Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners

Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography, first published in 1666 while he was imprisoned in Bedford gaol for preaching without a license. Written in the plain, direct style of a Puritan conversion narrative, it traces Bunyan’s life from a profane and troubled youth through years of intense religious anxiety to a settled assurance of God’s grace.

The heart of the book is its account of prolonged spiritual struggle. Bunyan describes overhearing a few poor women in Bedford speaking joyfully of their faith, an encounter that awakened his own search. What follows is not a smooth path but a drawn-out battle with doubt, fear of having committed the unpardonable sin, and waves of despair, interrupted by sudden consolations he finds in particular verses of Scripture. He records the texts that wounded him and the texts that healed him with remarkable specificity.

The later sections turn to his call to preach, his ministry in the separatist congregation at Bedford, and his arrest and imprisonment in 1660 for unlawful religious assembly. Throughout, Bunyan presents himself as the “chief of sinners” precisely to magnify the mercy that reached him, and the book stands as a key forerunner to his far more famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Ours is the eighth edition, which Bunyan corrected himself a few weeks before his death in 1688. Grace Abounding was written in English, so no translation is involved; the question is which setting of it you read. Bunyan numbered his paragraphs and that numbering is how the work is cited — and the free text breaks it in two places: the opening paragraph carries no number at all, so the work appears to begin at section 2, and section 122 is missing entirely because two consecutive paragraphs are both labeled 112. Both are corrected in our edition, so the sequence runs unbroken from 1 to 339 and a citation lands where it should. His italics — the words he was quoting from Scripture — are preserved throughout, and the ten explanatory notes are set as footnotes you can tap. The free source is linked below and is the same text; what differs is the setting and the numbering.

Bunyan italicized the words he was quoting from Scripture, which is how a reader tells them from the words he was writing. That distinction does more work in this edition than anywhere else, because it decides what we were willing to touch.

His own prose has been lightly modernized for reading: hath to has, doth to does, saith to says, durst to dared, unto to to, amongst to among, betwixt to between, spake to spoke — 263 changes in all, each one word for the same word, nothing restructured. His quoted Scripture has not been touched at all. Every thou, thee, thy and ye inside a quotation stands exactly as he set it, because changing those would alter the Bible rather than Bunyan. The italics are what made that line enforceable rather than a matter of judgment, and it was checked afterwards: the text inside every one of the 1,596 quotations is identical, character for character, to the transcription.

The paragraph breaks are partly ours. Bunyan's sections often run past two hundred words, which is punishing on a screen, so the longest are broken at sentences he had already ended. No word is added, removed or reordered by this — the sequence is unchanged — but where a paragraph begins is now sometimes our judgment. His section numbers are untouched and still mark where each section starts, so a citation resolves exactly as before.

The base is the eighth edition, corrected by Bunyan himself a few weeks before his death in 1688, as transcribed by Project Gutenberg from the Religious Tract Society printing.

Bunyan numbered his paragraphs, and that numbering is the citation system for the work: a reference to Grace Abounding is a reference to a section number. Two defects in the free text break it, and both are corrected here.

The first is that the opening paragraph carries no number at all in the free text, so the work appears to begin at section 2. It is numbered 1 here, as standard editions number it.

The second is that section 122 is missing. The free text prints two consecutive paragraphs both labelled 112, and no 122 anywhere — so every citation to section 122 lands on nothing. The second of the two is numbered 122 here. With those two corrections the sequence runs unbroken from 1 to 339, which is what it is supposed to do and what the free text does not do.

Three things this edition does not have. The eight coloured plates Harold Copping drew for the 1905 printing are not here: the transcription this is set from dropped the images and left only their captions, which have been removed rather than left standing in the middle of a paragraph as though Bunyan had written them. Bunyan's original marginal summaries are not present either: they were not included in the transcription this is set from, and restoring them from a rougher scan would risk introducing errors that the rest of this edition exists to avoid. And the last three pieces — the Continuation, the Character, and the Postscript — are not by Bunyan. They were written by his friend Charles Doe after his death in 1688, and their titles say so, so that no reader takes them for the autobiography.

The free source is linked on this book's page at tsbakerbooks.com. If all you want is Bunyan's words, take it. What you are paying for here is the setting, the notes, and a section numbering you can cite.