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 life 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.
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