Now, a good understanding is a grand endowment for a
minister, and his ministerial office will all his days afford him
opportunity for the best understanding he can bring to it. The Christian
ministry, first and last, has had a noble roll of men of a strong
understanding. The author of the book now open before us was a man of a
strong understanding. John Bunyan had a fine imagination, with great
gifts of eloquent, tender, and most heart-winning utterance, but in his
case also all that was bottomed in a strong English understanding. Then,
again, a good memory is indispensable to a minister of knowledge. You
must be content to take a second, a third, or even a lower place still if
your Master has withheld from you a good memory. Dr. Goodwin has a
passage on this point that I have often turned up when I had again
forgotten it. 'Thou mayest have a weak memory, perhaps, yet if it can
and doth remember good things as well and better than other things, then
it is a sanctified memory, and the defilement of thy memory is healed
though the imperfection of it is not; and, though thou art to be humbled
for it as a misery, yet thou art not to be discouraged; for God doth not
hate thee for it, but pities thee; and the like holds good and may be
said as to the want of other like gifts.
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