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.

3.  And, then, the Interpreter’s life was as full of work as his house was of entertainment and instruction.  Not only so, but his life, it was well known, had been quite as full of work before he had a house to work for as ever it had been since.  The Interpreter did nothing else but continually preside over his house and all that was in it and around it, and it was all gone over and seen to with his own eyes and hands every day.  He had been present at the laying of every stone and beam of that solid and spacious house of his.  There was not a pin nor a loop of its furniture, there was not a picture on its walls, nor a bird nor a beast in its woods and gardens, that he did not know all about and could not hold discourse about.  And then, after he had taken you all over his house, with its significant rooms and woods and gardens, he was full all supper-time of all wise saws and witty proverbs.  ’One leak will sink a ship,’ he said that night, ‘and one sin will destroy a sinner.’  And all their days the pilgrims remembered that word from the Interpreter’s lips, and they often said it to themselves as they thought of their own besetting sin.  Now, if it is indeed so, that every gospel minister is an interpreter, and every evangelical church an interpreter’s house, what an important passage this is for all those who are proposing and preparing to be ministers.  Let them reflect upon it:  what a house this is that the Interpreter dwells in; how early and how long ago he began to lay out his grounds and to build his house upon them; how complete in all its parts it is, and how he still watches and labours to have it more complete.  Understandest thou what thou here readest? it is asked of all ministers, young and old, as they turn over John Bunyan’s pungent pages.  And every new room, every new bird, and beast, and herb, and flower makes us blush for shame as we contrast our own insignificant and ill-furnished house with the noble house of the Interpreter.  Let all our students who have not yet fatally destroyed themselves and lost their opportunity lay the Interpreter’s House well to heart.  Let them be students not in idle name only, as so many are, but in intense