- Having been left by the Shining One, the Pilgrims encounter Atheist walking backwards toward them.
- Atheist laughs at and ridicules their quest, explaining how he, for one, is content enough with worldly life as it is.
- The Pilgrims argue against this and part ways with Atheist.
- Next, they come to the Enchanted Ground, which the shepherds also warned them of. Hopeful particularly feels drawn to sleep there, but Christian prevents him.
- The two use conversation to keep each other awake, questioning one another about the history of their conversions.
- Hopeful tells the tale of how he came to abandon his sinful ways at Vanity Fair and how he was affected by Faithful.
- Christian and Hopeful are once again approached by Ignorance.
- They decide to give him another chance, but he persists in holding to his own thoughts and whims instead of trying to hold to a higher law.
- For the pilgrims, this makes Ignorance's supposed faith false and groundless. Ignorance eventually grows frustrated by their attitude and leaves them to continue on their own.
- When Ignorance has left them, Christian and Hopeful talk about how it is necessary to have fear if you want your faith to be strong.
- This fear of God is precisely what Ignorance seems to have lacked; what made him so negligent of Christ's actual teachings.
- His persistence in his ignorance is thus a serious disrespecting of God and undermines his claims to any faith.
- Finally, the pilgrims come to the Celestial City. Within sight of it, they are filled with longing and sickness for God because they're so close.
- A gardener outside the city offers them food and drink from his vineyard and arbor, which makes them talk in their sleep.
- The narrator explains, rather strangely, that the gardener actually explains the phenomenon to himself (the nourishment being so sweet that they are made to talk sweetly even when unconscious).
- Just before the entrance to the city the pilgrims are met by two men dressed in gold who lead them to the bank of a river.
- They explain that they must each cross it alone, and that they "will find it deeper or shallower, as you believe in the King of the place" (P894).
- Wading through the waters, Christian begins to think of all this failings along the way and begins to sink.
- Just before he is completely overwhelmed, however, Hopeful reminds him that, "Jesus Christ maketh thee whole" (P896). This revives Christian's faith and enables him to make it to the other side of the river.
- Having crossed, the pilgrims are "transfigured" from their mortal states and led up to the gates of the Celestial City by angels.
- Here, they are required to hand over their certificates in order to gain access to the king. Because they still have them (and because said certificates are apparently water-proof), they are admitted into the Celestial City.
- While the pilgrims leave the scene of the narrator's dream, however, he has one last vision of Ignorance.
- Ignorance manages to cross the river on a ferry called Vain-hope, but, at the city gates, is without a certificate.
- Because of this, he is bound by angels and shipped off to Hell. Whoops!
- Bunyan closes with a conclusion in verse.
- It reminds readers not to be too captivated by the story element of the book, lest they neglect to analyze the significance of the metaphors.
- Bunyan encourages his readers to go back and analyze the allegories as such, and to pull out the spiritual truth, the "gold," from the fiction he's couched it in.