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 be