and an enjoyment to all the people of the place; but our Interpreter was
never asked to show any of his significant things there; and, indeed,
neither minister nor people would have understood him had he ever done
so. And had any of the parishioners from below the gate ever by any
chance stumbled into the Interpreter's house, his most significant rooms
would have had no significance to them. Both he and his house would have
been a mystery and an offence to Worldly-Wiseman, his minister, and his
fellow-worshippers. John Bunyan has the clear warrant both of Jesus
Christ and the Apostle Paul for the place on which he has planted the
Interpreter's house. 'It is given to you,' said our Lord to His
disciples, 'to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them
it is not given.' And Paul tells us that 'the natural man receiveth not
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' And,
accordingly, no reader of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ will really understand
what he sees in the Interpreter's House, unless he is already a man of a
spiritual mind. Intelligent children enjoy the pictures and the people
that are set before them in this illustrated house, but they must become
the children of God, and must be well on in the life of God, before they
will be able to say that the house next the gate has been a profitable
and a helpful house to them. All that is displayed here--all the
furniture and all the vessels, all the ornaments and all the employments
and all the people of the Interpreter's House--is fitted and intended to
be profitable as well as interesting to pilgrims only. No man has any
real interest in the things of this house, or will take any abiding
profit out of it, till he is fairly started on the upward road. In his
former life, and while still on the other side of the gate, our pilgrim
had no interest in such things as he is now to see and hear; and if he
had seen and heard them in his former life, he would not, with all the
Interpreter's explanation, have understood them. As here among ourselves