The achievements of the Bible, in the realm of the spiritual, are of almost infinite number. In the spring of the year 372, a young man in the thirty-first year of his age, in evident distress of mind, entered into his garden, near Milan. The sins of his youth-a youth spent in sensuality and impiety-weighed heavily on his soul. Lying under a fig-tree, mourning and pouring out abundant tears, he heard from a neighboring house a young voice, saying, and repeating in rapid succession, "Tolle, lege; tolle lege!"-take and read, take and read. Receiving this as a divine admonition, he returned to the place where he had left his friend, Alypius, to procure the roll of St. Paul's epistles, which he had a short time before left with him. "I seized the roll," said he, in describing the scene; "I opened it, and read in silence the chapter on which my eyes first alighted." It was the thirteenth of Romans. The passage which struck his mind was the following: "Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof." All was decided by a word. "I did not want to read any more," said he; "nor was there any need; every doubt was banished." The morning star had risen in his heart. In the language of Gausen, "Jesus had conquered; and the grand career of Augustine, the holiest of the Fathers, then commenced. A passage of God's Word had kindled that glorious luminary, which was to enlighten the Church for ten centuries; and whose beams gladden her, even to this present day. After thirty-one years' revolt, of combats, of falls, of misery, faith, life, eternal peace came to his soul; a new day, an eternal day came upon it."

The experience of the race, in the judgment of President C. H. Payne, has settled a few things: "Water quenches thirst, bread satisfies hunger, a few medicines are specifics for certain diseases. Thirty-three centuries of accredited history have proved that the Bible, and the Bible alone, meets the necessities of the human race. All man's wants are here supplied. All his ills are here remedied. And all his wrongs are here redressed. His spiritual nature always and everywhere seeks in vain until, coming to this divine

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source, it finds the bread, which eating, it hungers no more; the rest, which securing, its weariness is at an end. Individuals in all classes and conditions have tested the value of God's word and found solace and strength. The poor man tried its virtue, and it opened to him imperishable treasures more valued than the wealth of a kingdom. That slave suffering the bondage of body, or mind, or soul, sought its proffered deliverance, and his shackles fell off; while his prison door flew open, and he walked forth into 'the glorious liberty of the sons of God.' That sorrowful weeper drank at this sacred fount, and his tears became as crystal lenses through which he saw the hand of love above him and the land of hope before him, and his weeping was changed into joy. That bereaved one, with smitten heart, sighing for

the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!'

came hither for its holy consolations, and heard a precious message falling from the lips of the mighty Conqueror, saying, 'I am he that liveth, and was dead; and am alive for evermore, Amen ; and have the keys of hell and of death;' and through falling tears he beheld the vanished hand' beckoning and heard the 'voice' that was 'still' calling to a reunion amid the changeless scenes of the golden city above."

The Word of God always presents irresistible claims to the belief of the honest and diligent inquirer. The truth is there, and whoever is really seeking for the truth will find it there. For him in whose heart real faith exists the Bible is, indeed, a perfect revelation of God, stamped with the impress of his mind in every page. No objections, however powerful, can unsettle the belief of the true God-taught Christian.

The very night before the Lady Jane Grey suffered death, she addressed the following exhortation to her beloved sister, the Lady Katherine Grey, in a letter written at the end of a Greek Testament. "I have here sent you, good sister Katherine, a book, which, though it be not outwardly trimmed with gold, yet inwardly it is more worth than precious stones. It is the book, dear sister, of the law of the

Lord: it is his Testament and last will, which he bequeathed unto us wretches, which shall lead you to the path of eternal life."

At twenty years of age Prince Metternich, the great diplomatist, was "an atheist, as he confesses, after the fashion of D'Alembert and Lalande." At forty, when he had passed the "vealy" age, he wrote to a friend: "I read every day one or two chapters of the Bible. I daily discover new beauties in it, and I prostrate myself before this admirable book. Now I believe and do not criticise."

Thomas Jefferson is generally thought to have been an infidel, but in the year 1804, his daughter Maria, whom he tenderly loved, departed life, leaving a babe behind her. His eldest daughter Martha, speaking of the father's grief, says: "I found him with the Bible in his hands. He who has been so often and so harshly accused of unbelief-he, in his hour of intense affliction, sought and found consolation in the sacred volume. The Comforter was there for his true heart and devout spirit, even though his faith might not be what the world calls orthodox."

"A gifted spirit who some time since passed away, in England, fell from the position of a Christian minister and became a skeptic. In the glory and triumph of his intellect he forgot God and denied his Word. But hours of sickness and solemn reflection came. Undisturbed by the world, he was nursed for weeks by a loving sister. One evening she saw him stretch forth his feeble hand and grope about a table standing by. She asked what he desired. I only wish,' said he, 'that old pocket Bible which I formerly used in my village pastorate.' It had been long neglected, doubted, denied; but a change had come, not over John Sterling's intellect that was bright and powerful as ever-but over John Sterling's heart, and the book he had disesteemed was now precious."

Thomas De Quincy, like many brilliant but erratic men of genius, owed much that was pure and enjoyable in his sad life to early memories of the Bible, and the lingering of its lessons in his mind. In one passage of touching beauty, he says:

"It happened that among our nursery collection of books was the Bible, illustrated with many pictures. And in long dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sat by the firelight round the guard

of our nursery, no book was in such request amongst us. It ruled us and swayed us as mysteriously as music.

"One young nurse, whom we all loved, would often, before any candle was lighted, strain her eyes to read it for us; and sometimes, according to her simple powers, would endeavor to explain what we found obscure.

“We, the children, were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness. The fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room by firelight suited our evening state of feeling; and they suited, also, the Divine revelations of power and mysterious beauty which awed

us.

Above all, the story of a just man-man, and yet not mere man, real and above all things, and yet shadowy above all things, who had suffered death on the cross in Palestine-slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the waters."

Henry Gratton, a brilliant Irish orator and a busy politician, was, during his life, thought to be indifferent to Christianity. But when he came to lie on the bed which he left only to be borne to the tomb, he gave evidence that he had pondered deeply the greatest thought which man can entertain—his accountability to God.

One day, as his daughter was reading to him from the Bible, he said:

"If I had not read this book before, it would be of little service to me to do so now. I can do nothing of myself. I prostrate myself, with all my sins, at the foot of the Cross, and I trust to the mercy of my Redeemer."

His sons and daughters had often listened with rapture to the eloquent words of their father, but they treasured these utterances. Strange must it seem to an unbeliever that a dying man's broken sentences are more inspiring, more tenaciously retained, than the rhetoric and thought which gave him reputation.

"The near prospect of death," observes the narrator of the above, "corrects man's conscious errors," and he conscientiously speaks the convictions of a life-long experience.

The Emperor William, of Prussia, has borne the most emphatic testimony to the importance and authority of the written word of God, and the knowledge of Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour. In an address before the Cathedral College of candidates for holy orders,

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he said: "It is my earnest wish, gentlemen, that the words you have just heard from the pulpit may find place and realization in the hearts and thoughts of all. If there is anything that, amidst the drifting stress of the world's life, can give us a holdfast, it is the one, the solitary foundation which is laid in Jesus Christ. Do not allow yourselves to be bewildered into missing this, gentlemen, by the flux of change which, especially at the present period, traverses the world. Do not join the multitude of those who either ignore the Bible altogether as the one foundation of truth, or at least give it a spurious interpretation of their own devising. You all know that I am a member, on full and free conviction, of the 'Positive Union' established by my late dear father. The basis and rock on which I and we all are bound to fix our foothold is the unadulterated faith as taught us by the Bible. There are, to be sure, many who do not at all take exactly the same line of interpretation. Each uses his knowledge and conscience as well as he can, and thereby regulates his acts and purposes.

May all the alumni of this institution find this day so blest to them that the knowledge of God and his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, as alone the source of true salvation, may advance in them. Each, indeed, is free to deal with this according to the voice of his conscience; but all must build on the foundation of the Bible and the Gospel. Let but this be secured, and all will be enabled to develop a divinely blest ministerial work, each according to his special gift."

It is not needful that we shake with alarm at infidel attacks upon the Bible. It has always been so, and perhaps always will be. But the Bible will outlive all its enemies. Dr. Austin Phelps well puts this fact in "My Portfolio": "Early in the autumn, I have heard three or four crickets under the hearthstone serenading each other in voices sharp and shrill, which seemed as if they were a thousand strong. They made the whole house ring. But the solid earth moved on its way, the autumn passed into winter, the crickets died and were no more heard. Such a passing racket are the harpings of a few skeptical minds upon this everlasting claim that our faith is defunct, our theory obsolete, our pulpit dead."

The grand reason why men reject the Bible is because the Bible rejects them. It strikes terrible blows at their ugly sins, and they