colour, and smell, and virtue, and some better than some, and all where
the gardener had set them, there they stand, and quarrel not with one
another. The robin-red-breast also, so pretty of note and colour and
carriage, but instead of bread and crumbs, and such like harmless matter,
with a great spider in his mouth. A tree also, whose inside was rotten,
and yet it grew and had leaves. So they went on their way and sang:
'This place hath been our second stage,
Here have we heard and seen
Those good things that from age to age
To others hid have been.
The butcher, garden, and the field,
The robin and his bait,
Also the rotten tree, doth yield
Me argument of weight;
To move me for to watch and pray,
To strive to be sincere,
To take my cross up day by day,
And serve the Lord with few.'
The significant rooms of that divine house instruct us also that all the
lessons requisite for our salvation are not to be found in any one
scripture or in any one sermon, but that all that is required by any
pilgrim or any company of pilgrims should all be found in every
minister's ministry as he leads his flock on from one Sabbath-day to
another, rightly dividing the word of truth. Our ministers should have
something in their successive sermons for everybody. Something for the
children, something for the slow-witted and the dull of understanding,
and something specially suited for those who are of a quick apprehension;
something at one time to make the people smile, at another time to make
them blush, and at another time to make the water stand in their eyes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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