army, then a doctor in Bedford, and now a Baptist Puritan pastor; and the young tinker looked up to Gifford as the most wonderful man for learning in books and in bodies and souls of men in all the world.  And when Gifford talked over young Bosworth’s bed half to himself and half to them about a medicine made ex carne et sanguine Christi, the future author of the Pilgrim’s Progress never forgot the phrase.  At a glance Gifford saw what was the whole matter with the sick man.  And painful as the truth was to the sick man’s mother, and humiliating with a life-long humiliation to the sick man himself, Gifford was not the man or the minister to beat about the bush at such a solemn moment.  “This boy has been tampering with that which will kill him unless he gets it taken off his conscience and out of his heart immediately.”  Now, this same divination into our pastoral cases is by far and away the most difficult part of a minister’s work.  It is easy and pleasant with a fluent tongue to get through our pulpit work; but to descend the pulpit stairs and deal with life, and with this and that sin in the lives of our people,—­that is another matter.  “We must labour,” says Richard Baxter in his Reformed Pastor, “to be acquainted with the state of all our people as fully as we can; both to know the persons and their inclinations and conversation; to know what sins they are most in danger of, what duties they neglect, and what temptations they are most liable to.  For, if we know not their temperament or their disease, we are likely to prove but unsuccessful physicians.”  But when we begin to reform our pastorate to that pattern, we are soon compelled to set down such entries in our secret diary as that of Thomas Shepard of Harvard University:  “Sabbath, 5th April 1641.  Nothing I do, nay, none under my shadow prosper.  I so want wisdom for my place, and to guide others.”  Yes; for what wisdom is needed for the place of a minister like John Gifford, John Bunyan, Richard Baxter, and Thomas Shepard!  What wisdom, what divine genius, to dive into and divine the secret history of a soul from a twinge of conscience, even from a drop of the eye, a tone of the voice, or a gesture of the hand or of the head!  And yet, with some natural taste for the holy work, with study, with experience, and with life-long expert reading, even a plain minister with no genius, but with some grace and truth, may come to great eminence in the matters of the soul.  And then, with what an interest, solemn and awful, with what a sleepless interest such a pastor goes about among his diseased, sin-torn, and scattered flock!  All their souls are naked and open under his divining eye.  They need not to tell him where they ail, and of what sickness they are nigh unto death.  That food, he says, with some sternness over their sick-bed, I warned you of it; I told you with all plainness that many have died of eating that fruit!  “We must be ready,” Baxter continues, “to give advice to those that