discoveries, because these are beside a way of thinking they have been
long used to; resolved, therefore, if ever I live to years, that I will
be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and
receive them, if rational, how long soever I have been used to another
way of thinking.'
5. The fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity
students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to
be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of
the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to
get out of that house as he had been to get in. Twice over the wise and
learned Interpreter had to beg and beseech this ignorant and impulsive
pilgrim to stop and get another lesson in the religious life before he
left the great school-house. All our professors of divinity and all our
ministers understand the parable at this point only too well. Their
students are eager to get into their classes; like our pilgrim, they have
heard the fame of this and that teacher, and there is not standing-room
in the class for the first weeks of the session. But before Christmas
there is room enough for strangers, and long before the session closes,
half the students are counting the weeks and plotting to petition the
Assembly against the length and labour of the curriculum. Was there ever
a class that was as full and attentive at the end of the session as it
was at the beginning? Never since our poor human nature was so stricken
with laziness and shallowness and self-sufficiency. But what is the
chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that deserves and repays the
husbandman's love and labour. When Plato looked up from his desk in the
Academy, after reading and expounding one of his greatest Dialogues, he
found only one student left in the class-room, but then, that student was
Aristotle. 'Now let me go,' said Christian. 'Nay, stay,' said the
Interpreter, 'till I have showed thee a little more.' 'Sir, is it not
time for me to go?' 'Do tarry till I show thee just one thing more.'
6. 'Here have I seen things rare and profitable,
. . . Then let me be
Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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