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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works," readers are treated to a curated collection that highlights the profound spiritual and moral insights of John Bunyan. This anthology showcases exemplary prose from various works, illustrating Bunyan's mastery at weaving allegorical narratives with accessible language. His evocative style invites readers into an immersive exploration of faith, redemption, and grace, firmly grounding them in the theological discussions of the 17th century, a time rife with religious upheaval and personal struggle. The selections emphasize Bunyan's ability to speak to both the heart and mind, making this a vital resource for those studying religious literature and the dynamics of Puritan thought. John Bunyan, a tinker by trade, transformed adversity into artistry during his imprisonment for his Nonconformist beliefs. Historically positioned in the tumult of the English Civil War, his experiences profoundly shaped his writing. As a self-taught author, Bunyan drew inspiration from his inner conflicts and profound spiritual journeys, culminating in a rich literary legacy that reflects his faith and humanity, echoing the struggles of an oppressed spirit seeking truth. "The Riches of Bunyan" is an essential read for anyone interested in religious literature, folklore, or the socio-political context of its time. It serves not only as an enlightening introduction to Bunyan's oeuvre but also as a testament to the enduring power of faith-based storytelling to resonate across centuries, captivating both scholars and casual readers alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works gathers the essential spiritual and theological insights of John Bunyan into a single, accessible volume. Rather than presenting one complete work, it offers a curated anthology designed to display the breadth of Bunyan’s conviction, counsel, and consolation. Its purpose is both introductory and comprehensive: to orient new readers to his major concerns and to provide seasoned readers with a concentrated treasury of his most characteristic emphases. By arranging selections under clear doctrinal and practical headings, the collection enables focused reading while preserving the coherence of Bunyan’s larger vision of Christian faith and life.
The structure of the collection reflects a deliberate progression from foundational doctrine to Christian experience and finally to ultimate realities. It moves through subjects such as the nature of God and the authority of Scripture, the condition of humanity and the claims of divine law, the grace of God in Christ and the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and the outworking of faith in justification, conversion, growth, and perseverance. It then treats the life of the church and the discernment of error, before concluding with death, resurrection, judgment, heaven, and hell. The design underscores how doctrine and devotion mutually inform each other.
John Bunyan (1628–1688) was an English writer and preacher whose works have shaped Christian thought and practice across generations. Though his fame rests largely on his enduring prose, his authorial identity cannot be reduced to a single title or mode of writing. This collection presents him as pastor, theologian, and stylist in one voice—concerned to instruct the mind, awaken the conscience, and steady the heart. It avoids narrow specialization by drawing widely from his corpus, so that readers perceive not isolated arguments but a coherent outlook: God-centered, Christ-exalting, biblically grounded, and intent on guiding ordinary people toward steadfastness and hope.
The selections here are primarily prose, drawn from Bunyan’s varied output: allegorical narrative, spiritual autobiography, doctrinal exposition, pastoral exhortation, and practical counsel. While the source works span different aims and audiences, this volume presents them as succinct extracts and extended passages arranged by theme. Readers should not expect complete narratives or full-length treatises, but representative portions that reveal Bunyan’s characteristic ways of thinking and speaking. The result is a cross-section of text types—story, confession, argument, meditation, and admonition—through which the same theological pulse can be traced. The editorial principle is clarity and concentration rather than exhaustiveness.
Several stylistic features recur throughout. Bunyan writes with plainness, urgency, and a marked reliance on Scripture—both in explicit citation and in the cadence of his reasoning and imagery. He favors concrete, homely comparisons drawn from everyday life, using them to make doctrinal truths vivid and memorable. His prose balances tenderness and forthrightness, pairing warnings with invitations, analysis with encouragement. Even when he treats intricate matters, he avoids needless ornament, preferring direct appeal to the conscience. The selections preserve this voice, allowing readers to encounter a style that is at once imaginative and practical, richly figurative yet rigorously focused on spiritual ends.
The collection’s doctrinal center of gravity is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Topics such as the Trinity, the Scriptures, the Law, and Divine Grace establish a framework within which truths about Christ’s person and work, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and justification by faith are comprehended. Although presented topically, these sections illuminate one another: the law exposes the human need; grace meets it; Christ accomplishes redemption; the Spirit applies it; faith receives it. This coherent emphasis helps explain the continuing relevance of Bunyan’s work, which addresses enduring questions about guilt and assurance, duty and delight, fear and hope.
At the heart of Bunyan’s writing lies experiential Christianity. Conviction of sin, conversion, the description of the Christian, the race set before believers, and the trials they endure are treated not as abstractions but as lived realities. Temptations, the security of Christians, the promises of God, the formation of Christian graces, and the practice of prayer are approached with pastoral realism. The selections trace how truth takes root in the soul and bears fruit in conduct and perseverance. They also attend to the rhythms of the inner life—seasons of discouragement and renewal—offering practical guidance for conscience, discipline, hope, and joy.
Bunyan’s concern for the church is unmistakable. By attending to the nature of genuine profession and the danger of false profession, he underscores the need for discernment and integrity within the community of faith. His reflections on the church consider both its privileges and responsibilities, encouraging unity grounded in truth and humility. The section on Antichrist addresses opposition to the gospel and the distortions that threaten spiritual health. Across these topics, the aim is constructive: to protect the flock, to encourage faithfulness in doctrine and life, and to nurture a shared life ordered by Scripture, charity, and watchful self-examination.
The final sections turn readers toward the last things: death, resurrection, judgment, heaven, and hell. Here Bunyan’s moral seriousness and pastoral purpose are most evident. He seeks to teach believers how to die well by learning how to live well, and he situates present obedience within a horizon of accountability and hope. His treatment of resurrection and judgment emphasizes both the reality of divine justice and the reliability of God’s promises. Heaven and hell are presented not for speculation but for sober reflection, consolation, and warning. The selections promote a hopeful sobriety that clarifies priorities and strengthens perseverance.
Though the anthology is organized by doctrine and practice rather than by literary form, it displays Bunyan’s literary gifts. His allegorical imagination, capacity for memorable images, and feel for narrative movement animate even his didactic passages. He uses metaphor and scene to make invisible realities felt, without sacrificing clarity or theological precision. The result is devotional reading that engages both the mind and the imagination. Readers encounter a writer who unites instruction with delight—who can carry a rigorous argument on the wings of a metaphor, and who turns everyday experiences into windows on ultimate truth.
This collection is designed for varied use. It can serve as an introduction, providing a mapped overview of Bunyan’s thought for those approaching him for the first time. It can also function as a companion for study, meditation, and teaching, allowing readers to linger over concise treatments of particular topics. The arrangement encourages cross-reading—linking, for example, law and grace, or trials and prayer—so that each theme is read in light of the others. Its selection favors clarity and devotional usefulness, making it suitable for both individual reflection and group discussion, and for brief readings or sustained engagement.
Taken together, these selections justify the title The Riches of Bunyan. They offer a concentrated encounter with a writer whose abiding concerns are God’s glory in Christ, the trustworthiness of Scripture, the necessity of grace, and the cultivation of a faithful, persevering life. By presenting doctrine and experience in mutual conversation, the volume shows why Bunyan’s work continues to instruct, comfort, and challenge. It is not a substitute for his complete writings, but a doorway into them—a disciplined survey that invites deeper exploration. Readers are welcomed to a treasury where conviction, counsel, and consolation meet with enduring clarity.
Author Biography
John Bunyan (1628–1688) was an English Puritan preacher and prose writer whose work shaped devotional life and the development of allegory in English literature. Best known for The Pilgrim’s Progress, he wrote in a plain, vivid style that spoke to artisans and gentry alike during the turbulent decades following the English Civil War and the Restoration. His books explore conscience, conversion, perseverance, and the life of the church under persecution. A Nonconformist voice outside the Church of England, Bunyan combined pastoral urgency with imaginative narrative, producing works that have remained in print for centuries and influenced religious readers and general audiences worldwide.
Born in 1628 in Bedfordshire to a brazier’s family, Bunyan learned the tinker’s trade and received only modest schooling, though he became an avid reader of Scripture and popular devotional works. As a young man he served in the Parliamentarian army during the English Civil War in the mid-1640s, an experience often cited as sharpening his awareness of mortality and judgment. Returning to civilian life, he worked at his craft around Bedford and began attending gatherings of Nonconformists. Early spiritual struggles—alternating despair and hope—would later be recounted with unusual candor in his autobiographical narrative Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
During the early 1650s, Bunyan encountered Puritan devotional classics such as Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety and Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven. He came under the influence of the Bedford congregation’s pastor, John Gifford, whose counsel helped clarify Bunyan’s understanding of grace and church life. Baptistic in practice and independent in governance, the Bedford church modeled the gathered-church ideal common among English Nonconformists. Bunyan began to speak publicly, first in small meetings and then more widely as an exhorter and lay preacher. His plain speech, scriptural saturation, and homely images resonated with hearers beyond his immediate parish.
After the Restoration, preaching outside the established church became a punishable offense. Arrested for unlicensed preaching in 1660, Bunyan spent much of the next decade in Bedford gaol, with a brief release late in the period. He used confinement to deepen his study and to write. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published in the 1660s, offered a detailed account of his temptations, doubts, and assurance, framed by a robust confidence in the sufficiency of Christ. The book established his voice as both pastor and storyteller, and its psychological intensity helped prepare the ground for his later allegorical narratives.
The Pilgrim’s Progress, first issued in the late 1670s, quickly became a publishing phenomenon, read far beyond Baptist or Puritan circles. Its journey motif, emblematic characters, and episodic structure created a portable theatre of the soul that readers could inhabit. Part Two followed in the early 1680s, expanding the work’s domestic and communal dimensions. Alongside it, Bunyan produced vigorous prose in other modes, including The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, a moral biography cast as dialogue, and The Holy War, a martial allegory about the beleaguered city of Mansoul. These works consolidated his reputation for imaginative, accessible theology.
Legal toleration shifted during the 1670s, bringing Bunyan a royal license to preach and, intermittently, renewed constraints. He was briefly imprisoned again in the mid-1670s, but from the later 1670s until his death he ministered widely and served the Bedford congregation as pastor. He issued sermons, catechetical pieces, and practical treatises on prayer, church discipline, and the Christian life, often distilled from his pulpit work. His style remained colloquial and urgent, drawing authority from biblical citation rather than learned apparatus. By the late 1680s his name had become synonymous with edifying narrative, and his books circulated well beyond Bedfordshire.
Bunyan died in 1688 after falling ill while traveling to preach in London; he was buried at Bunhill Fields, a well-known Nonconformist burying ground. His legacy has proved unusually durable. The Pilgrim’s Progress became a touchstone for devotional reading in the English-speaking world and was translated into many languages, shaping the imaginations of clergy, lay readers, and later writers. His other allegories and his spiritual autobiography remain significant for historians of religion and students of prose style. Today Bunyan is read both as a classic of world literature and as a key voice of seventeenth-century English Nonconformity.
Historical Context
John Bunyan (1628–1688) wrote across one of England’s most convulsive centuries, from the Civil Wars through the Restoration to the eve of the Glorious Revolution. Born at Elstow, near Bedford, he emerged from artisan culture into the world of Nonconformist preaching and print. His career spanned the Commonwealth’s fluid religious marketplace and the Stuart monarchy’s repression of dissent. The themes gathered in this collection—law and grace, the Spirit’s work, conversion, justification, church order, perseverance, and last things—were formed amid these upheavals. They address perennial doctrines, yet their tone, urgency, and images reflect the social, political, and ecclesiastical conditions surrounding English Dissent between roughly 1640 and 1688.
Bunyan’s upbringing in Elstow among tinkers and rural laborers shaped his idiom and imagery. With limited formal schooling, he learned to read and absorbed the cadences of the 1611 King James Bible, which became the matrix of his prose and doctrine. The culture of fairs, markets, and roadside commerce around Bedford placed him among artisans, pedlars, and smallholders, whose moral choices and spiritual anxieties animate his depictions of temptation, false profession, and practical godliness. Familiar with parish rites yet drawn to gathered church life, he translated the vocabulary of theology into the speech of fields and lanes, making doctrines like sin, grace, and perseverance intelligible to common readers.
The English Civil Wars (1642–1651) marked Bunyan’s youth. Serving in the Parliamentarian army as a teenager, likely between 1644 and 1647, he encountered the instability, fear, and camaraderie of war. Military experience supplied metaphors of conflict, vigilance, and endurance that pervade his exhortations on the Christian race, trials, and temptations. The wars also disrupted traditional hierarchies, opening spaces for lay voices in religion. In this setting, themes of spiritual warfare, watchfulness, and discipline moved from pulpit rhetoric into lived experience. Bunyan recast soldierly obedience and perseverance as marks of saving faith, while warning that presumption and sloth were hazards as lethal as any encountered in battle.
Bunyan’s path to ministry ran through the Bedford church gathered by John Gifford, a former Royalist converted after the wars. Received into membership in 1653, Bunyan began preaching around 1655 among Baptists and Independents who practiced congregational church government. The Bedford congregation’s emphasis on regenerate membership, mutual discipline, and pastoral oversight framed his treatments of prayer, conversion, and the believer’s walk. Debates over baptism and communion—whether differences should bar fellowship—trained him to connect church order with gospel charity. His insistence on a heart-worked religion undergirds texts here on the Christian described, the law’s use, and the graces necessary for life together in gathered communities.
During the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–1660), England’s religious marketplace teemed with Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Baptists, and assorted radicals. Print licensing loosened, and itinerant preaching flourished. Bunyan’s earliest pamphlets appeared in this ferment, contending with Ranters and Quakers while clarifying orthodox views of the Trinity, Scripture, and Christ’s person and work. The period’s debates with Socinians over the deity of Christ and the Spirit pressed Nonconformists to articulate classical Trinitarianism in plain terms. The flood of sermons, catechisms, and controversial tracts taught writers like Bunyan to move from doctrine to application, a method visible throughout these selections on Scripture, divine grace, sanctification, and the Spirit’s operations.
The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 brought repression of Dissent under the Clarendon Code: the Corporation Act (1661), Act of Uniformity (1662), Conventicle Act (1664), and Five Mile Act (1665). Arrested in 1660 for unlicensed preaching, Bunyan spent roughly twelve years in Bedford County Gaol, supporting his family by making laces. In confinement he deepened his theology of suffering, assurance, and providence, and he wrote devotional and doctrinal works that circulate through this collection. Prison fostered his conviction that God’s promises hold under external constraint, and that prayer and the Spirit’s inward witness are the believer’s defense against both legal threats and inward despondency.
The Declaration of Indulgence (March 1672) briefly suspended penal laws, freeing Bunyan and allowing him to receive a preaching license; he became pastor of the Bedford meeting that year. When indulgence was withdrawn and enforcement resumed, he endured another imprisonment in 1675 in the town gaol on Bedford Bridge. These alternating seasons of liberty and restraint shaped his pastoral counsel on prudence, boldness, and the cost of discipleship. His post-1672 ministry, with regular preaching and care for scattered conventicles, broadened his perspective on conversion, perseverance, and church unity. The oscillation between toleration and crackdown sharpened his appeals to seek security in Christ rather than in policy.
Bunyan wrote for the burgeoning world of cheap print. London publishers and booksellers, clustered around Paternoster Row and regulated by the Stationers’ Company, met popular demand with small-format duodecimos and octavos suited to readers of modest means. Nathaniel Ponder issued several of Bunyan’s most influential works in the late 1670s and 1680s, amid shifting regimes of licensing and suppression. Provincial distribution networks, hawkers, and chapmen carried his books far beyond Bedfordshire. This print ecology favored plain style, memorable images, and practical use. The result is a body of doctrine—on justification, prayer, the Spirit, death, and judgment—packaged for repeated household reading and communal instruction.
The theological landscape of Bunyan’s England was contested yet bounded by Reformed orthodoxy. A Particular Baptist by sympathy, he embraced Calvinist doctrines of grace while arguing for open communion with godly believers who differed on baptism, provoking exchanges with London leaders such as William Kiffin. He engaged Edward Fowler’s moralizing account of Christianity and rejected any “new law” of evangelical obedience as the basis of acceptance with God, insisting on justification by Christ’s imputed righteousness. Disputes with Quakers and General Baptists refined his accounts of the Spirit’s witness, gospel offers, and the law’s place. These conflicts generated sustained reflection across the themes gathered here.
Scripture governed Bunyan’s thought and rhetoric. The King James Bible shaped his diction and supplied the typological framework by which he connected Sinai and Zion, Israel’s wilderness and the believer’s pilgrimage. He read widely in Protestant exegesis, especially Martin Luther’s Commentary on Galatians, which reinforced his convictions about law, gospel, and faith. Foxe’s Acts and Monuments nourished his sense of Christian suffering under “Antichrist.” Against Socinian currents represented in England by John Biddle, he defended the Trinity and the Spirit’s deity in accessible language. This biblical saturation, cross-referenced by confessional debates, underlies his treatments of the Scriptures, the Trinity, Christ, and the Spirit’s sanctifying work.
Puritan spirituality prized self-examination, meditation, family worship, and days of fasting and thanksgiving. Conversion narratives circulated in manuscript and print, offering patterns of conviction, despair, gospel discovery, and assurance. Bunyan’s own account, forged in years of scruple and relief, became a model of pastoral diagnosis and consolation. Such practices inform his counsel on prayer as Spirit-enabled, his anatomy of conviction of sin and true conversion, and his mapping of Christian graces that accompany justifying faith. He urges believers to test professions, seek evidences of renewal, and distinguish legal terror from evangelical repentance, all while grounding comfort in Christ’s promises rather than in fluctuating frames.
Bunyan’s literary method joined plain sermonic prose to allegorical imagination. English readers knew allegory from medieval morality plays and Spenser, yet Bunyan adapted the device to Protestant practical divinity, personifying vices and graces to render doctrine vivid and portable. He disciplined his images to serve Scripture, not to supplant it, and used dialogue, travel, and courtroom scenes to explore the law, conscience, and the gospel’s verdict. His figures of race, warfare, markets, and journeys naturalized theology in everyday life, equipping hearers to examine themselves, resist temptation, and persevere to the end. The same narrative habits animate admonitions on trials, security, heaven, and hell.
Eschatology permeated seventeenth-century Protestant culture. Many English divines identified the Papacy as Antichrist, interpreting history through Daniel and Revelation. Public alarms—the supposed Popish Plot (1678), the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681), and Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) with its Huguenot refugees—reinforced fears of persecution and final judgment. Bunyan placed present sufferings within this prophetic horizon, urging steadfastness under magistrates while waiting for Christ’s appearing. His reflections on death, resurrection, the judgment, and eternal destinies direct readers to weigh time in light of eternity. Antichrist’s eventual ruin and the saints’ vindication framed conscience, encouraged prayer, and nourished hope amid political uncertainty.
The local texture of Bedfordshire furnished concrete settings for moral reflection. Elstow Green, market days, and regional fairs modeled the world’s vanities; the Great North Road and river crossings suggested a pilgrim path beset by hazards and hospitality. Craft communities taught cooperation, reputation, and economic temptation; enclosure and poor relief exposed social fault lines. Bunyan’s family life, including care for his blind daughter Mary, deepened his sympathy for suffering households and formed his counsel on providence, prayer, and perseverance. The ordinary pressures of debt, disease, and seasonal employment appear beneath his doctrinal exhortations, rendering teachings on grace, trials, and temptation pastorally credible.
National crises supplied a theater for providence. The Great Plague (1665) and the Great Fire of London (1666) intensified reflection on mortality, judgment, and the fragility of earthly securities. The Test Act (1673) and later crackdowns after the Rye House Plot (1683) tightened conformity, prompting Bunyan’s seasoned advice to sufferers on prudence, conscience, and endurance. James II’s Declaration for Liberty of Conscience (1687) promised broad toleration from contested motives. Through these oscillations, Bunyan emphasized that the Christian’s security lies not in statutes but in Christ’s covenant faithfulness, and that afflictions, properly interpreted, serve to refine faith, expose hypocrisy, and drive believers to prayerful dependence.
Dissenting ecclesiology centered on covenanted congregations, gathered by voluntary profession and ruled by elders and deacons. Discipline aimed at restoration, preaching at conversion and growth, and the Lord’s Supper at communion among the godly. Bunyan’s advocacy of open communion, while holding believer’s baptism, reflected a charity shaped by gospel essentials rather than uniformity on rites. He moved within networks of Nonconformists—names like John Owen and Richard Baxter were prominent—even as he charted an independent pastoral course. The practice of conventicles, itinerant exhortation, and mutual aid sustained churches under pressure, giving rise to the robust teaching here on the church, prayer, graces, and perseverance.
Bunyan died in London on 31 August 1688, at the house of his friend John Strudwick, and was buried in Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists’ cemetery. The Toleration Act (1689) soon granted limited freedom of worship, enabling wide reprinting of his works. Posthumous publications in the 1690s extended his influence. Eighteenth-century evangelicals in Britain and America—among them George Whitefield and John Wesley—praised his experiential divinity. Cheap editions crossed the Atlantic to New England and circulated in Scotland and Wales. Nineteenth-century editors assembled thematic anthologies to guide readers through his doctrinal and practical riches. The present selections stand in that tradition, distilling a life forged in trial into enduring counsel.
Synopsis (Selection)
NOTICES OF BUNYAN
Brief biographical notices outlining Bunyan’s life, conversion, ministry, imprisonments, and literary legacy, providing historical context for the selections that follow.
THE RICHES OF BUNYAN.
An introductory gathering of representative passages that showcases the doctrinal depth and practical piety found across Bunyan’s works, highlighting themes of grace, pilgrimage, and perseverance.
II. THE TRINITY
Affirms the unity of God in three distinct, coequal persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and outlines their harmonious roles in creation and redemption.
III. THE SCRIPTURES.
Asserts the divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of the Bible, commending it as the rule for faith and life and the sure guide to salvation.
IV. MAN.
Describes human nature as created by God yet fallen in Adam, emphasizing moral inability, spiritual need, and the dignity and immortality of the soul.
V. THE LAW.
Presents God’s law as holy and just, exposing sin and driving sinners to Christ while denying the law’s power to justify or save.
VI. DIVINE GRACE.
Celebrates God’s sovereign, unmerited favor in salvation—pardon, new life, and perseverance—freely offered in Christ to the undeserving.
VII. CHRIST.
Sets forth the person and work of Jesus Christ as God and man, fulfilling the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King through His atonement and mediation.
VIII. THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Explains the Spirit’s work in conviction, regeneration, sanctification, guidance, and comfort, enabling believers to live and persevere in faith.
IX. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH.
Teaches that sinners are counted righteous before God by faith alone through the imputed righteousness of Christ, apart from works.
X. CONVICTION OF SIN.
Examines how the law and the Spirit awaken the conscience to guilt and need, distinguishing true godly sorrow from despair or mere fear.
XI. CONVERSION.
Describes the turning of the soul to God in repentance and faith, the new birth, and the early marks of a genuine change of heart.
XII. THE CHRISTIAN DESCRIBED
Portrays the character, affections, and conduct of a true believer in contrast to formalists and hypocrites.
XIII. THE CHRISTIAN RACE.
Uses the imagery of a race and pilgrimage to urge discipline, vigilance, and perseverance through the appointed means of grace.
XIV. TRIALS OF THE CHRISTIAN
Addresses afflictions, persecutions, and inward conflicts, offering counsel on God’s wise purposes in suffering and encouragement to endure.
XV. TEMPTATIONS.
Identifies the sources and strategies of temptation from the world, the flesh, and the devil, with practical remedies rooted in Scripture and prayer.
XVI. SECURITY OF CHRISTIANS.
Grounds the believer’s assurance in God’s promises, Christ’s intercession, and the Spirit’s witness, emphasizing perseverance under divine keeping.
XVII. THE PROMISES.
Catalogues and applies God’s promises to varied conditions of the soul, urging faith to plead and rest upon them.
XVIII. CHRISTIAN GRACES.
Commends the cultivation and exercise of virtues such as faith, hope, love, humility, patience, and zeal in the Christian life.
XIX. PRAYER.
Defines true prayer as Spirit-wrought and Christ-centered, stressing its necessity, manner, and efficacy, as well as common hindrances.
XX. FALSE PROFESSION.
Warns against empty religion and hypocrisy, outlining signs of a false convert and the danger of apostasy.
XXI. THE CHURCH.
Describes the nature and marks of the true church, its ordinances and discipline, and the importance of fellowship and purity.
XXIII. ANTICHRIST.
Denounces systems that oppose or corrupt the gospel and persecute true believers, calling for discernment and steadfastness.
XXIV. DEATH.
Reflects on the certainty of death and the need to die well, offering sober warnings and comfort for believers.
XXV. THE RESURRECTION.
Affirms the future bodily resurrection of all, highlighting the believer’s hope of renewal and glory.
XXVI. THE JUDGMENT.
Portrays the final judgment under Christ, its impartiality and consequences, and the call to readiness.
XXVII. HEAVEN.
Depicts the believer’s eternal rest, joy, and communion with God and the saints as the goal of the Christian pilgrimage.
XXVIII. HELL.
Sets forth the reality and severity of eternal punishment, urging sinners to flee to Christ for mercy.
XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS.
Collects assorted maxims, allegorical insights, and practical counsels that complement the doctrinal and devotional themes of the volume.
