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has done for me. What has your way of thinking done for you?"

"Well, my good lady," rejoined the lecturer, "I don't want to disturb your comfort; but-"

"Oh! that's not the question," interposed the woman; "keep to the point, sir. What has your way of thinking done for you?"

The infidel endeavored to shirk the matter again, but an applause broke out in the audience, and Mr. Bradlaugh had to go away discomfited by one of the humblest of Christ's witnesses.

But the question was appropriate, and might very properly be supplemented with this. What has infidelity done for anybody? Has it ever added one iota to the usefulness of any busy life, to the achievements of consecrated energy and skill, to the value of human undertaking? "Has it ever," asks the St. Louis Christian Advocate, "raised a man or woman from the haunts of vice, and made his or her life clean? Has it ever taken a drunkard from the gutter, the gambler from his cards, the fallen from a life of shame? Has it ever found a man coarse and brutal in character and life, and made him a kind husband and faithful father? Has it ever gone out in the heathen lands, and found a people ignorant and barbarous, delighting in rapine and murder, and by the power of its teachings lifted them out of their degradations until they adopted the customs of civilized nations? Is there in all the history of infidelity a story of its moral triumphs that will match the regeneration of the Fiji Islands under the labors of the Wesleyan missionaries? Has it added anything to the sum of human happiness? Does it bring one ray of comfort into the chamber of death, filling the soul of the dying with peace, and the hearts of weeping friends with hope? The religion of Jesus Christ has done all these things."

What is infidelity, at any rate? What has it that one can know, or feel, or see, or embrace? Is it not empty nothingness? Is it more than a mere negation-a something not a belief, or a belief that there is no belief? How can it be defined? Take agnosticism, the assertion that nothing is known; then it is not even known that nothing is known, and its foundation tumbles to pieces. Say that infidelity is a system of negation; it has no system, and never had. The late Bishop Matthew Simpson very truthfully remarked:

"Where are its temples? Where were they ever? Where are its schools? Where were they ever? Where are its hospitals? Where were they ever? What did it ever try to do for man anywhere or in any land as an organized system? There have been men, strong men, learned men, wise men who have been skeptical, who have been infidel; but they have never embodied their creed in an organization; they have never worked together powerfully for the elevation of the race. There was one nation, and only one, that I know of, that ever tried this system of infidelity. It was France that decreed, "There is no God, and death is an eternal sleep,' and the result was that the streets of Paris ran with blood. Society was upheaved from its very foundations, and men were glad to go back to even poor temples for the sake of finding some relief from the error and terror into which infidelity had thrown them."

Men who have strayed into skepticism are continually coming back to the Bible, and accepting it again as their teacher, their guide, and their comforter. "I am myself," affirms Rev. Joseph Barker the converted skeptic, now a gospel preacher in England, “I am myself an instance of this. Carried away, as by a tempest, from my early faith, I wandered for years in the dreary regions of doubt and unbelief. I looked for light and beheld darkness. I sought rest and found disquietude. And the farther I went the worse I fared, and the longer I remained in those dismal shades the more wretched I became. I found myself at length face to face with utter darkness and eternal death. God, in his mercy, rescued me from that awful state, and brought me back to Christ. I am, happy in the light of his truth and in the assurance of his love. I praise the Bible, and love Christ and Christianity more than ever, and I am more happy in the work of a minister than ever I was in my life. And my ability to maintain the claims of Christ and Christianity and the Bible to the love and reverence and gratitude of mankind is greater than ever. And my hatred and horror of infidelity are greater than ever. I know it to be the extreme of madness and misery-the utter degradation and ruin of man's soul."

And here

Those skeptics who do not return to their former faith and hope, acknowledge the striking contrast. "I am not ashamed to confess,'

says a recent writer of this class, "that with the virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost all its loveliness, and when I think of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of the creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as I now find it, I find it impossible to avoid the sharpest pangs of which my nature is susceptible."

"But," says the reader, "I know of infidels who never turn, and who are not moved by any representatives of the clergy or Christian laity." Very likely. Infidelity with some is a sort of second nature, as Sharon Turner says, "It is one of the characters of the human mind, which, from the days of paradise to our own, has never wholly left it; and, till our knowledge is greatly multiplied, will perhaps not be universally extinguished, because it is the champion of matter against mind, of body against spirit, of the senses against the reason, of passion against duty, of self-interest against self-government, of dissatisfaction against content, of the present against the future, of the little that is known against all that is unknown, of our limited experience against boundless possibility."

Has it ever occurred to the reader that many of the best and wisest men that the world has ever known experienced no practical difficulty in accepting the Bible as it is? They saw the good there is in it; they appreciated its beauties, its elevating tendencies, its purifying influences.

The justly celebrated Sir William Jones, one of the brightest geniuses and most distinguished scholars of the eighteenth century, observes: “I have carefully and regularly perused these Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume, independently of its divine origin, contains more sublimity, pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from ALL other books, in whatever language they have been written." It is related that the eminent English poet Collins, in the latter part of his moral career, withdrew from study, and traveled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children carry to school. When a friend took it in his hand, out of curiosity, to see what companion a man of letters had chosen: "I have only one book," said he, "but it is the best." John Locke, so distinguished as a philosopher, in the latter part of his life studied scarcely any

ting but the Word of God; and when asked which was the surest way for a young man to attain a knowledge of the Christian religion, he replied, "Let him study the Holy Scriptures, especially the New Testament. Therein are contained the words of eternal life. It hath Gop for its author, SALVATION for its end, and TRUTH, without any mixture of error, for its matter."

The good John Wesley proposed a short, clear, and strong argument in proof of the divine in-piration of the Scriptures, which any reader can commit to memory in a few minutes. Here it is: "The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God.

"1. It could not be the invention of good men or angels, for they neither would nor could make a book, and tell lies all the time they were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord!' when it was their own invention.

"2. It could not be the invention of bad men or devils; for they would not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns their souls to hell to all eternity.

"3. Therefore I draw this conclusion, that the Bible must be given by divine inspiration."

Dr. Talmage has also opened, with a few sentences, a line of thought which any person may follow out to his comfort. "I will tell you," he says, "one reason why we believe this book is the right book, and the book from God, and an infallible book and an indestructible book.

"There are the two Testaments, the Old and the New. Take the New Testament first. Why do I adopt it? Why do I take it? Why do I believe it? Why do I receive it with all my heart? You can trace it right out. Jerome and Eusebius in the first century, Origen in the second century, gave lists of the writers of the New Testament, that list just corresponding with our list of writers of the New Testament, showing precisely as we have it they had it in the third and fourth centuries.

"Where did they get it? From Irenæus. Where did he get it? From Polycarp. Where did Polycarp get it? From St. John who was a personal associate of Jesus. The line is just as clear as anything ever was clear. My grandfather gave a book to my

father, my father gave it to me, I gave it to my child. No difficulty in tracing that down from generation to generation. Just as a communion chalice is passed along from one to another, the chalice filled with the wine of the sacrament, just so this New Testament was handed down from one to another, and we drink of the new wine of the kingdom."

Christianity has been called "the religion of the sorrowful." Be it so. It is not sorrow without hope. Does skepticism lessen the sum of human misery? Would the world's woe be alleviated by recourse to infidel hopelessness? No! On earth there is always sorrow. Afflictions and losses, bereavements and crosses, are the common lot of man. Mrs. Browning perceived the true when she

wrote:

"The fool hath said there is no God,

But none, there is no sorrow."

Christianity enters the wide field of the world's sorrow and plants the tree of hope, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. It recognizes the bitterness of man's life, and responds to it. "It promises a Comforter, the Holy Spirit who shall dwell with us and sustain us in our sorrows; and it assures us that the cloud of evil shall be pierced by the light of heaven and finally rolled away." Not thus does skepticism deal with human sin and suffering. It offers no remedy for the dread disease. It does indeed make light of sin and mocks at the noblest God-inspired Christian effort to accomplish man's purification. This is all. No other light for the darkness, no cheer for the sadness, no relief for the pain. In profound sadness and darkness itself, how can it give a happy spirit to life or a cheerful view of the beyond. Have not skeptics acknowledged over and over again their helplessness before the stern facts of life and death? Goethe has been named as a model of healthy skepticism. Hear him near the close of life, in his conversations with Eckermann: "Happiness is but a dream, misery only is real.” I have always been looked upon as a favorite of fortune; neither will I bemoan myself nor accuse my past course of life as unworthy. But yet, after all, it has been nothing but labor and trouble, and I may well say that in my seventy-fifth year I have not had four weeks during which I could enjoy life." Hear Strauss confess to