testimony that God's Scriptures are the richest of pastures to the
human soul; and that God the Holy Ghost, as working with those
Scriptures and by those Scriptures, is the one Teacher on whose
sovereign aid all the churches, all the nations, and all the ages
must depend. For the absence of those influences of the divine
Spirit no earthly lore can compensate; while the exuberance of those
influences may supply, as on Pentecost, the lack of all human
helpers and patrons, and more than replace all universities and all
libraries. We love to dwell on the illustrious Dreamer, as one of
those characters for whom man had done so little and God did so
much.

And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life
of romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike
to awe and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope. No
scene or station of all the earth that can eye paradise, or catch
the gleams of the atoning cross, is truly ignoble or utterly
forlorn. He who promised that, in the last days, the inscription
which shone on the front of the high-priest's mitre, "HOLINESS UNTO
THE LORD," should be written also on the very bells of the horses,
and that "every pot" in Jerusalem, and its outlying streets should
become holy as the consecrated furniture of his own temple and
altar, can in like manner render the lowliest scenes of human art
and toil and traffic the schools of truth and duty and peace,
schools ministering alike to the truest happiness and to the most
perfect holiness of our race. He who gave, as in Bunyan's case he
did, to the maker or mender of culinary vessels the sacred skill to
grave the all-holy Name, as one dignifying and consecrating them, on
all the objects and scenes and accompaniments of his humble labors,
can, in our times and in our various stations, make each allowable