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.

1.  Now, my brethren, to plunge at once out of the parable and into the interpretation, I observe, in the first place, that pastors who are indeed to be pastors after God’s own heart have all to pass into their pastorate through the school of experience.  Preaching after God’s own heart, and pastoral work of the same divine pattern, cannot be taught in any other school than the school of experience.  Poets may be born and not made, but not pastors nor preachers.  Nay, do not all our best poets first learn in their sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their songs?  At any rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and pastors.  As my own old minister once said to me in a conversation on this very subject, ‘Even God Himself cannot inspire an experience.’  No.  For if He could He would surely have done so in the case of His own Son, to Whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost He gave all that He could give and all that His Son could receive.  But an experience cannot in the very nature of things be either bestowed on the one hand or received and appropriated on the other.  An experience in the unalterable nature of the thing