(See related sermon here.)

Obviously, the all-time best-selling book in any language is the Bible, also making it the all-time best-selling book published in English. The all-time best-selling novel written in English (note that Don Quixote was originally written in Spanish) is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In fact, there’s an argument that it was the first novel ever written in English. Since its initial publication in 1678, the novel has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print.

John Bunyan was a pastor in Bedfordshire, a county in the east of England. He was imprisoned for 12 years from 1660 until 1672, and then for another 6 months in 1675, for the crime of preaching outside the walls of the government-controlled Church of England. He began writing his classic novel at some point during those two imprisonments.

There have been numerous revisions of The Pilgrim’s Progress published in more modern-day English, as the English language has changed quite a bit over the last 344 years. There have also been numerous children’s editions. I’ve been reading Ethan, our 3 year-old, both Parts 1 and 2 of one of the latest children’s editions: Little Pilgrim’s Big Journey, from Lithos Kids, and he absolutely loves them. Embossed on the back cover of Part 1 are these words: