Education Quote by John Bunyan

Bunyan is making a Puritan case against verbal pageantry: plain speech doesn’t just communicate, it converts. In one clean contrast - “hit the mark” versus “pierce the air” - he treats language like an arrow. The point isn’t that long words are bad; it’s that they’re often fired for the archer, not the target. “High and learned” diction can look impressive in the pulpit or on the page, but it risks becoming performance art: sound that travels, meaning that doesn’t land.

The subtext is a theological and social challenge to the educated gatekeepers of Bunyan’s England. As a tinker-turned-preacher who spent years imprisoned for unauthorized preaching, Bunyan had skin in the argument. He’s defending the legitimacy of the uncredentialed speaker and the ordinary listener against a church culture that could weaponize Latinate sophistication as authority. Plain words are democratic; they presume the soul in the pew deserves direct access to truth, without clerical translation.

Intent matters here. Bunyan isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-vanity. “Easy to be understood” is a moral category: clarity signals humility and care, a willingness to be judged by whether your message helps people live and believe differently. “Pierce the air” is the grim punchline - language that moves through space without moving anyone. It’s a warning that rhetoric can be a kind of spiritual evasiveness: if no one can grasp you, no one can hold you to account.