Bunyan Parody

The following is a monthly article written by Rev Kenneth Stewart to the Stornoway RPCS congregation.

Dear congregation,

Some in our congregation have been studying the Pilgrim’s Progress recently. In that classic of English literature, fully deserving of its status in both church and academy, the Puritan author (John Bunyan 1628-1688) allegorises the journey of the Christian towards glory under the figure of a man travelling from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City.

Less well known is a parody of the Pilgrim’s Progress called ‘The Celestial City’, a short story written by the American 19^th century writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). Hawthorne was no real friend of the Puritan faith which animated the Pilgrim’s Progress, but he was astute enough to recognise the shift taking place in much of American religion.

In his own ‘dream’, he gives us an alternative religious journey from the one city to the other and begins by telling of our traveller’s arrival in the City of Destruction. Having read Bunyan’s description of the city, our traveller is both surprised and delighted to find that the old animosity between this city and the Celestial City has more or less disappeared. So much so, that it is now quite easy to travel from the one to the other and no one needs to leave the City of Destruction with any sense of the old rejection or alienation.

He is met by his guide, Mr Smooth-it-Away. When our traveller asks for the previous guide, Mr Great-Heart, he is told that the management had decided to let him go as he was beginning to be stiff and awkward. Mr Smooth-it-Away tells him that very few travellers take the old route now because the railway journey to the city is far more pleasant and comfortable than the old method of travel – so much so, that large travelling parties of the most respectable people could now undertake the journey easily and cheerfully to the Celestial City.

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