BUNYAN IN DECLINE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 149, 21 December 1938, Page 5

BUNYAN IN DECLINE

It would be enlightening if the modern passion for competitions in knowledge of* one kind or another could be met at this two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Bunyan's death by a contest between people born in the Victorian Age and people born since over a "Pilgrim's Progress" paper, says the "Manchester Guardian." Is there any doubt at all that the Victorians would win easily? There can have been few families of the mid-Victorian Age in which Bunyan was not an essential part of nursery libraries; there can have been few parents of that time who never read from "Pilgrim's Progress" to their children. The names of the characters in that epic were really household words. It is very different now. In comparatively few "modern" homes, it is safe to say, would a copy of the book bp found. And yet, if Bunyan is not "modern" today, so much the worse for us. Froude said of him: "He hated party titles and quarrels about trifles. He desired himself to be called a Christian or a Believer or any name approved by the Holy Ghost. Divisions, he said, were to the churches like wars to countries. Those who talked most about religion cared least for it, and controversies about things of little moment ate up all zeal for things which were practicable and indisputable"