How Golden Is Silence, Actually?

One of the virtues of John Bunyan, the author of “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” is how little he bothered with the high and mighty. He preferred the low and ordinary, in his discourse as in the company he kept. In “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners”—his spiritual autobiography, which went through many editions after first being published, in 1666—revelations tumble upon him when he is least expecting them. “I was walking to and fro in a good man’s shop, bemoaning of myself in my sad and doleful state,” he writes. We’ve all been there. Suddenly, mid-shopping, he hears the word of the Lord:It brought light with it, and commanded a silence in my heart, of all those tumultuous thoughts, that did before use, like masterless hell-hounds, to roar and bellow, and make an hideous noise within me.T