'
The shepherd-brother, on the other hand, is thus pictured out to us by
one who has seen him. A traveller who has visited the Delectable
Mountains, and has met and talked with the shepherds, thus describes
Experience in his excellent itinerary: 'Knowledge,' he says, 'I found to
be the sage of the company, spare in build, high of forehead, worn in
age, and his tranquil gait touched with abstractedness. While Experience
was more firmly knit in form and face, with a shrewd kindly eye and a
happy readiness in his bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom evidently
on foot within him as a capability for work and for control.' This,
then, was the second of the four shepherds, who fed Immanuel's sheep on
the Delectable Mountains.
But here again to-night, and in the case of Experience, just as last
Sabbath night and in the case of Knowledge, in all this John Bunyan
speaks to children,--only the children here are the children of the
kingdom of heaven. The veriest child who reads the Delectable Mountains
begins to suspect before he is done that Knowledge and Experience are not
after all two real and true shepherds going their rounds with their
staves and their wallets and their wheeling dogs.
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