Experience, the excellent shepherd of the Delectable Mountains, had a
brother in the army, and he was an equally excellent soldier. The two
brothers--they were twin-brothers--had been brought up together till they
were grown-up men in the same town of Mansoul. All the Experience
family, indeed, had from time immemorial hailed from that populous and
important town, and their family tree ran away back beyond the oldest
extant history. The two brothers, while in all other things as like as
two twin-brothers could be, at the same time very early in life began to
exhibit very different talents and tastes and dispositions; till, when we
meet with them in their full manhood, the one is a soldier in the army
and the other a shepherd on the Delectable Mountains. The
soldier-brother is thus described in one of the military histories of his
day: 'A man of conduct and of valour, and a person prudent in matters. A
comely person, moreover, well-spoken in negotiations, and very successful
in undertakings. His colours were the white colours of Mansoul and his
scutcheon was the dead lion and the dead bear.'
The shepherd-brother, on the other hand, is thus pictured out to us by
one who has seen him. A traveller who has visited the Delectable
Mountains, and has met and talked with the shepherds, thus describes
Experience in his excellent itinerary: 'Knowledge,' he says, 'I found to
be the sage of the company, spare in build, high of forehead, worn in
age, and his tranquil gait touched with abstractedness. While Experience
was more firmly knit in form and face, with a shrewd kindly eye and a
happy readiness in his bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom evidently
on foot within him as a capability for work and for control.' This,
then, was the second of the four shepherds, who fed Immanuel's sheep on
the Delectable Mountains.
But here again to-night, and in the case of Experience, just as last
Sabbath night and in the case of Knowledge, in all this John Bunyan
speaks to children,--only the children here are the children of the
kingdom of heaven. The veriest child who reads the Delectable Mountains
begins to suspect before he is done that Knowledge and Experience are not
after all two real and true shepherds going their rounds with their
staves and their wallets and their wheeling dogs. Yes, though the little
fellow cannot put his suspicions into proper words for you, all the same
he has his suspicions that he is being deceived by you and your Sabbath
book; and, ten to one, from that sceptical day he will not read much more
of John Bunyan till in after-life he takes up John Bunyan never for a
single Sabbath again to lay him down. Yes, let the truth be told at
once, Experience is simply a minister, and not a real shepherd at all; a
minister of the gospel, a preacher, and a pastor; but, then, he is a
preacher and a pastor of no ordinary kind, but of the selectest and very
best kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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