At the same time, there was one of the happy quaternity who,
from his years on the hills, and his services in times of trial and
danger, and one thing and another, fell always, and with the finest
humility too, into the foremost place, and his name, as you have already
heard, was Knowledge. Old Mr. Know-all the children in the villages
below ran after him and named him as they clustered round his staff and
hid in the great folds of his shepherd's coat.
Now, in all this John Bunyan speaks as a child to children; but, of such
children as John Bunyan and his readers is the kingdom of heaven. My
very youngest hearer here to-night knows quite well, or, at any rate,
shrewdly suspects, that Knowledge was not a shepherd going about with his
staff among woolly sheep; nor would the simplest-minded reader of John
Bunyan's book go to seek the Delectable Mountains and Immanuel's Land in
any geographer's atlas, or on any schoolroom map. Oh, no. I do not need
to stop to tell the most guileless of my hearers that old Knowledge was
not a shepherd whose sheep were four-footed creatures, but a minister of
the gospel, whose sheep are men, women, and children.
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