you who have a taste for natural history will find that many of the Bible writers were admirably close observers and skilful recorders of natural phe

nomena.

In history no book in all our libraries offers you so large and instructive a view of the rise, the growth and prosperity, the glory, and then the decadence and fall of nations, as the Bible. In the earlier books of the Old Testament you may see how Moses, a man of the greatest genius the world has seen, with admirable and almost impossible patience, gave himself to the making of a nation out of a horde of ignorant and degraded freedmen; with what constant and irritating obstacles he had to contend in his endeavor to make men out of a people who had been sunk in slavery; and with what wonderful wisdom and zeal he persevered in their training during forty tedious and vexatious years. If you read with sufficient intelligence you will marvel to find Moses, in that age of the world, developing a system of political economy to which the minds of many thoughtful men even now turn back for instruction and hope; and not only this, but to find him laying down minute rules for the daily conduct of life-rules regarding the administration of justice, for cleanliness and order, food, raiment, and drink, for the protection of the poor, of prisoners and

slaves, for the conduct of men towards men, and towards women—a mass of sanitary, physiological, and social regulations, very many of which we should be the better, in our modern society, for re-adopting and observing.

If you have given any thought to statesmanship, or have read history with even moderate attention, the Bible story of Moses will present him to you as by far the wisest and greatest statesman of whom we have any record; as one of the few very great men our race has known; and the greatest of them all, because his wisdom and the labors of his long life were given unselfishly to the liberation of a degraded slave population, and their elevation in the scale of manhood and civilization to the rank of a nation which remained compact, prosperous, and happy so long as it adhered to the laws he established.

Solon and Lycurgus were famous law-givers among the ancients; but the laws of Moses, in the opinion of the ablest thinkers of modern days, far excel theirs in scope and merit, and especially in humanity. Nowhere in the histories which have come down to us do we find the ruler of an ancient people so humane, so careful of the poor, the weak, and defenceless; nowhere are there such simple yet admirable devices for the maintenance of a general

equality of condition in society. No law-giver or lawmaker of ancient or modern days has shown so keen an appreciation of the importance of the necessity of securing to every family of a nation a share in its soil. Nowhere do we find such simple and yet effective checks placed upon selfishness and that greed for accumulation which in our own days has forced itself upon the attention of many wise statesmen and philosophers as a grave danger to society. No student of political economy or of statesmanship in our days can neglect to examine with care the constitution of that Jewish confederation of which Moses laid the corner-stone in the wilderness, and which he left Joshua, his principal general or military aid, to finally establish according to the regulations previously laid down by himself.

Nor should you overlook the fact that Joshua, a military ruler, who led his people to conquest in a time when military rulers were accustomed to misuse their power to establish a despotic and personal government, patriotically respected the constitution of the Jewish commonwealth, and, like our own Washington, sought only the welfare of his people, and not his own aggrandizement—a remarkable and noble example of self-denial and public spirit in those days which has had few imitators since.

If you turn to the Book of Proverbs you discover

a mass of shrewd and happy generalizations on human life and society, which show the closest observation of character. And in all parts of the Bible you meet with statements and narratives which, were they discovered in other books, or now first made by writers of our own day, would be hailed as marvels of genius or remarkable insight.

I would like you to recognize in the Bible not merely a book of moral precepts. It is a great collection of writings filled with lessons and suggestions instructive to the student in many of the most important branches of modern investigation and inquiry. There is scarcely any subject to which you may give thought, barring only the exact sciences, in which some part of these ancient writings will not be useful and important to you.

XI.

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN.

IN the Old Testament the affairs of the present life are the most prominent. In the New Testament, and particularly in the Gospels, the concerns of this life seem to fade away before our eyes into comparative insignificance.

In the Old Testament prosperity, predominance, happiness here below, are held out as the rewards of right living and of obedience to God, and the summit of felicity is when the aged grandsire sees his descendants to the third and fourth generation playing about his knees; when his cattle graze on a thousand hills, and his sons and daughters are powerful in the land: "Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.”

In the New Testament these earthly joys and rewards become dim to our vision, which is turned by Jesus with gentle persistence toward that other, spiritual and immortal, life of which He never ceased to explain, in discourses and parables, the supreme importance and real relations.