John Bunyan's masterful religious allegory, narrates the journey of an everyman hero, Christian, as he attempts to navigate the trials and tribulations of this world, the City of Destruction, on the path towards paradise, the Celestial City. Though weighed down by the burden of original sin, Christian overcomes the distractions of the world, moving past the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, while simultaneously resisting the temptations of the Worldy Wise, the Vain and the Ignorant. The product of a lifetime of religious work and thought, Bunyan's virtuosic narrative fundamentally altered Protestant belief, and remains one of the most important and influential works in the English language.

I evidently saw that unless the great God of his infinite grace and bounty, had voluntarily chosen me to be a vessel of mercy, though I should desire, and long, and labour until my heart did break, no good could come of it... How can you tell you are Elected? (GA, 47) In seventeenth-century England, the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, with its belief in the predetermined salvation of the few and damnation of the many, led many Christians to an anguished search for evidence of God's favour. John Bunyan's Grace Abounding records this spiritual crisis and its gruelling fluctuations between hope and despair in all its psychological intensity. It is a classic of spiritual autobiography — a genre which flourished in seventeenth-century England, as anxiety over one's spiritual state encouraged rigorous self-scrutiny and the sharing of spiritual experiences. This edition sets Grace Abounding alongside four of the most interesting and varied contemporary spiritual autobiographies, making its cultural milieu more meaningful to the modern reader.

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