ife before he
left the great school-house. All our professors of divinity and all our
ministers understand the parable at this point only too well. Their
students are eager to get into their classes; like our pilgrim, they have
heard the fame of this and that teacher, and there is not standing-room
in the class for the first weeks of the session. But before Christmas
there is room enough for strangers, and long before the session closes,
half the students are counting the weeks and plotting to petition the
Assembly against the length and labour of the curriculum. Was there ever
a class that was as full and attentive at the end of the session as it
was at the beginning? Never since our poor human nature was so stricken
with laziness and shallowness and self-sufficiency. But what is the
chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that deserves and repays the
husbandman's love and labour. When Plato looked up from his desk in the
Academy, after reading and expounding one of his greatest Dialogues, he
found only one student left in the class-room, but then, that student was
Aristotle. 'Now let me go,' said Christian. 'Nay, stay,' said the
Interpreter, 'till I have showed thee a little more.' 'Sir, is it not
time for me to go?' 'Do tarry till I show thee just one thing more.'

6. 'Here have I seen things rare and profitable,

. . . Then let me be

Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee.'

Sydney Smith, with his usual sagacity, says that the last vice of the
pulpit is to be uninteresting. Now, the Interpreter's House had this
prime virtue in it, that it was all interesting. Do not our children beg
of us on Sabbath nights to let them see the Interpreter's show once more;
it is so inexhaustibly and unfailingly interesting? It is only stupid
men and women who ever weary of it. But, 'profitable' was the one and
universal word with which all the pilgrims left the Interpreter's House.
'Rare and pleasant,' they said, and sometimes 'dreadful;' but it was
always 'profitable.' Now, how seldom do we hear our people at the church
door step down into the street saying, 'profitable'? If they said that
oftener their ministers would study profit more than they do. The people
say 'able,' or 'not at all able'; 'eloquent,' or 'stammering and
stumbling'; 'excellent' in style and manner and accent, or the opposite
of all that; and their ministers, to please the people and to earn their
approval, labour after these approved things.