which are needed to prepare our spirits for that other life in which we are to live without the bonds, and also without the help, of the body. Therefore He taught self-restraint, self-denial, the curbing and rooting out of evil passions and desires, the denial to the body of the gratifications of our senses, because He saw that thus only can we train our spirits for the higher life beyond the grave.

Thus, His teaching, though some found it "hard,” was utterly reasonable. It urged, only in a vastly more important field and aspect, what a thoughtful father impresses upon his son going to college, or to a trade: "Use this opportunity to prepare yourself for the real life which is to come to you hereafter -after this period of privation and exertion. Deny yourself now, in these student or apprentice years, that you may hereafter be a man amongst men."

But, leave out the future life which was the constant burden of His speech and thoughts, and the social theory of Jesus is only foolishness-an overwrought sentimentalism as it has been called in our days by men who, rejecting the future life, naturally and logically reject, also, the admonitions for the conduct of our present and bodily lives which Jesus delivered.

Reject the future life beyond the grave, eliminate it from our thoughts and beliefs, and what we call

goodness becomes merely a "matter of choice"—a thing to be determined for society by the vote of the majority for the time being, and for the individual by what happens to be most to his taste.

If you urge that, nevertheless, "goodness," self-sacrifice, love to the neighbor, restraint of the physical passions and appetites, are so necessary to society that without these that could not long endure, this is only to say that, in the Divine Providence, that which is best for the individual beyond the grave is best for the aggregate we call society here. But consider what a strange confusion in the Divine thought it would argue-what a singular break in the general harmony we should discover, if, for instance, honesty were not the best policy in this life, but only in the next!

X.

THE BIBLE AS A BOOK.

AMONG books it is from the Bible that we draw the most of our ideas of God and the future life. It is a great collection of books, some very ancient, some less so, but all admitted by critics to be of great age, and among the oldest writings preserved to our days.

I should like you to read the Bible not merely as a book of devotion, but as you would other books of the highest interest and importance. Like other ancient writings, though not more but rather less so, its style in some of the books will seem to you often strange, and sometimes dry. But I notice that those who have most carefully and even critically studied it are the most positive in their praises of its extraordinary literary excellence.

If you read it with the intelligent curiosity which it deserves, you will discover that it has astonishing merits of many kinds-literary, historical, poetical; and that there is no part of it which does not deserve and reward a careful study, aside entirely from

its importance as a guide to our moral or spiritual lives. This has been the opinion of the greatest poets and the most deeply cultivated minds in all countries, and their judgment is worthy of your respect. No thoughtful person, if he regards only the affairs of the present life, can even glance superficially over this great collection without a feeling of admiration and wonder; and when you hear a person speak slightingly or contemptuously of the Bible you may safely set him down as an ignoramus.

To speak only of superficials, nowhere in literature do we find such biographies as are in the Bible: memoirs giving such vivid traits of life; relating with such impartial hand the evil as well as the good which appeared in the man, and leaving you with such a conviction of the accuracy of the author, and of the genuineness of the character portrayed. In the lives of Moses and Aaron, of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of David and Solomon, though these were heroes and great men, founders and rulers, there is no attempt in the Bible narrative to deify them, or to conceal their faults. The Bible "whitewashes" nobody. You see that these were men of force, power, sometimes of genius; but along with their great or good deeds the Scripture story gives you their weaknesses, foibles, faults, sins, and presents to you men, and not impossible or improbable beings.

There is nowhere in literature such an admirable collection of biographies as we find in the Old Testament.

The poetry of the Bible has instructed and delighted the most refined and critical minds in all ages, and particularly in modern times when the critical faculty has had its greatest development. There is scarcely a great poet in the last three centuries, in our own or other languages, who has not taken some Scripture event or some suggestion from its pages, as the basis of a poem; and you need to have but a cursory acquaintance with English poetry to know that if you could eliminate from it all that is founded upon or drawn from the Bible, you would rob it of very many of its noblest poems, and leave a blank which nothing that remains would fill. The Psalms, which touch and awaken all the moods and experiences of our lives; the Book of Job, the song of Miriam, the song of Deborah, many pages in the Prophets, not to speak of other parts, abound in poetry of the highest order, and in narratives which touch the heart and stir the feelings by beauty of language and elevation of thought, and by their appeal to the common experience of mankind in misfortune, disappointment, sorrow, or in great joy and gladness.

The Bible is not a book of science; but any of