Grace Abounding

Grace Abounding, spiritual autobiography of John Bunyan, written during the first years of his 12-year imprisonment for Nonconformist religious activities and published in 1666. Bunyan’s effort to obtain an absolutely honest, unadorned rendering of the truth about his own spiritual experience caused him to forge a highly original style. His description of the inner life of the Christian is rich in powerful physical imagery; he feels “a clogging and a heat at my breast-bone as if my bowels would have burst out” and states that a preacher’s call to abandon the sin of idle pastimes “did benumb the sinews of my best delights.”