American Minute for August 31st:
Imprisoned twelve years for preaching without a license from the King, he wrote Pilgrim's Progress, an allegory of a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction and directed by Evangelist to follow a narrow path to the City of Zion. The friends and dangers he meets along the way inspired the modern story Wizard of Oz. This classic was written by John Bunyan, who died AUGUST 31, 1688. It was translated into over a hundred languages and found in nearly every colonial American home. Ronald Reagan, greeting Australia's Prime Minister, June 30, 1981, said: "Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, 'We are all travelers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world. And the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend-they keep us worthy of ourselves.'" Franklin Roosevelt said January 19, 1936: "When Theodore Roosevelt died, the Secretary of his class at Harvard, in sending classmates a notice of his passing, added this quotation from Pilgrim's Progress: 'My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me that I have fought His battles who now will be my rewarder.'"
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