Bunyan's pungent pages. And every
new room, every new bird, and beast, and herb, and flower makes us blush
for shame as we contrast our own insignificant and ill-furnished house
with the noble house of the Interpreter. Let all our students who have
not yet fatally destroyed themselves and lost their opportunity lay the
Interpreter's House well to heart. Let them be students not in idle name
only, as so many are, but in intense reality, as so few are. Let them
read everything that bears upon the Bible, and let them read nothing that
does not. They have not the time nor the permission. Let them be
content to be men of one book. Let them give themselves wholly to the
interpretation of divine truth as its riddles are set in nature and in
man, in scripture, in providence, and in spiritual experience. Let them
store their memories at college with all sacred truth, and with all
secular truth that can be made sacred. And if their memories are weak
and treacherous, let them be quiet under God's will in that, and all the
more labour to make up in other ways for that defect, so that they may
have always something to say to the purpose when their future people come
up to church hungry for instruction and comfort and encouragement. Let
them look around and see the sin that sinks the ship of so many
ministers; and let them begin while yet their ship is in the yard and see
that she is fitted up and furnished, stored and stocked, so that she
shall in spite of sure storms and sunken rocks deliver her freight in the
appointed haven. When they are lying in bed of a Sabbath morning, let
them forecast the day when they shall have to give a strict account of
their eight years of golden opportunity among the churches, and the
classes, and the societies, and the libraries of our university seats.
Let them be able to name some great book, ay, more than one great book,
they mastered, for every year of their priceless and irredeemable student
life. Let them all their days have old treasure-houses that they filled
full with scholarship and with literature and with all that will minister
to a congregation's many desires and necessities, collected and kept
ready from their student days. 'Meditate upon these things; give thyself
wholly up to them, that thy profiting may appear unto all.'

4. And then with a sly stroke at us old ministers, our significant
author points out to us how much better furnished the Interpreter's House
was by the