Now, if it is indeed so, that every gospel minister is an Interpreter, and every Evangelical Church an Interpreter's house, what an important passage this is for all those who are proposing and preparing to be ministers. Let them be students not in idle name only, as so many are, but in intense reality, as so few are.
Let them read everything that bears upon the Bible, and let them read nothing that does not … so that they may have always something to say when their future people come up to Church hungry for instruction and comfort and encouragement. Let them look around and see the sin that sinks the ship of so many ministers; and let them begin while yet their ship is in the yard and see that she is fitted up and furnished, stored and stocked so that she shall, in spite of sure storms and sunken rocks, deliver her freight in the appointed haven.
And then with a sly stroke at us old ministers, our significant author points out to us how much better furnished the Interpreter's House was by the time Christiana and the boys visited it compared with that early time when Christian was entertained in it.
Our Pilgrim got far more in the Interpreter's House of delight and instruction then he could carry out of it, but that did not tempt the Interpreter to sit down and content himself with taking all his future pilgrims into the same room, and showing them the same pictures, and repeating to them the same explanations. No, for he reflected that each coming pilgrim would need some new significant room to himself, and, therefore, as soon as he got one pilgrim off his hands, he straightway set about building and furnishing new rooms, putting up new pictures, and replenishing his woods and his waters with new beasts and birds and fishes. I am ashamed, he said, that I had so little to show when I first opened my gates to receive pilgrims, and I do not know why they came to me as they did. I was only a beginner in these things when my first visitor came to my gates.
Let every long-settled, middle-aged, and even grey-headed minister read the life of the Interpreter at this point and take courage and have hope. Let it teach us all to break some new ground in the field of divine truth with every New Year. Let it teach us all to be students all our days.
