L Reads a Classic

I was first introduced to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in Louisa May Alcott’s delightful novel Little Women.  Whenever I read great works of literature, I like to pay attention to novels the characters are discussing, because it gives depth to the novel by showcasing the thoughts and feelings of the day.  In Little Women, the four sisters, Amy, Jo, Beth and Meg act out scenes from Bunyan’s pivotal spiritual work, The Pilgrim’s Progress. 

 

Many Brits immigrated to the new world due to religious persecution and in North America, they were free to practice their Quaker and Puritan beliefs, without pressure to reform to the Church of England.  Bunyan was the son of a tinker who was exposed to different forms of worship when fighting for the Parliamentary Army, who wanted to depose King Charles I.  Imprisoned for his beliefs, Bunyan wrote several books of spiritual discourse, The Pilgrim’s Progress being his most famous and most read.

 

In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian is on a quest to relieve himself of the burden of sin and enter the kingdom of heaven.  With him, he carries the Bible, the book that will tell him how to get from this world to the next.  Along the way, he encounters many barriers and obstacles in characters like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Obstinate, Pliable, etc., that attempt to dissuade him from his purpose as he traverses through dangerous places like the Hill Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, Vanity Fair, etc.  The journey though is not so much a physical path, as a spiritual one.

 

It’s a simple story, of course, an allegory of spiritual belief, that by reading the Bible, one will discover the secrets to the Kingdom of Heaven, but if one strays from the right and true path, then therein lies death and perhaps even Hell, and eternal life will be forever lost.

 

In its day, The Pilgrim’s Progress was a lesson every young child needed to learn, as religion played a huge part in each and every life.  Today, however, this cynical, non-religious mind determines it’s an interesting tale, one worth reading for its classical and historical significance, rather than any religious lesson.

 

Note: The edition I own carries both The Pilgrim’s Progress and its sequel, The Pilgrim’s Progress Part II in which Christian’s wife and children attempt to follow him from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.  As I had many library books piling up, I decided to split the reading of The Pilgrim’s Progress into its two parts, and blog about them separately as two individual books.  As they were technically originally written and published separately, and although they are now often published in one volume, as one complete work, C says it’s perfectly okay to treat them as two separate entities.   So I will.  Talk to her if you have a problem with that. ;p

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J

 

TBR = 8

WPL = 16