Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Preacher A LARGE portion of Bunyan's works consists of expanded sermons. He probably would have told us that the commission with which he was entrusted was not religious allegory but the proclamation of the Gospel in Bedford. The Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy War and the Life and Death of Mr. Badman are an overflow of that which could not find a place in the Sunday discourses. When Bunyan was writing the Pilgrim's Progress Newton had just come to the conclusion that the observed motions of the moon were in accordance with the law of gravitation. But there was no popular magazine in 1685, and his discovery was therefore communicated to the Royal Society. Nor would the motions of the moon have been thought to be of much importance by religious folk in those days if they could have learned anything about them. We now justly consider that the calculations which it is said that Newton, foreseeing to what they tended, could not finish through agitation, are a contribution to theology greater than any which was made by Calvin; but if we had said this to our forefathers in the eighteenth century, they would not have known what we meant. Their science was that of God's direct relations with man, and they took little interest in any other. Hence the preacher was of greater importance to them than he is to us, who busy ourselves with so much upon which he is no authority, and who, as the Manager says in Faust, " have read a terrible deal" (haben schrecklich viel gelesen). A quarter of an hour's modern talk in the pulpit once a week would have been a mockery to men who believed that therewas nothing in life of much consequence save to discover what directions an inspired book gave to ensure salvation. We all strive to form some kind of theory of the world and its government, to bu... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.