Finally, (4) election is ‘in Christ ,’ since the Saviour is the one in whom the elect were always considered and without whom there is neither election, grace, nor salvation. Election according to God’s good pleasure is: (1) eternal, having been executed before the foundation of the world, (2) unconditional, being totally independent of foreseen faith or good works, and (3) effectual, in that no impediment can hinder the realization of God’s purposes. This act of God in electing is a choosing or fore-appointing of some infallibly unto eternal life. Indeed, as Bunyan wrote in ‘ Reprobation Asserted’: Bunyan was a Puritan who believed in the Calvinist idea of the Elect: some people were predestined for heaven, while others, sadly, would probably never get there. What it is, though, is a specific kind of Christian allegory, which reveals Bunyan’s own adherence to a dissenting tradition. But in the broadest possible sense, Bunyan’s book is a fictional prose narrative whose length certainly qualifies it for the title of ‘novel’. Is The Pilgrim’s Progress a novel? The word was unknown in Bunyan’s own lifetime, and many critics and commentators prefer to name Daniel Defoe’s 1719 book Robinson Crusoe the ‘first novel’, because of Defoe’s realist focus on the everyday which came to be considered such an important part of the novel form. Similarly, Doubting Castle in the book is based on the real (though sadly now destroyed) Ampthill Castle. For instance, the Slough of Despond was modelled on the grey clay deposits around the model village of Stewartby. melancholy, or depression) or the darkest pit of despair (the dungeon in the Giant Despair’s Doubting Castle).Īnd many of these features of The Pilgrim’s Progress were inspired by the area that John Bunyan knew well, around the county of Bedfordshire in England, around 50 miles north of London. Small comfort for those readers nursing memories of browsing through the quiet rooms jammed floor to ceiling with esoterica.Those wanting to reach the Celestial City of Heaven when they die had better make sure they are not tempted by Mr Worldly Wiseman or the wares on offer at Vanity Fair, or that they don’t succumb to the overwhelming power of the Slough of Despond (i.e. They met a fiery end, no doubt. In the days that followed, the sage-like Tiwari spoke to journalists of the impermanence of existence, and reminded them that he “wasn’t quite on the street yet”-a much smaller branch of Pilgrims remains open for business down the road. The last time I was at Pilgrims was to drop off copies of La.Lit, our literary magazine, a week before the disaster. Over the years, I’d purchased books on Indian philosophy, Nepali architecture, alpine flowers, Hatha yoga, spirit possession as well as old copies of the Paris Review, and I frequented the store long enough to see my own collection of short stories appear in the section for Nepali authors. In the three decades since he’d set up Pilgrims, Nandaram Tiwari of Benares had built up a veritable library with a specialization in the spiritual, cultural and material existence of the Himalayan region. But for booklovers across the Kathmandu Valley, this was a tragedy of Alexandrian proportions: tens of thousands of books on literally every subject in the cosmos lay scattered in a sodden heap outside the eviscerated husk of Pilgrims Book House. There was relief that no lives were lost, that the inferno hadn’t spread through the tourist quarter of Thamel. The owner came running, summoned the fire brigade and appealed to his neighbours to employ their buckets. Pilgrims Book House was perhaps the largest, certainly the most loved, purveyor of books in Nepal. There it licked at the piled gas cylinders, unleashing a conflagration of such ferocity that in no time at all the store next door was engulfed. The fire began surreptitiously, away from the bar’s carousing punters, but soon crept into the kitchen.
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