'An interpreter, one among a thousand.'--Elihu.
We come to-night to the Interpreter's House. And since every minister of
the gospel is an interpreter, and every evangelical church is an
interpreter's house, let us gather up some of the precious lessons to
ministers and to people with which this passage of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ so much abounds.
1. In the first place, then, I observe that the House of the Interpreter
stands just beyond the Wicket Gate. In the whole topography of the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ there lies many a deep lesson. The church that Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman supported, and on the communion roll of which he was so
determined to have our pilgrim's so unprepared name, stood far down on
the other side of Goodwill's gate. It was a fine building, and it had an
eloquent man for its minister, and the whole service was an attraction
and an enjoyment to all the people of the place; but our Interpreter was
never asked to show any of his significant things there; and, indeed,
neither minister nor people would have understood him had he ever done
so. And had any of the parishioners from below the gate ever by any
chance stumbled into the Interpreter's house, his most significant rooms
would have had no significance to them. Both he and his house would have
been a mystery and an offence to Worldly-Wiseman, his minister, and his
fellow-worshippers. John Bunyan has the clear warrant both of Jesus
Christ and the Apostle Paul for the place on which he has planted the
Interpreter's house. 'It is given to you,' said our Lord to His
disciples, 'to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them
it is not given.' And Paul tells us that 'the natural man receiveth not
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' And,
accordingly, no reader of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ will really understand
what he sees in the Interpreter's House, unless he is already a man of a
spiritual mind. Intelligent children enjoy the pictures and the people
that are set before them in this illustrated house, but they must become
the children of God, and must be well on in the life of God, before they
will be able to say that the house next the gate has been a profitable
and a helpful house to them. All that is displayed here--all the
furniture and all the vessels, all the ornaments and all the employments
and all the people of the Interpreter's House--is fitted and intended to
be profitable as well as interesting to pilgrims only. No man has any
real interest in the things of this house, or will take any abiding
profit out of it, till he is fairly started on the upward road. In his
former life, and while still on the other side of the gate, our pilgrim
had no interest in such things as he is now to see and hear; and if he
had seen and heard them in his former life, he would not, with all the
Interpreter's explanation, have understood them. As here among ourselves
to-night, they who will understand and delight in the things they hear in
this house to-night are those only who have really begun to live a
religious life. The realities of true religion are now the most real
things in life--to them; they love divine things now; and since they
began to love divine things, you cannot entertain them better than by
exhibiting and explaining divine things to them. There is no house in
all the earth, after the gate itself, that is more dear to the true
pilgrim heart than just the Interpreter's House. 'I was glad when it was
said to me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Peace be within thy
walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.'
2. And besides being built on the very best spot in all the land for its
owner's purposes, every several room in that great house was furnished
and fitted up for the entertainment and instruction of pilgrims. Every
inch of that capacious and many-chambered house was given up to the
delectation of pilgrims. The public rooms were thrown open for their
convenience and use at all hours of the day and night, and the private
rooms were kept retired and secluded for such as sought retirement and
seclusion. There were dark rooms also with iron cages in them, till
Christian and his companions came out of those terrible places, bringing
with them an everlasting caution to watchfulness and a sober mind. There
were rooms also given up to vile and sordid uses. One room there was
full of straws and sticks and dust, with an old man who did nothing else
day nor night but wade about among the straws and sticks and dust, and
rake it all into little heaps, and then sit watching lest any one should
overturn them. And then, strange to tell it, and not easy to get to the
full significance of it, the bravest room in all the house had absolutely
nothing in it but a huge, ugly, poisonous spider hanging to the wall with
her hands. 'Is there but one spider in all this spacious room?' asked
the Interpreter. And the water stood in Christiana's eyes; she had come
by this time thus far on her journey also. She was a woman of a quick
apprehension, and the water stood in her eyes at the Interpreter's
question, and she said: 'Yes, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea,
and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in
her.' The Interpreter then looked pleasantly on her, and said: 'Thou
hast said the truth.' This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their
faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle. 'This is to show
you,' said the Interpreter, 'that however full of the venom of sin you
may be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the
best room that belongs to the King's House above.' Then they all seemed
to be glad, but the water stood in their eyes. A wall also stood apart
on the grounds of the house with an always dying fire on one side of it,
while a man on the other side of the wall continually fed the fire
through hidden openings in the wall. A whole palace stood also on the
grounds, the inspection of which so kindled our pilgrim's heart, that he
refused to stay here any longer, or to see any more sights--so much had
he already seen of the evil of sin and of the blessedness of salvation.
Not that he had seen as yet the half of what that house held for the
instruction of pilgrims. Only, time would fail us to visit the hen and
her chickens; the butcher killing a sheep and pulling her skin over her
ears, and she lying still under his hands and taking her death patiently;
also the garden with the flowers all diverse in stature, and quality, and
colour, and smell, and virtue, and some better than some, and all where
the gardener had set them, there they stand, and quarrel not with one
another. The robin-red-breast also, so pretty of note and colour and
carriage, but instead of bread and crumbs, and such like harmless matter,
with a great spider in his mouth. A tree also, whose inside was rotten,
and yet it grew and had leaves. So they went on their way and sang:
'This place hath been our second stage,
Here have we heard and seen
Those good things that from age to age
To others hid have been.
The butcher, garden, and the field,
The robin and his bait,
Also the rotten tree, doth yield
Me argument of weight;
To move me for to watch and pray,
To strive to be sincere,
To take my cross up day by day,
And serve the Lord with few.'
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 reality, as so few are. Let them
read everything that bears upon the Bible, and let them read nothing that
does not. They have not the time nor the permission. Let them be
content to be men of one book. Let them give themselves wholly to the
interpretation of divine truth as its riddles are set in nature and in
man, in scripture, in providence, and in spiritual experience. Let them
store their memories at college with all sacred truth, and with all
secular truth that can be made sacred. And if their memories are weak
and treacherous, let them be quiet under God's will in that, and all the
more labour to make up in other ways for that defect, so that they may
have always something to say to the purpose when their future people come
up to church hungry for instruction and comfort and encouragement. Let
them look around and see the sin that sinks the ship of so many
ministers; and let them begin while yet their ship is in the yard and see
that she is fitted up and furnished, stored and stocked, so that she
shall in spite of sure storms and sunken rocks deliver her freight in the
appointed haven. When they are lying in bed of a Sabbath morning, let
them forecast the day when they shall have to give a strict account of
their eight years of golden opportunity among the churches, and the
classes, and the societies, and the libraries of our university seats.
Let them be able to name some great book, ay, more than one great book,
they mastered, for every year of their priceless and irredeemable student
life. Let them all their days have old treasure-houses that they filled
full with scholarship and with literature and with all that will minister
to a congregation's many desires and necessities, collected and kept
ready from their student days. 'Meditate upon these things; give thyself
wholly up to them, that thy profiting may appear unto all.'
4. And then with a sly stroke at us old ministers, our significant
author points out to us how much better furnished the Interpreter's House
was by the time Christiana and the boys visited it compared with that
early time when Christian was entertained in it. Our pilgrim got far
more in the Interpreter's House of delight and instruction than he could
carry out of it, but that did not tempt the Interpreter to sit down and
content himself with taking all his future pilgrims into the same room,
and showing them the same pictures, and repeating to them the same
explanations. No, for he reflected that each coming pilgrim would need
some new significant room to himself, and therefore, as soon as he got
one pilgrim off his hands, he straightway set about building and
furnishing new rooms, putting up new pictures, and replenishing his woods
and his waters with new beasts and birds and fishes. I am ashamed, he
said, that I had so little to show when I first opened my gates to
receive pilgrims, and I do not know why they came to me as they did. I
was only a beginner in these things when my first 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.'