great horror of darkness seemed to settle down upon the audience. The orator even uttered the cry for blood. There was no other relief. And then he showed that there was no relief even in that. Every thing, every influence, every event was gathering not for good but for evil about the doomed race. It seemed as if they were fated to destruction. Just at the instant when the cloud was most heavy over the audience, there slowly rose, in the front seat, an old black woman. Her name," Sojourner Truth." She had given it to herself. Far and wide she was known as an African prophetess. Every eye was on her. The orator paused. Reaching out towards him her long bony finger, as every eye followed her pointing, she cried out, "Frederick, is God dead?" It was a lightning-flash upon that darkness. The cloud began to break, and faith and hope and patience returned with the idea of a personal and ever-living God. Such is always the result, whether we look out on the broad scenes of human history, or in upon the lowering events of any one human life. Everywhere it is the word of despair, and God is the word of faith and hope.

And as the divine plan of things is the true view of them, so there must be, unto the complete answer of all fatalism, an emphasis put upon the eternity of

this divine plan of things. For are not all our thinkers pushing their inquiries backward? Are they not asking whence and when this established order of things? They go back before man to find his origin in some vast process of development. They push back their fatalistic it until they come virtually to make an eternal it. And the only answer possible is that furnished by the Scripture doctrine of an eternal God, who from "before the foundation of the world hath chosen" the things that shall be. It is Solomon's doctrine that the recognition of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom and the sum of all knowledge. And Christian thinkers are being driven anew to assert this doctrine by the fatalistic tendency of certain lines of modern thought. As nothing less than the thought of an eternal and personal God meets the demands of the intellect, so nothing less than this meets the yearnings of the heart. How justly and beautifully has Faber said:

"O Majesty, unspeakable and dread!

Wert Thou less mighty than Thou art,
Thou wert, O Lord, too great for our belief,
Too little for our heart.

But greatness which is infinite, makes room
For all things in its lap to lie;

We should be crushed by a magnificence
Short of infinity.

Great God! our lowliness takes heart to play
Beneath the shadow of Thy state;

The only comfort of our littleness

Is that Thou art so great."

And when an inquiring young man is driven back to recognition of God, as a logical necessity of all thought, as a demand alike of brain and soul, of the outward nature that surrounds him and the inward nature that is made to know and judge of these outward things and to trace back facts and laws to their only possible origin in the personal thought and personal act of a personal God, he has come to stand not only upon a broad and lofty ground, but beside all the best thinkers of the world. For some of those thinkers whose philosophic theories are often regarded as tending towards the denial of a personal God, make haste to deny the inference. Herbert Spencer claims that the doctrine of the correlation of forces does not exclude that of God, and Tyndall hastens to correct the inferable Atheism of his Belfast address.

And so the world's experience of philosophy and even of speculation leads a man back to the place where Solomon was brought-the place, beneath the fear, love, and service of God, from which he never should have wandered, and which he entreats every young man never to leave.

Or, if one has been tempted to think it brave to doubt about God and the soul and immortality, this book will serve as a tonic for his faith. One book of Solomon, the Ecclesiastes, is the book of doubts, or rather, the book of doubts solved. In that book Solomon recounts the old arguments used when he was a sceptic, when he was a pleasureseeker, when he was astray in idolatry. We see him, hear him at his worst; and then, with him, go back to the "conclusion of the whole matter," in the devout recognition and the earnest service of God. But in the "Proverbs" there is a strong joyous faith which the writer not only possesses but commends to the young men of the world. The young man is addressed as capable of faith. God made man to believe. The great difference between him and the higher animals is very largely in the fact that he has the capacity for faith, the ability to believe upon testimony. The beast has no such power. The brutes can remember, can do many acts singularly like reasoning. But they cannot collect and compare evidence, and believe and so act upon it. The men of fifty years ago collected various items of knowledge, and the boy of to-day starts where they ended, for he is able to believe. Not so the colts of to-day; for their sires collected no testi

mony. There is neither capacity to believe nor amassed material on which to exercise faith. Something can be done by interbreeding to develop other powers. But no capacity for faith in testimony can be developed in the brute creation. Hence progress for them is impossible. They have no faculties adapted to faith in others' testimony. They are made to know what they can through eye and through ear, by touch and by taste. Man alone is capable of faith. He receives most of his knowledge by credence. testimony of others.

He believes it on the Man, unlike the brutes, is by

his nature a believing animal. When he has no faith in testimony he is no better than a brute. A man's great characteristic is power to believe-to believe the testimony of his fellow-man and the revelation of his God.

Some young men are tempted to think that, since we have the power of doubting as well as the power of believing, we are to work both by doubt and by belief. But we have the power of doubting just as we have the power of sinning. We sin by perverting our powers. They were given us not for sin but for service. So we have eyes for seeing, but we have power to put them out. Nevertheless, God gave us eyes, not that we might be blind with