'I will give you pastors after Mine own heart, which shall feed you
with knowledge and understanding.'
The Delectable Mountains rise out of the heart of Immanuel's Land. This
fine range of far-rolling hills falls away on the one side toward the
plain of Destruction, and on the other side toward the land of Beulah and
the Celestial City, and the way to the Celestial City runs like a bee-
line over these well-watered pastures. Standing on a clear day on the
highest peak of the Delectable Mountains, if you have good eyes you can
see the hill Difficulty in the far-back distance with a perpetual mist
clinging to its base and climbing up its sides, which mist the shepherds
say to you rises all the year round off the Slough of Despond, while,
beyond that again the heavy smoke of the city of Destruction and the town
of Stupidity shuts in the whole horizon. And then, when you turn your
back on all that, in favourable states of the weather you can see here
and there the shimmer of that river over which there is no bridge; and,
then again, so high above the river that it seems to be a city standing
in heaven rather than upon the earth, you will see the high towers and
shining palace roofs and broad battlements of the New Jerusalem itself.
The two travellers should have spent the past three days among the sights
of the Delectable Mountains; and they would have done so had not the
elder traveller misled the younger. But now that they were set free and
fairly on the right road again, the way they had spent the past three
days and three nights made the gardens and the orchards and the pastures
that ran round the bottom and climbed up the sides of the Delectable
Mountains delectable beyond all description to them.
Now, there were on the tops of those mountains certain shepherds feeding
their flocks, and they stood by the highway side. The two travellers
therefore went up to the shepherds, and leaning upon their staves (as is
common with weary travellers when they stand to talk with any by the
way), they asked: Whose delectable mountains are these? and whose be the
sheep that feed upon them? These mountains, replied the shepherds, are
Immanuel's Land, and they are within sight of the city; the sheep also
are His, and He laid down His life for them. After some more talk like
this by the wayside, the shepherds, being pleased with the pilgrims,
looked very lovingly upon them and said: Welcome to the Delectable
Mountains. The shepherds then, whose names were Knowledge, Experience,
Watchful, and Sincere, took them by the hand to lead them to their tents,
and made them partake of what was ready at present. They said, moreover:
We would that you should stay with us a while to be acquainted with us,
and yet more to solace yourselves with the cheer of these Delectable
Mountains. Then the travellers told them they were content to stay; and
so they went to rest that night because it was now very late. The four
shepherds lived all summer-time in a lodge of tents well up among their
sheep, while their wives and families had their homes all the year round
in the land of Beulah. The four men formed a happy fraternity, and they
worked among and watched over their Master's sheep with one united mind.
What one of those shepherds could not so well do in the tent or in the
fold or out on the hillside, some of the others better did. And what one
of them could do to any perfection all the others by one consent left
that to him to do. You would have thought that they were made by a
perfect miracle to fit into one another, so harmoniously did they live
and work together, and such was the bond of brotherly love that held them
together. At the same time, there was one of the happy quaternity who,
from his years on the hills, and his services in times of trial and
danger, and one thing and another, fell always, and with the finest
humility too, into the foremost place, and his name, as you have already
heard, was Knowledge. Old Mr. Know-all the children in the villages
below ran after him and named him as they clustered round his staff and
hid in the great folds of his shepherd's coat.
Now, in all this John Bunyan speaks as a child to children; but, of such
children as John Bunyan and his readers is the kingdom of heaven. My
very youngest hearer here to-night knows quite well, or, at any rate,
shrewdly suspects, that Knowledge was not a shepherd going about with his
staff among woolly sheep; nor would the simplest-minded reader of John
Bunyan's book go to seek the Delectable Mountains and Immanuel's Land in
any geographer's atlas, or on any schoolroom map. Oh, no. I do not need
to stop to tell the most guileless of my hearers that old Knowledge was
not a shepherd whose sheep were four-footed creatures, but a minister of
the gospel, whose sheep are men, women, and children. Nor are the
Delectable Mountains any range of hills and valleys of grass and herbs in
England or Scotland. The prophet Ezekiel calls them the mountains of
Israel; but by that you all know that he had in his mind something far
better than any earthly mountain. That prophet of Israel had in his mind
the church of God with its synagogues and its sacraments, with all the
grace and truth that all these things conveyed from God to the children
of Israel. As David also sang in the twenty-third Psalm: 'The Lord is my
Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters.'
Knowledge, then, is a minister; but every congregation has not such a
minister set over it as Knowledge is. All our college-bred and ordained
men are not ministers like Knowledge. This excellent minister takes his
excellent name from his great talents and his great attainments. And
while all his great talents are his Master's gift to him, his great
attainments are all his own to lay out in his Master's service. To begin
with, his Master had given His highly-favoured servant a good
understanding and a good memory, and many good and suitable
opportunities. Now, a good understanding is a grand endowment for a
minister, and his ministerial office will all his days afford him
opportunity for the best understanding he can bring to it. The Christian
ministry, first and last, has had a noble roll of men of a strong
understanding. The author of the book now open before us was a man of a
strong understanding. John Bunyan had a fine imagination, with great
gifts of eloquent, tender, and most heart-winning utterance, but in his
case also all that was bottomed in a strong English understanding. Then,
again, a good memory is indispensable to a minister of knowledge. You
must be content to take a second, a third, or even a lower place still if
your Master has withheld from you a good memory. Dr. Goodwin has a
passage on this point that I have often turned up when I had again
forgotten it. 'Thou mayest have a weak memory, perhaps, yet if it can
and doth remember good things as well and better than other things, then
it is a sanctified memory, and the defilement of thy memory is healed
though the imperfection of it is not; and, though thou art to be humbled
for it as a misery, yet thou art not to be discouraged; for God doth not
hate thee for it, but pities thee; and the like holds good and may be
said as to the want of other like gifts.' You cannot be a man of a
commanding knowledge anywhere, and you must be content to take a very
subordinate and second place, even in the ministry, unless you have both
a good understanding and a good memory; but then, at the last day your
Master will not call you and your congregation to an account for what He
has not committed to your stewardship. And on that day that will be
something. But not only must ministers of knowledge have a good mind and
a good memory; they must also be the most industrious of men. Other men
may squander and kill their time as they please, but a minister had as
good kill himself at once out of the way of better men unless he is to
hoard his hours like gold and jewels. He must read only the best books,
and he must read them with the 'pain of attention.' He must read nothing
that is not the best. He has not the time. And if he is poor and remote
and has not many books, he will have Butler, and let him read Butler's
Preface to his Sermons till he has it by heart. The best books are
always few, and they must be read over and over again when other men are
reading the 'great number of books and papers of amusement that come
daily in their way, and which most perfectly fall in with their idle way
of reading and considering things.' And, then, such a minister must
store up what he reads, if not in a good memory, then in some other
pigeon-hole that he has made for himself outside of himself, since his
Master has not seen fit to furnish him with such a repository within
himself. And, then, after all that,--for a good minister is not made
yet,--understanding and memory and industry must all be sanctified by
secret prayer many times every day, and then laid out every day in the
instruction, impression, and comfort of his people. And, then, that
privileged people will be as happy in possessing that man for their
minister as the sheep of Immanuel's Land were in having Knowledge set
over them for their shepherd. They will never look up without being fed.
They will every Sabbath-day be led by green pastures and still waters.
And when they sing of the mercies of the Lord to them and to their
children, and forget not all His benefits, among the best of their
benefits they will not forget to hold up and bless their minister.
But, then, there is, nowadays, so much sound knowledge to be gained, not
to speak of so many books and papers of mere pastime and amusement, that
it may well be asked by a young man who is to be a minister whether he is
indeed called to be like that great student who took all knowledge for
his province. Yes, indeed, he is. For, if the minister and interpreter
of nature is to lay all possible knowledge under contribution, what must
not the minister of Jesus Christ and the interpreter of Scripture and
providence and experience and the human heart be able to make the
sanctified use of? Yes, all kinds and all degrees of knowledge, to be
called knowledge, belong by right and obligation to his office who is the
minister and interpreter of Him Who made all things, Who is the Heir of
all things, and by Whom all things consist. At the same time, since the
human mind has its limits, and since human life has its limits, a
minister of all men must make up his mind to limit himself to the best
knowledge; the knowledge, that is, that chiefly concerns him,--the
knowledge of God so far as God has made Himself known, and the knowledge
of Christ. He must be a student of his Bible night and day and all his
days. If he has not the strength of understanding and memory to read his
Bible easily in the original Hebrew and Greek, let him all the more make
up for that by reading it the oftener and the deeper in English. Let him
not only read his Bible deeply for his sermons and prayers, lectures and
addresses, let him do that all day every day of the week, and then read
it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul. Let every
minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his Bible his own
heart. He who so knows his Bible and with it his own heart has almost
books enough. All else is but ostentatious apparatus. When a minister
has neither understanding nor memory wherewith to feed his flock, let him
look deep enough into his Bible and into his own heart, and then begin
out of them to write and speak. And, then, for the outside knowledge of
the passing day he will read the newspapers, and though he gives up all
the morning to the newspapers, and returns to them again in the evening,
his conscience will not upbraid him if he reads as Jonathan Edwards read
the newsletters of his day,--to see how the kingdom of heaven is
prospering in the earth, and to pray for its prosperity. And, then, by
that time, and when he has got that length, all other kinds of knowledge
will have fallen into its own place, and will have taken its own proper
proportion of his time and his thought. He was a man of a great
understanding and a great memory and great industry who said that he had
taken all knowledge for his province. But he was a far wiser man who
said that knowledge is not our proper happiness. Our province, he went
on to say, is virtue and religion, life and manners: the science of
improving the temper and making the heart better. This is the field
assigned us to cultivate: how much it has lain neglected is indeed
astonishing.
Now, my brethren, two dangers, two simply terrible dangers, arise to
every one of you out of all this matter of your ministers and their
knowledge. 1. The first danger is,--to be frank with you on this
subject,--that you are yourselves so ignorant on all the matters that a
minister has to do with, that you do not know one minister from another,
a good minister from one who is really no minister at all. Now, I will
put it to you, on what principle and for what reason did you choose your
present minister, if, indeed, you did choose him? Was it because you
were assured by people you could trust that he was a minister of
knowledge and knew his own business? Or was it that when you went to
worship with him for yourself you have not been able ever since to tear
yourself away from him, nor has any one else been able to tear you away,
though some have tried? When you first came to the city, did you give,
can you remember, some real anxiety, rising sometimes into prayer, as to
who your minister among so many ministers was to be? Or did you choose
him and your present seat in his church because of some real or supposed
worldly interest of yours you thought you could further by taking your
letter of introduction to him? Had you heard while yet at home, had your
father and mother talked of such things to you, that rich men, and men of
place and power, political men and men high in society, sat in that
church and took notice of who attended it and who did not? Do you, down
to this day, know one church from another so far as spiritual and soul-
saving knowledge is concerned? Do you know that two big buildings,
called churches, may stand in the same street, and have men, called
ministers, carrying on certain services in them from week to week, and
yet, for all the purposes for which Christ came and died and rose again
and gave ministers to His church, these two churches and their ministers
are farther asunder than the two poles? Do you understand what I am
saying? Do you understand what I have been saying all night, or are you
one of those of whom the prophet speaks in blame and in pity as being
destroyed for lack of knowledge? Well, that is your first danger, that
you are so ignorant, and as a consequence, so careless, as not to know
one minister from another.
2. And your second danger in connection with your minister is, that you
have, and may have long had, a good minister, but that you still remain
yourself a bad man. My brethren, be you all sure of it, there is a
special and a fearful danger in having a specially good minister. Think
twice, and make up your mind well, before you call a specially good
minister, or become a communicant, or even an adherent under a specially
good minister. If two bad men go down together to the pit, and the one
has had a good minister, as, God have mercy on us, sometimes happens, and
the other has only had one who had the name of a minister, the
evangelised reprobate will lie in a deeper bed in hell, and will spend a
more remorseful eternity on it than will the other. No man among you,
minister or no minister, good minister or bad, will be able to sin with
impunity. But he who sins on and on after good preaching will be beaten
with many stripes. 'Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida!
For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and
Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I
say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of
judgment than for you.' 'Thou that hast knowledge,' says a powerful old
preacher, 'canst not sin so cheap as another that is ignorant. Places of
much knowledge'--he was preaching in the university pulpit of Oxford--'and
plentiful in the means of grace are dear places for a man to sin in. To
be drunken or unclean after a powerful sermon, and after the Holy Ghost
has enlightened thee, is more than to have so sinned twenty times before.
Thou mightest have sinned ten times more and been damned less. For does
not Jesus Christ the Judge say to thee, This is thy condemnation, that so
much light has come to thee?' And, taking the then way of execution as a
sufficiently awful illustration, the old Oxford Puritan goes on to say
that to sin against light is the highest step of the ladder before
turning off. And, again, that if there are worms in hell that die not,
it is surely gospel light that breeds them.