er can be judged by his
neighbors, but by the little round of daily customs he allows
himself in."

"I should like," said Mr. Johnson, "to know how you manage in this
respect."

"I am but a poor scholar, sir," replied the shepherd, "but I have
made myself a little sort of rule. I always avoid, as I am an
ignorant man, picking out any one single difficult text to distress
my mind about, or to go and build opinions upon, because I know that
puzzles and injures poor unlearned Christians. But I endeavor to
collect what is the _general_ spirit or meaning of Scripture on any
particular subject, by putting a few texts together, which though I
find them dispersed up and down, yet all seem to look the same way,
to prove the same truth, or hold out the same comfort. So when I am
tried or tempted, or any thing happens in which I am at a loss what
to do, I apply to my rule--to the _law and the testimony_. To be
sure I can't always find a particular direction as to the very case,
because then the Bible must have been bigger than all those great
books I once saw in the library at Salisbury palace, which the
butler told me were acts of Parliament; and had that been the case,
a poor man would never have had money to buy, nor a working man time
to read the Bible; and so Christianity could only have been a
religion for the rich, for those who had money and leisure; which,
blessed be God! is so far from being the truth, that in all that
fine discourse of our Saviour to John's disciples, it is enough to
reconcile any poor man in the world to his low condition, to
observe, when Christ reckons up the things for which he came on
earth, to observe, I say, what he keeps for last. _Go tell John_,
says he, _those things which ye do hear and see: the blind receive
their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the
deaf hear, and the dead are raised up._ Now, sir, all these are
wonders to be sure, but they are nothing to what follows. They are
but like the lower rounds of a ladder, as I may say, by which you
mount to the top--_and the poor have the Gospel preached to them_. I
dare say, if John had any doubts before, this part of the message
must have cleared them up at once. For it must have made him certain
sure at once, that a religion which placed preaching salvation to
the poor above healing the sick, which ranked the soul above the
body, and set heaven above health, must have come from God."

"But," said Mr. Johnson, "you sa