n still unanswered prayer; and so
on the ever-shifting but never-ceasing experiment goes. I do beseech
you, my brethren, take that true view of life home with you again this
night. This true view of life, namely, that experience in the divine
life can only come to you through your being much experimented upon. Meet
all your trials and tribulations and temptations, then, under this
assurance, that all things will work together for good to you also if you
are only rightly exercised by means of them. Nothing else but this
growing experience and this settling assurance will be able to support
you under the sudden ills of life; but this will do it. This, when you
begin by experience to see that all this life, and all the good and all
the ill of this life, are all under this splendid divine law,--that your
tribulations also are indeed working within you a patience, and your
patience an experience, and your experience a hope that maketh not
ashamed.

WATCHFUL

'Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of
Israel.'--The word of the Lord to Ezekiel.

'They watch for your souls.'--The Apostle to the Hebrews.

There were four shepherds who had the care of Immanuel's sheep on the
Delectable Mountains, and their names were Knowledge, Experience,
Watchful, and Sincere. Now, in that very beautiful episode of his great
allegory, John Bunyan is doing his very utmost to impress upon all his
ministerial readers how much there is that goes to the making of a good
minister, and how much every good minister has to do. Each several
minister must do all that in him lies, from the day of his ordination to
the day of his death, to be all to his people that those four shepherds
were to Immanuel's sheep. He is to labour, in season and out of season,
to be a minister of the ripest possible knowledge, the deepest and widest
possible experience, the most sleepless watchfulness, and the most
absolute and scrupulous sincerity. Now, enough has perhaps been said
already about a minister's knowledge and his experience; enough,
certainly, and more than enough for some of us to hope half to carry out;
and, therefore, I shall at once go on to take up Watchful, and to supply,
so far as I am able, the plainest possible interpretation of this part of
Bunyan's parable.

1. Every true minister, then, watches, in the words of the apostle, for
the souls of his people. An ordinary minister's everyday work embraces
many