from the Introduction: "In the Bedford congregation which Bunyan joined in 1655 it was a rule that new members, before they were formally admitted into full fellowship, should make a public decalration of the workings of Grace in their souls. Many accounts of conversion and spiritual experience were recorded during the seventeenth century, and a number have survived in print; of these John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is the best known. It was written in 1666 when Bunyan had already endured six years of imprisonment for his principles. . . . [At the age of forty,] The Pilgrim's Progress was his twenty-fourth book. Its success prompted him to show the opposite side of the picture in The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680). Both The Pilgrim's Progress and Mr. Badman largely owe their vitality to the fact that Bunyan was drawing on his own very vivid experiences of all sorts and conditions of men, but the contrast between the two books shows Bunyan's great skill as an artist. In the Pilgrim's passage to the Heavenly City, experience is sublimated into allegory and symbol; in Mr. Badman's descent to destruction, Bunyan tells the story as an actual happening, and the excellence of the book lies in its vivid realism; 'yet have I,' says he, 'as little as may be, gone out of the road of mine own observation of things.' "