The Henson Journals

[175]

Thursday, November 15th, 1928.

I began the day by going through the correspondence with Lionel: & then wrote 3 most unpalatable letters to Kenneth, to his Mother, and to the Warden of Wadham. Also I wrote to the Editor of the Nineteenth Century & After, in reply to a communication from him, offering to write an article in the Jany Issue on "Disestablishment by Consent".

[symbol] Then I started to run through Dr John Brown's well–known biography of John Bunyan, of which a 'Tercentenary edition' revised by Frank Mott Harrison has just been published. One of the most amazing things about Bunyan is his immediate & continuing popularity among foreigners. It would be difficult to find a more intensely English book than the Pilgrim's Progress. Its scenes, its dialogue, its humour, its temper are all English: & yet the book, even in its author's life–time, was published in translations abroad, and has continued to commend itself widely to foreigners. Missionaries find it very acceptable to their Converts, among whom it is said to wield an authority hardly less than canonical. Now what is the explanation of this universal popularity in the case of so 'adorably English' a book?

[176]

"The Commonwealth Mercury of the week Sept 2–9 1658 came out with a deep, black border and immediately after the announcement of the Protector's death came this advertisement: 'There is lately published 'A few sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul, by John Bunyan. A writer in Notes & Queries (Third Series iii.325) asks whether the placing of this advertisement after the announcement was a mere accident, or a piece of malicious suggestion on the part of some royalist."

(Brown's 'John Bunyan' p. 112 note)

Perhaps it would suffice for the theme of my Bunyan Sermon in Westminster Abbey if I discussed the reasons why the 'Pilgrims Progress' has become one of the few spiritual classics of mankind. Is it not because it discloses the besetting anxiety of man as such, and sets out very luminously (though with many gross severities of xviith century, which was hag–ridden with Calvinistic dogmatism) the version of Christianity which relieves & even removes it?

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