Now, in all this John Bunyan speaks as a child to children; but, of such
children as John Bunyan and his readers is the kingdom of heaven. My
very youngest hearer here to-night knows quite well, or, at any rate,
shrewdly suspects, that Knowledge was not a shepherd going about with his
staff among woolly sheep; nor would the simplest-minded reader of John
Bunyan's book go to seek the Delectable Mountains and Immanuel's Land in
any geographer's atlas, or on any schoolroom map. Oh, no. I do not need
to stop to tell the most guileless of my hearers that old Knowledge was
not a shepherd whose sheep were four-footed creatures, but a minister of
the gospel, whose sheep are men, women, and children. Nor are the
Delectable Mountains any range of hills and valleys of grass and herbs in
England or Scotland. The prophet Ezekiel calls them the mountains of
Israel; but by that you all know that he had in his mind something far
better than any earthly mountain. That prophet of Israel had in his mind
the church of God with its synagogues and its sacraments, with all the
grace and truth that all these things conveyed from God to the children
of Israel. As David also sang in the twenty-third Psalm: 'The Lord is my
Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.'
Knowledge, then, is a minister; but every congregation has not such a
minister set over it as Knowledge is. All our college-bred and ordained
men are not ministers like Knowledge. This excellent minister takes his
excellent name from his great talents and his great attainments. And
while all his great talents are his Master's gift to him, his great
attainments are all his own to lay out in his Master's service. To begin
with, his Master had given His highly-favoured servant a good
understanding and a good memory, and many good and suitable
opportunities. Now, a good understanding is a grand endowment for a
minister, and his ministerial office will all his days afford him
opportunity for the best understanding he can bring to it. The Christian
ministry, first and last, has had a noble roll of men of a strong
understanding. The author of the book now open before us was a man of a
strong understanding. John Bunyan had a fine imagination, with great
gifts of eloquent, tender, and most heart-winning utterance, but in his
case also all that was bottomed in a strong English understanding. Then,
again, a good memory is indispensable to a minister of knowledge. You
must be content to take a second, a third, or even a lower place still if
your Master has withheld from you a good memory. Dr. Goodwin has a
passage on this point that I have often turned up when I had again
forgotten it. 'Thou mayest have a weak memory, perhaps, yet if it can
and doth remember good things as well and better than other things, then
it is a sanctified memory, and the defilement of thy memory is healed
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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