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Blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this sare Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered, bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspired doctrine art thou too honored to be taught; O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thon become contrite, and learn it! O thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain: thou hadst need of them: the Self in thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulphed, but borne aloft in the azure of Eternity. Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him."

These passages, the Everlasting Nay and the Everlasting Yea, are quoted for the spirit of the Bible they possess, rather than for direct references.

"To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish-should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose; with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks, and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness-to such Temptation are we all called."

Heroes and Hero Worship

He who, in any way, shows us better than we knew before that a lily of the fields is beautiful, does he not

show it us as an effluence of the Fountain of all Beauty; as the handwriting, made visible there, of the great Maker of the Universe? He has sung for us, made us sing with him, a little verse of a sacred Psalm. Essentially so. How much more he who sings, who says, or in any way brings home to our heart the noble doings, feelings, darings, and endurances of a brother man. He has verily touched our hearts as with a live coal from the altar. Perhaps there is no worship more authentic.

Past and Present

When a Nation is unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it: Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye would not have been unhappy. It is not according to the laws of Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and willful and unwillful Mistake of Fact; behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out; Nature's long-suffering with you is exhausted; and ye are here!

These be thy gods, O Israel? And thou art so willing to worship,-poor Israel!

"My starving workers?" answers the rich mill-owner: "Did I not hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?--Verily Mammonworship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, 'Where is thy brother? he too made answer, Am I my brother's keeper? Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?"

RALPH W. EMERSON

The Poct

When John saw, in the apocalypse, the ruin of the

world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven, as the fig-tree casteth her untimely fruit.

JOHN RUSKIN

The Two Boyhoods

"Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe." The word is spoken in our cars continually to other reapers than the angels-to the busy skeletons that never tire for stooping. When the measure of iniquity is full, and it seems that another day might bring repentance and redemption "Put ye in the sickle." When the young life has been wasted all away, and the eyes are just opening upon the tracks of ruin, and faint resolutions rising in the heart for nobler things-"Put ye in the sickle."

Time and Tide

I happened to be reading this morning (29th March) some portions of the Lent services, and I came to a pause over the familiar words, "And with Him they crucified two thieves." Have you ever considered (I speak to you now as a professing Christian) why, in the accomplishment of the "numbering among transgressors," the transgressors chosen should have been especially thieves-not murderers, nor, as far as we know, sinners by any gross violence? Do you observe how the sin of theft is again and again indicated as the chiefly antagonistic one to the law of Christ? "This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag" (of Judas). And again, though Barabbas was a leader of sedition and a murderer besides (that the popular election might be in all respects perfect)-yet Saint John, in curt and conclusive account of him, fastens again on the theft. "Then cried they all again saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber."

CHAPTER XIX

THE BIBLE IN THE NOVEL

MANY of our best English novels contain references to the Bible. The selections here given represent for the most part scenes of considerable dramatic power.

CHARLES DICKENS

A Tale of Two Cities

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other. The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before him -is gone; the knitting women count twenty-two.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-three. John 11. 25.

WALTER SCOTT

The Heart of Mid-Lothian

All marked and were moved by these changes, excepting one. It was old Deans, who, motionless in his seat, and concealed, as we have said, by the corner of the bench, from seeing or being seen, did nevertheless keep his eyes firmly fixed on the ground, as if determined

that, by no possibility whatever, would he be an ocular witness of the shame of his house.

"Ichabod!" he said to himself "Ichabod! my glory is departed." 1 Sam. 4. 21.

WILLIAM M. THACKERAY

The Newcomes

At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time. And just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, "Adsum!" and fell back. It was the word we used at school, when names were called; and lo, he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of The Master. Matt. 18. 3.

Pendennis

As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how, when he was a little boy, she used to go to his bedroom at that hour, and hear him say Our Father, and once more, oh, once more, the young man fell down at his mother's sacred knees, and sobbed out the prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been echoed for twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humbled men. And as he spoke the last words of supplication, the mother's head fell down on her boy's, and her arms closed around him, and together they repeated the words "forever and ever" and "Amen." Matt. 6. 9-13.

Vanity Fair.

That night Amelia made the boy read the story of Samuel to her, and how Hannah, his mother, having weaned him, brought him to Eli the High Priest to min

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