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'''''The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come''''' by [[John Bunyan]] (published [[1678]]) is an [[allegory|allegorical]] [[novel]].
Bunyan wrote this book while imprisoned in [[1675]] for violations of the [[Conventicle Act]] which punished people for conducting unauthorised religious services outside of the [[Church of England]]. An expanded edition, with additions written after Bunyan was freed, appeared in [[1679]].
The allegory tells of Christian, an [[Everyman]] character who must make his way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City of Zion. During his travel, he must make his way past hazards such as the ''Slough of Despond'', temptations like ''[[Vanity Fair]]'', and foes like the ''Giant Despair''. Due to the long popularity of this devotional book, many of these phrases have become [[proverb]]ial in English. In a second book, his wife and children, who once denounced his ideas, follow his path to the Celestial City.
The allegory of this book has antecedents in a large number of [[Christianity|Christian]] devotional works that speak of the soul's path to [[Heaven]], from the ''[[Lyke-Wake Dirge]]'' forwards. Bunyan's allegory stands out above his predecessors because of his simple and effective, if somewhat naïve, prose style, steeped in [[Bible|Biblical]] texts and cadences. He confesses his own naïveté in the verse prologue to the book:
:''. . . I did not think<br>To shew to all the World my Pen and Ink<br>In such a mode; I only thought to make<br>I knew not what: nor did I undertake<Br>Thereby to please my Neighbour; no not I;<br>I did it mine own self to gratifie.''
Its explicitly [[Protestantism|Protestant]] theology also made it much more popular than its predecessors. Finally, Bunyan's gifts and plain style breathe life into the abstractions of the [[anthropomorphism|anthropomorphized]] temptations and abstractions Christian encounters and converses with on his course to Heaven. [[Samuel Johnson]] said that "this is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing." Three years after its publication, it was reprinted in [[colonial America]], and was widely read in the [[Puritan]] colonies.
The book was the basis of an [[opera]] by [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]], premiered in 1951; see [[The Pilgrim's Progress (opera)]].
==John Bunyan==
Converted to HTML by Jim Milligan and Harry Plantinga in May 1995.
The original non wiki text from available below -
[http://www.believerscafe.com/Christian_Classics/b/bunyan/pilgrims/pilgrim1.htm Piligrims Progress]
Modified after Wikipedias article licenced under GNU FDL.
