ers 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.