy is beyond dispute the greatest book of personaland experimental religion the world has ever seen. The consumingintensity of its author’s feelings about sin and holiness, thekeenness and the bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the severityof his revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning, allset ablaze by his splendid imagination—all that combines to makethe Divine Comedy the unapproachable masterpiece it is. John Bunyan, on the other hand, had no learning to be called learning,but he had a strong and a healthy English understanding, a conscienceand a heart wholly given up to the life of the best religion of hisreligious day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaringima