The Pilgrim's Progress

The weight strapped to Christian's back is his own sin, heavy as a physical thing, and no sermon or argument will talk it loose. Only the sight of a cross does that: it rolls from his shoulders and drops into an open grave, and he stands up lighter than he has ever been. John Bunyan wrote this in a Bedfordshire gaol, jailed for preaching without a license, and what came out of that cell is the plainest, most exact map of a soul trying to save itself that English prose has ever drawn. Every place his pilgrim passes has a name because it is a feeling given ground to walk on: the Slough of Despond that swallows good resolve, the Hill Difficulty with no way around it, Vanity Fair, where a whole town sells kingdoms and wives and burns his companion Faithful alive for refusing to buy. The road does not stop for that grief. It goes on, through Doubting Castle and past Giant Despair, toward a city glimpsed once, from a distance, and never forgotten.