'Soldier's son Joseph Barker... first read the Bible "chiefly as a work of history and was very greatly delighted with many of its stories... One effect was to lead me to regard miracles as nothing improbable". Consequently his response to Pilgrim's Progress was exactly the same: "My impression was, that the whole was literal and true"...Ghost stories, highwayman stories, fairy tales, Paradise Lost and Daniel Defoe were all equally credible. "I was naturally a firm believer in all that was gravely spoken or printed", he recalled. "I doubted nothing that was found in books... I had no idea at the time I read Robinson Crusoe, that there were such things as novels, works of fiction, in existence".'