souled. We honor God in matter by going to see his Great and his Fair, and we should honor him in mind by admiring yesterday and to-day and for ever the types of his Great and his Good, the heroes of his earlier, and the saints of his later dispensation. We greet with all hail the spring and the song of birds; we walk in the autumn wood without weariness; and with fresh delight and wonder revisit Niagara and the Alps, the Atlantic and the Rhine. Why should we not commune with the Super-Nature, the Soul of things, with new inspiration? Here is the oldest history, the purest theism, here are the wisest laws, the highest idealities of the spirit-world, and the thoughts of the Son of God. There may be a familiarity which breeds contempt, but there is an intimacy which ripens into love. The use of the Bible promiscuously in schools, to be spelled and murdered by dullards of the form, may be injurious, but its reverential and early reading by childhood must be favorable to clearness of intellectual vision, as well as purity of heart. It may be so read as to enslave, not free, the soul; there is such a superstition as Bibliolatry, but when intelligently and reverently studied and digested into the mind, it becomes the charter of the fairest freedom, as well as the missal of the lowliest faith and penitence. Then we would say, let these holiest words be lisped by children at their mother's knee, and let them circle round the fireside of home, and let them make musical and devout the walls of school-room and capitol. Life is too hard with soul-seducing temptations and crushing afflictions, for us to cast away this balm of the heart, this munition against evil. Verily we cannot estrange ourselves from this wise and mighty counsellor without losing something of the best part of life, and vacating a domain of rich experience, refined intellectual culture, and sweet and happy ideas of God and life and life's future, for the want of which no amount of earthly prosperity and

pleasures, though broad as the sea and countless as the sands on its shore, can ever compensate.

Inspiration is not infallibility; else it must be subjective in the mind of each receiver, as well as subjective in the mind of the giver. Inspiration is no chain of compulsion, either to the intellect or the heart. High and holy as it is, and descending from the heaven of heavens, it falls gently on the soul, as the rain comes from the zenith, nor mars nor breaks a single petal of the tenderest flower. Though coming from above, it is, like all light, discolored by the atmosphere it passes through, and issues to us as Mosaic, Pauline, Johannine, or Petrine. Inspiration is not, again, perfect character, any more than it is perfect knowledge. It is a help, not a substitute, for our natural powers. The men inspired may not always be the men perfect; there is in them likewise the play of the terrible engine of the will. It is as Peter said of the miracle done to the lame man at the Gate Beautiful, so of the world taught,-"Why marvel ye at this? Or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we made this man to walk?" It was not because they were so perfect in character, or so wise in intellect, beyond all other men, that Paul and John spoke as they did, but because they were illuminated from on high that they and all men might become more wise and more perfect. Inspiration casts no discredit on human nature, but it honors and glorifies it rather, that it can be the sharer and congenial recipient and user of so heavenly a wisdom. It has no conflict with, and assumes no haughty precedence of, reason and genius, but, on the contrary, the intellectual kings and princes of the race have bowed their laurelled heads at the foot of the cross, and have felt glorified, not humiliated, by the act. In its light they have seen light, and been made strong and beautiful as angels by its life and its love. From its elevated plane of vision, they

have spoken with a second-hand inspiration, and have kindled anew the failing hope of the world, and disarmed the problem of despair, the destiny of man.

O wonderful Bible! book of the ages, theme of David and Paul, of Moses and Jesus! a recorded revelation from Infinite Wisdom to frail, ignorant man, sitting in sackcloth and ashes! Egypt is gone, but a race of slaves from her bosom have been the teachers and leaders of the nations. Greece and Rome, too, have had their rise and growth, decline and downfall, and they too are gone; their mythologies and their philosophies have crumbled with their Parthenons and their Pantheons. But this mighty river of thought, the confluence of divers streams of wisdom on the highest subjects of God and the soul and the soul's eternity, taking its rise in the remotest mountains of antiquity, flowing down with an ever-accumulating volume and power through successive climes and countries, bearing on its broad bosom the freight of untold treasures, corn from Egypt, gold from Ophir, myrrh and frankincense from Arabia, silks from Persia, oil and honey from Syria, and its own richest wealth from Judah's sacred mount, still pouring onward with its deepening and resistless tide, as from the hollow of God's own hand, at once giving a refreshing draught to a thirsty soul, and fertilizing provinces and kingdoms with its inexhaustible streams; - what if it have a tinge and a taste from the soils it has passed through, a sediment from the affluence of its tributaries, and a bitter and a sweet from the luxuriant vegetation which adorns its banks and dips into its current? Is it not still the Great River of the waters of life, making glad the city and church of our God, rolling ever onward with its majestic sweep, and carrying with it the innumerable commerce from every kindred and tongue and people under heaven toward the Greater Sea?

ESSAY II.

THE EPISTLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.

THE New Testament has, properly speaking, four kinds of writings embraced in it, the Life of Jesus Christ in the Four Gospels, the History of the Founding of his Church in the Acts of the Apostles, the Commentaries of the Apostles themselves on their Master's work and doctrine, and their own, in the Epistles, and a mystic, magnificent Prophecy at the conclusion, in the Book of Revelation. There is, therefore, an epic order and completeness in the volume. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or rather the beginning of an end. Biography in the Gospels, History in the Acts, the Epistles, and Prophecy in Revelation, make up the fourfold literature of the New Testament. And whatever may be said, or conjectured, of the way in which these writings were preserved, and gathered into one volume at last, we cannot doubt that the providence which was in their production was also in their preservation.

The Epistles are all characteristic. They are no vain repetitions of one another, and though they contain no new doctrines, or additional substance of the Gospel, they give new views of its relations to the existing systems of faith and practice at that time in the world. They reflect decidedly the style of thought and character of those who wrote them, and contain internal evidence of their real authorship. Paul's pen moves, like himself in his missionary tours, in impetuous sallies against error and superstition and sin, but not without an instinctive, though not a formal, order and logic. John's word is Love, love of God to men, love of

Christ, love of men to God and Christ and one another, love at first, love at last, love midway. James is an essayist, gives the reasons of things, moralizes, and philosophizes, and illustrates. Peter breaks out with the noble impulses of his fiery zeal, and glories in his personal evidence of the dignity of the Lord. While Jude mingles the light of the new with examples from the older dispensations, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws a detailed comparison between the Jewish and the Christian system in favor of the latter.

The Epistles thus written by Apostles and apostolic men were the earliest commentaries upon the life and doctrine of Jesus Christ. In the Acts of the Apostles we have their deeds, in the Epistles we have what is equally interesting, their words. They add no fresh matter to the Gospel, as some critics have asserted, nor increase by a single unit or fraction the truths of Christianity. But they have an exceeding charm, as showing what impressions the new light made as it broke on the human vision, what new experiences it wrought, how the new state of mind and character agreed with the old, what plans, theories, explanations, conjectures, hopes, followed their conversion, what was their posture of mind in presenting the Gospel to others, and how it stood the test of time and trial, and with what prophecies and promises they cast it, when they meditated their own cessation from the work, into the bosom of the mighty Future. Nothing could indeed be more opportune to the cause of the Christian religion than thus to have the very letters of apostles and disciples on the subject nearest to their heart, written from the midst of the great work of preaching the Gospel to the world. These writings cannot stand as high, as an authority of what Christianity is, as the words of Jesus himself, but they illustrate those words, show how they took root in human nature at that period, how they