Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

John Bunyan was born in 1628 in Elstow, England. He was a Baptist preacher and writer, creating about sixty books and tracts including The Pilgrim's Progress, The Holy War, and Grace Abounding. He died in 1688.

Composed and published while John Bunyan (1628-1688) was in prison for his religious principles, Grace Abounding is an extraordinary spiritual autobiography. It was written in an age when religious radicalism was regarded as socially subversive, and is a haunting, often harrowing and ultimately inspiring account of his inner life: his long struggle with and eventual triumph over doubt and despair, his spiritual regeneration and his subsequent emergence as a preacher and writer of great imaginative power. God and Satan are the chief protagonists in Bunyan's drama, existing not as theological concepts but as terrifyingly immediate adversaries in the competition for his soul. Yet he finds his spiritual defences in the Bible, and Grace Abounding charts his passionate and imaginative involvement with this ultimate source of wisdom.

John Bunyan

Roger Pooley

Bunyan wrote the first part of The Pilgrim's Progress when he was in prison for conducting unauthorised Baptist religious services outside of the Church of England. It was published in 1678; the second part was published in 1684. In Bunyan's hands a pious tract is transformed into a work of imaginative literature whose influence, both indirectly on the English consiousness and directly on the literature that followed, has been immeasurable. The rich countryman's phrases that Bunyan borrowed or invented have become enshrined in the language, and many of the characters he created to people his imaginary world have won for themselves an independent and unforgettable existence.

The Pilgrim's Progress

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