The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Evangelical Revival
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which evangelicals of various persuasions in the later eighteenth century—Methodists (both Arminian and Calvinist), Church of England evangelicals, and evangelical Dissenters (both Congregationalist and Baptist)—adopted The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of their key texts and made it speak to their own situations. It focuses on three main topics: first, how, in the hands of its editors, The Pilgrim’s Progress became a polemical text, especially from the 1770s onwards, one hundred years after the book’s publication; second, how it was used as a guide to Christian experience as lived by evangelicals; and third, how it became a means of writing the history of Dissent and evangelicalism. The key figures discussed include John Wesley, George Whitefield, John Newton, Richard Conyers, William Shrubsole, William Mason, George Burder, John Bradford, and Thomas Scott.