visitor came to my gates.  Let every long-settled, middle-aged, and even grey-headed minister read the life of the Interpreter at this point and take courage and have hope.  Let it teach us all to break some new ground in the field of divine truth with every new year.  Let it teach us all to be students all our days.  Let us buy, somehow, the poorest and the oldest of us, some new and first-rate book every year.  Let us not indeed shut up altogether our old rooms if they ever had anything significant in them, but let us add now a new wing to our spiritual house, now a new picture to its walls, and now a new herb to its gardens.  ‘Resolved,’ wrote Jonathan Edwards, ’that as old men have seldom any advantage of new 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.’