JOHN BUNYAN.
JOHN BUNYAN.
The first book which Benjamin Franklin owned was "Pilgrim's Progress." This he read over and over.
Sir Humphry Davy, the great scientist, could repeat a large part of "Pilgrim's Progress" before he could read it. Nathaniel Hawthorne read and loved it when he was six years old.
Rufus Choate, the great orator, says E. P. Whipple, "read 'Pilgrim's Progress' when he was six years old; and he not only got it by heart, but eloquently expounded it to his companions, dramatically reproducing the scenes, incidents, and characters of that wonderful allegory, so that the little people he addressed were made to see in it what he saw."
Dr. Thomas Arnold said, "I cannot trust myself to read the account of Christian going up to the celestial gate, after his passage through the river of death.... I hold John Bunyan," he said, "to have been a man of incomparably greater genius than any of them [our old divines], and to have given a far truer and more edifying picture of Christianity."