r, well-spoken in negotiations, and very successful
in undertakings. His colours were the white colours of Mansoul and his
scutcheon was the dead lion and the dead bear.'

The shepherd-brother, on the other hand, is thus pictured out to us by
one who has seen him. A traveller who has visited the Delectable
Mountains, and has met and talked with the shepherds, thus describes
Experience in his excellent itinerary: 'Knowledge,' he says, 'I found to
be the sage of the company, spare in build, high of forehead, worn in
age, and his tranquil gait touched with abstractedness. While Experience
was more firmly knit in form and face, with a shrewd kindly eye and a
happy readiness in his bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom evidently
on foot within him as a capability for work and for control.' This,
then, was the second of the four shepherds, who fed Immanuel's sheep on
the Delectable Mountains.

But here again to-night, and in the case of Experience, just as last
Sabbath night and in the case of Knowledge, in all this John Bunyan
speaks to children,--only the children here are the children of the
kingdom of heaven. The veriest child who reads the Delectable Mountains
begins to suspect before he is done that Knowledge and Experience are not
after all two real and true shepherds going their rounds with their
staves and their wallets and their wheeling dogs. Yes, though the little
fellow cannot put his suspicions into proper words for you, all the same
he has his suspicions that he is being deceived by you and your Sabbath
book; and, ten to one, from that sceptical day he will not read much more
of John Bunyan till in after-life he takes up John Bunyan never for a
single Sabbath again to lay him down. Yes, let the truth be told at
once, Experience is simply a minister, and not a real shepherd at all; a
minister of the gospel, a preacher, and a pastor; but, then, he is a
preacher and a pastor of no ordinary kind, but of the selectest and very
best kind.

1. Now, my brethren, to plunge at once out of the parable and into the
interpretation, I observe, in the first place, that pastors who are
indeed to be pastors after God's own heart have all to pass into their
pastorate through the school of experience. Preaching after God's own
heart, and pastoral work of the same divine pattern, cannot be taught in
any other school than the school of experience. Poets may be born and
not made, but not pastors nor preachers. Nay, do