nor to any theory of their literal infallibility in every minor particular. The doctrine which the brilliant Professor Huxley approved in the champions of the Scriptures, the teaching that the least error in the most unimportant matter of science or history is inconsistent with a true theory of inspiration and is subversive of the Bible, the untenable claim against which he loved to couch his lance and which binds our hopes of salvation to the absolute accuracy of the itinerary of Israel's wanderings through the wilderness, is more of a hindrance than a help in the present generation. The Bible is not the Christian's dictator, but his gracious illumination, his wise, gentle and sufficient guide. It does not dwarf the powers of humanity and thwart its development by taking away the stimulus to energetic work which is furnished by the exhaustless domain of explored truth. It does not cripple those faculties whose life is in their activity or bid men to stultify reason. We might question a book which when all nature was saying to man, "examine, explore, search, conquer"; lifted up its voice and said, "Vain and needless labour. Open my pages all truth is here." But what does this volume say? "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and to depart from evil is understanding.” The Bible is a witness to this fundamental truth, and while its store is so rich that poet and statesman and philosopher may find in its golden treasury much that is of priceless worth, still the Word of God is primarily a Book of Religion; it reaches down far below and rises far above all other knowledge. It appeals to the innermost nature of man, and when human wisdom has confessed as Solomon did and Goethe has done, that all is vanity and vexation of spirit, it enters the heart like a torch into a darkened cavern. giveth light"; by it men are Truth around which, like the sun, all other truths revolve. restoring the soul.

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"The entrance of Thy word brought back to the Supreme wandering globes around the The law of the Lord is perfect

All men need a perfect moral standard. Examine the Ten Commandments given in the dawn of recorded history; see there a Divine hand smiting down idolatry with all its accompanying degradations. See there a Divine hand building up the institution of the family. See there God's thought of purity and of the sacredness of life and of possessions; see there the Divine idea of truth, of regard for human rights, and then open the New Testament and read the Sermon on the Mount, the fulfilling of the old Law, and then put to yourself the question: "Can I discover elsewhere

so perfect a standard? Can I find a moral legislation which covers so mercifully and completely all human life?" I look around the world and discover that wherever this Book has gone, men, though clinging to other Scriptures, have been awakened out of moral lethargy, they have felt themselves at once challenged and condemned, even though they hold in their hands the scattered gems of ethical and spiritual truth which gleam from other sacred books than the Christian. Where outside of the area which is blessed by the Bible will you find true honour and high privilege granted to womanhood? The greatest of all emancipations, that by which the Christian ideals of the family have superseded the non-Christian whether savage or civilized, is co-extensive with the influence of the Christian Scriptures. I might tell the story of what this Book has done for the souls of women, how in Zululand girls who were to be exchanged for cattle have learned that they were bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, always and everywhere the friend and helper of womankind; how in Syria those who had been left in mental and moral babyhood have learned from the New Testament the liberating truths of the Gospel; how in Japan the daughter, who for the sake of her parents has sold herself to shame and is made the theme of many a praiseful story, where, "no one ever thinks of questioning the right of a parent to make this sale any more than he would allow a daughter to rebel against it," has learned from Mary's Son that there is earthly and heavenly enfranchisement for her; how in China, where from the cradle to the grave her life is one long-drawn woe, whose great teacher never thought of remedying misery by delivering woman from polygamy and social inferiority; and in India where often the sorrows of her lot, in enforced widowhood, would melt any heart not dead to generous feeling, in India where hundreds of nonChristian social reformers have at last risen up to fight the consecrated cruelty, old at least as the law of Menu, woman is finding the Bible an emancipator which, while breaking the chains of earthly bondage lifts her imprisoned soul to heights and hopes beyond the stars. When her children expire in her arms, or are torn from her love to be murdered, as in China, and that grief which makes many a little grave so sacred wrings her heart, she is not left to mourn in utter desolateness of spirit, for she has heard of One who loves and shepherds her lost lambs in fields Elysian, and declares that "of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”

What a wondrous ennobling power this Book has had over

all willing to receive it! What we call Puritanism was one of the greatest efforts ever made to get the Bible enshrined into social law and national habits, and to it are due the liberty and purity of English-speaking nations. Even conservative Oxford from her chair of history has said that England's progress for two hundred years on its moral and spiritual side was due to Puritanism. The idolatrous Malagasy gets the Bible into his heart and suffers death by torture rather than surrender it or his faith in it. Professor Drummond goes to Africa and finds illustrations of Christian character among newly-converted believers in God's Word which appear to him among the finest in the world. A native preacher holding up a copy of the Scriptures before some of the Christian inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, exclaims, "This is my resolve, the dust shall never cover my Bible, the moth shall never eat it, the mildew shall never rot it, my light and my joy." And late in his life the all-accomplished poet and philosopher Coleridge, who had ranged so widely through literature, withdrew from his usual studies and took with him in his travels only a small English New Testament, saying to his friends, "I have only one Book and that is the best.

But we may believe with Ewald that "in the New Testament is all the wisdom of the world," and with Sir William Jones that "in the Bible are more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written," and yet not discover that the chief secret of the Bible is not truth, so much as life, or rather life through the medium of truth. It appears to possess or to be accompanied by a divine energy working unparalleled miracles. Even sceptics are impressed by it. One who sees no difference worth mentioning between the theology of Christ and the theology of Mohammed wrote not long since in the Fortnightly Review, "Look at what Christian Missionaries have done in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and Madagascar. In that latter island British evangelists really fought out the battle of civilization without costing a penny or a drop of blood to any European government. The same work is in its inception in the centre of Africa. Who first put steamers on Lakes Tanganyika and Nyassa? Who first explored the great affluents of the Congo? A little steamer of the Baptist Mission Society." This materialist has no sympathy with the motive forces which are back of Christian missions, but as a political economist he is glad in the interests of edu

cation and civilization to encourage the work of a Biblical Christianity. "China and Japan may send delegations to America to study our ways and take back the force of our institutions and take back models of our industries, but one Missionary will do more to start the living currents of civilization than all the delegations, simply because he begins farther back in his teachings and awakens conscience and the sense of self-hood and the dignity of human nature. He goes to a nation, with the Bible in his hand, a simple and pathetic figure, less than a drop in the ocean; but he sinks in the depths only to reappear in some other form; the Bible has grown into a charter of freedom and of true national life. He seems to be doing little, but like the Norse god who drained his drinking horn, and lo! the sea was narrowed, he often finds himself in the midst of results miraculous and great." Always and everywhere the Bible brings life, its principles, which are universal, touch the springs of love and hope and fear and are in the greatest contrast with any system which "fills the whole course of life with punctilious minutiæ of observances."

Englishmen and Americans are racially akin to the men who wrote the Vedas and drew out those astounding compositions, the philosophical treatises of the Upanishads, but we have found our Bible in the writings of another race; it comes to us not through Aryan but through Semitic prophets and apostles. And I know not how to set forth the supremacy, the vigor and the predestined universalism of the Bible so effectively, as by pointing to its majestic work in moulding the English-speaking nationalities. In the American Republic, humanity, according to Professor Bryce, has reached the highest level, not only of material well-being but of intelligence and happiness which the race has yet attained. Within a hundred years, according to Mr. Lowell's prophecy, this will become "the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised and developed by man. But it is historically certain that America was "born of the Bible." From it came in the sixteenth century the strongest impulses which colonized her shores. Out of Biblical precepts and especially out of New Testament examples sprang the simpler forms of self-government in town and Church which have gone with civilization in its westward march. From the Bible came the Christian teaching which exalted man above the state. From it came the observance of the Lord's day, the bulwark of our freedom "the core of our civilization," and from it came the teaching of spiritual truth, to

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the young, which "has done more to preserve liberty than grave statesmen and armed soldiers." The Bible was the first Book which the types of Gutenberg ever printed, and that Book is the foundation of the educational system of the New World. From it came its public schools and more than three hundred Christian Colleges stretching from the elms of Cambridge to the great Lakes, and far over prairie and mountain to where "the haunted waves of Asia die on the shores of the world-wide sea.' From the Bible came the better elements of our national institutions. It was

an echo of the Scriptures that Jefferson sounded in the teaching that all men are created equal in their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of life's best good. From the Bible has come the salt of righteousness which has thus far withstood the wastings of corruption.

In America has the Word of God had a free field for its divine energies. And it is vastly significant, and the fact ought to be blown by trumpet-voices to the ends of the earth that the progress of Biblical Christianity in America in spite of the forces of materialism and the sudden inrush of all nationalities, has been far greater than the unparalleled increase of population. Opening the pages of the recent national census we learn that there are more than twenty millions of church communicants in the United States of America, and that according to Dr. Carroll, the careful superintendent of the department of Churches, the Christian population numbers nearly fifty-seven millions, leaving only five millions belonging to the non-religious and anti-religious classes. We learn that while the population increased twenty-four per cent. between 1880 and 1890, the communicants in the churches increased over forty-two per cent., and, as indicating the swifter growth and ampler conquests of those churches which regard the Bible as a supernatural revelation designed to be authoritative over all men, may be mentioned the fact, that the evangelical communicants in the United States are to the non-evangelical as one hundred and three to one. The Church in America "is devoted to the temporal and eternal interests of mankind. Every cornerstone it lays, it lays for humanity, every altar it establishes, it establishes for the salvation of souls. What is there in the world to compare with the Church in its power to educate, elevate and civilize mankind?"

Those Christian believers who hold the Bible in their hands are making the most extensive conquests to-day in the field which is the world. The victorious march of a Biblical Christianity

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