one another, so harmoniously did they live and work together, and such was the bond of brotherly love that held them together.  At the same time, there was one of the happy quaternity who, from his years on the hills, and his services in times of trial and danger, and one thing and another, fell always, and with the finest humility too, into the foremost place, and his name, as you have already heard, was Knowledge.  Old Mr. Know-all the children in the villages below ran after him and named him as they clustered round his staff and hid in the great folds of his shepherd’s coat.

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