time Christiana and the boys visited it compared with that
early time when Christian was entertained in it. Our pilgrim got far
more in the Interpreter's House of delight and instruction than he could
carry out of it, but that did not tempt the Interpreter to sit down and
content himself with taking all his future pilgrims into the same room,
and showing them the same pictures, and repeating to them the same
explanations. No, for he reflected that each coming pilgrim would need
some new significant room to himself, and therefore, as soon as he got
one pilgrim off his hands, he straightway set about building and
furnishing new rooms, putting up new pictures, and replenishing his woods
and his waters with new beasts and birds and fishes. I am ashamed, he
said, that I had so little to show when I first opened my gates to
receive pilgrims, and I do not know why they came to me as they did. I
was only a beginner in these things when my first visitor came to my
gates. Let every long-settled, middle-aged, and even grey-headed
minister read the life of the Interpreter at this point and take courage
and have hope. Let it teach us all to break some new ground in the field
of divine truth with every new year. Let it teach us all to be students
all our days. Let us buy, somehow, the poorest and the oldest of us,
some new and first-rate book every year. Let us not indeed shut up
altogether our old rooms if they ever had anything significant in them,
but let us add now a new wing to our spiritual house, now a new picture
to its walls, and now a new herb to its gardens. 'Resolved,' wrote
Jonathan Edwards, 'that as old men have seldom any advantage of new
discoveries, because these are beside a way of thinking they have been
long used to; resolved, therefore, if ever I live to years, that I will
be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and
receive them, if rational, how long soever I have been used to another
way of thinking.'
5. The fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity
students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to
be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of
the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to
get out of that house as he had been to get in. Twice over the wise and
learned Interpreter had to beg and beseech this ignorant and impulsive
pilgrim to stop and get another lesson in the religious l
|