Military metaphors had taken a powerful hold of our author's imagination even in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, as his portraits of Greatheart and Valiant-for-truth and other soldiers sufficiently show; while the conflict with Apollyon and the destruction of Doubting Castle are so many sure preludes of the coming _Holy War_.

Bunyan's early experiences in the great Civil War had taught him many memorable things about the military art; memorable and suggestive things that he afterwards put to the most splendid use in the siege, the capture, and the subjugation of Mansoul.
The _Divine Comedy_ is beyond dispute the greatest book of personal and experimental religion the world has ever seen.

The consuming intensity of its author's feelings about sin and holiness, the keenness and the bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the severity of his revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning, all set ablaze by his splendid imagination--all that combines to make the _Divine Comedy_ the unapproachable masterpiece it is.

John Bunyan, on the other hand, had no learning to be called learning, but he had a strong and a healthy English understanding, a conscience and a heart wholly given up to the life of the best religion of his religious day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world.
And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in Dante.

Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest of services--the service of spiritual, and especially of personal religion; but for one appreciative reader that Dante has had Bunyan has had a hundred.