which has been such a blessing to so many, and to so many ministers especially.  And as to this of every minister being well read, that master in Israel says:  ’Above all, let me tell you that the book of books to you is your own heart, in which are written and engraven the deepest lessons of divine instruction.  Learn, therefore, to be deeply attentive to the presence of God in your own hearts, who is always speaking, always instructing, always illuminating the heart that is attentive to Him.’  Jonathan Edwards called the poor parish minister of Ettrick ‘a truly great divine.’  But Law goes on to say, ’A great divine is but a cant expression unless it signifies a man greatly advanced in the divine life.  A great divine is one whose own experience and example are a demonstration of the reality of all the graces and virtues of the gospel.  No divine has any more of the gospel in him than that which proves itself by the spirit, the actions, and the form of his life:  the rest is but hypocrisy, not divinity.’  Let all our parish ministers, then, give themselves to this kind of reading.  Let them all aim at a doctor’s degree in the divinity of their own hearts.

3.  We are done at last, and we are done for ever, in Scotland, with patrons and with presenters; but I daresay our most Free Church people would be quite willing to surrender their dear-bought franchise if the old plan could even yet be made to work in all their parishes as it worked in Mansoul.  For not only was the presented minister in this case a well-read man; he was also, what the best of the Scottish people have always loved and honoured, a man, as this history testifies, with a tongue as bravely hung as he had a head filled with judgment.  In Scotland we like our minister to have a tongue bravely hung, even when that is proved to our own despite.  When any minister, parish minister or other, is seen to tune his pulpit, our respect for him is gone.  The Presbyterian pulpit has been proverbially hard to tune, and it will be an ill day when it becomes easy.  ’Here lies a man who had a brow for every good cause.’  So it was engraven over one of Boston’s elders.  And so is it always:  like priest, like people in the matter of the hang of the minister’s tongue and in the boldness of the elder’s brow.

‘Bravely hung’ is an ancient and excellent expression which has several shades of meaning in Bunyan.  But in the present instance its meaning is modified and fixed by judgment.  A bravely hung tongue; at the same time the parish minister of Mansoul’s tongue was not a loosely-hung tongue.  It was not a blustering, headlong, scolding, untamed tongue.  The pulpit of Mansoul was tuned with judgment.  He who filled that pulpit had a head filled with judgment.  The ground of judgment is knowledge, and the minister of Mansoul was a man of knowledge.  It was his early and ever-increasing knowledge of himself, and thus of other men; and then it was his excellent judgment as to the use he was