“Man of Religion”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 453, 7 September 1928, Page 16

“Man of Religion”

Secret of John Bunyan’s Success DR. WHITLEY’S LECTURE “Let me, as I speak for God, write for God,” said John Bunyan, speaking of the motive underlying his greatest work, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” In his lecture in the Tabernacle last evening on “John Bunyan,” Dr. W. T. Whitley explained that the whole secret of Bunyan’s success lay in the fact that he was a man of God. “John Bunyan was a man of the world because he was a man of religion,’* said the lecturer; “for the reason that religion predominates in the world.

“His life was not romantic. People do not think of him because he was a genius, nor because he was rich, nor because he was a great warrior, but simply because he was a man of God. “He grew up in a peaceful community in the quiet town of Bedford, and during the formative years of his life—until he was 32, that is—he enjoyed absolute religious freedom. Then, as the result of the revival of an old Act of Parliament after the Stuart restoration, he was imprisoned and, since he refused to stop preaching, was kept in prison for 12 years. “It was while he was in prison,” said Dr. Whitley, “that Bunyan discovered the novel as a means of giving entertainment coupled with religious teaching. There he wrote ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress,’ a book which has been translated into more than 150 languages and has been a best-seller for more than 250 years. “The book has no plot. It is simply a succession of incidents strung upon a thread, and that thread is the path leading from the doomed town to the Heavenly City. But the book was so successful and so popular that Bunyan was induced to write a sequel to it. “Later, by the intervention of a Quaker friend of Charles 11., Bunyan, and all the other religious prisoners in England, were released and Bunyan was even granted a licence to preach. He wrote other books, especially “Th.e Life and Death of Mr. Badman,* but none of them was so popular as his first.” Dr. Whitley concluded his lecture by saying that it was only a very short time ago that a memorial window to John Bunyan was placed in Westminster Abbey. While the lives of soldiers, sailors and poets were remembered, the personality of this great writer was rapidly being forgotten.