“One day I was very sad, I think sader [sic] then at any one time in my life; and this sadness was through a fresh sight of the greatness and vileness of my sins: And as I was then looking for nothing but Hell, and the everlasting damnation of my Soul, suddenly, as I thought, I saw the Lord Jesus look down from Heaven upon me, and saying, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. But I replyed, Lord, I am a great, a very great sinner; and he answered, My grace is sufficient for thee.” (P'sP, pp. 142-3) / This passage from Bunyan's most famous allegory commands our attention for two obvious reasons: first, because it gives us Hopeful's spiritual autobiography - a vivid account of his awakening into what Bunyan considers saving faith - and, secondly, because of its closeness to Bunyan's own conversion narrative, published twelve years before The Pilgrim's Progress appeared, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). The same, yet not the same, Hopeful's story might seem little more than 'Grace Abounding in miniature'. It is useful to begin with Hopeful's conversion not only to spot connections between Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress, exemplary works of Bunyan's religious experience and imagination, but also because it illustrates 'in miniature' some key features of seventeenth-century spiritual autobiography: a form which, focusing on an individual's religious conversion, often excludes details of a straightforwardly biographical kind, concentrating more on the convert's 'inner world' than upon 'the ordinary historical course of a life'. What we notice about Hopeful's account, then, even from the short extract quoted above, is just how inward it is: the word 'I' dominates this narrative, and it is an 'I' contemplating its own sadness as 'a great, a very great sinner', before undergoing a remarkably direct communication with 'the Lord Jesus'.