God Not Dead.

At one time I was sorely vexed and tried by my own sinfulness, by the wickedness of the world, and by the dangers which beset the Church. One morning I saw my wife dressed in mourning. Surprised, I asked her who had died. She replied: "Do you not know? God in Heaven is dead." I said to her: How can you talk such nonsense, Katie? How can God die? He is immortal, and will live through all eternity." "Is that really true?" she asked. "Of course," I said, still not perceiving what she was aiming at; "how can you doubt it? As surely as there is a God in Heaven, so sure is it that He can never die." "And yet," she said, "though you do not doubt that, you are still so hopeless and discouraged." Then I observed what a wise woman my wife was, and mastered my sadness.--MARTIN LUTHER.

God Dismissed from Human Thought.

It would be an alarming experiment if the King of Kings were to be dismissed from the minds of the people of this country, for the notion of such an infinite Being is the ideal by which society measures not only its duties, but also its greatness and its hopes. The Deity is the storehouse in which humanity treasures up all its best thoughts. The storehouse can never become full; for, however wise and kind society may become, the name of God opens to receive all the human conceptions of good. This God has always beckoned man on and on. Whether Moses, Daniel, Isaiah, Plato or Paul lifted the eye to

gcodness of self.

Heaven, each saw a Being far beyond the knowledge o Wonderful treasurer of our world He casts away our dross and retains all our gold! His angels bear man up, lest he dash his foot against a stone. Cities have fallen. Their ruins adorn and solemnize the old East. The temples have fallen where the Jewish and Greek statesmen began their speeches with prayer, but the God whom they worshiped gathered up all their moral beauties and bore them onward toward the Christian period without loss.-SWING.

Why Not Accept God?

Why not most cordially espouse the assumption of a Deity? The greatness of such a Being is no hindrance to faith, for the universe does not teach anything else than greatness. Having seen the ocean in peace and in storm, having seen the sun and moon encompass our earth as marvelous lamps, having learned that the sun has been flinging out light and heat for millions of years, having learned that there are millions of such suns, perceiving that man is a mind that can study such a universe and can trace, measure and weigh these distant orbs, the heart need not expect the God of such a scene to pass alone in the likeness of a man or a bird, or even an angel with wings. How can the mind turn from a half-hour of thought in astronomy, in whose heavens are seen gigantic worlds whirling in space like insects in a sunbeam; orbs a million miles in diameter and lighting up systems as an electric lamp lights up a little library or bedchamber; orbs in the light of which a moral and thinking

form of life can read a book at the distance of 95,000,000 miles from the lamp? How turn from globes which run 50,000 or 100,000 miles an hour, and yet carry gently the trembling dewdrop and the waking or sleeping forms of life; orbs which perhaps support a human race on their bosom, and ever change their speed a second in a thou. sand years? How turn from these things and expect God to be anything like the ruler of a city or a sacred cow of the East or the sacred reptiles of old Egypt? It is necessary that the Creator of such a stupendous scene should trausend all thought and move before man a perpetual dej and height wholly immeasurable.--SWING.

God Beyond Philosophy.

In its sublimest research, philosophy

May measure out the ocean-deep-may count
The sands or the sun's rays-but God! for Thee
There is no weight nor measure. None can mount
Up to Thy mysteries. Reason's brightest spark,
Though kindled by Thy light, in vain would try
To trace Thy counsels, infinite and dark;

And thought is lost ere thought can soar so high,
Even like past moments in eternity.

G. R. DERZHAVIN.

God Unchanging.

When we have looked on the pleasures of life, and they have vanished away; when we have looked on the works of Nature, and perceived that they were changing; on the monuments of Art, and seen that they would not

star.d; on our friends, and they have fled while we were gazing; on ourselves, and felt that we were fleeting as they we can look to the throne of God. Change and decay have never reached that. The waves of an eternity have been rushing past it, but it has ever remained unshaken. The waves of another eternity are rushing toward it; but it is fixed, and can never be disturbed. — F. W. P. GREENWOOD.

A Scientist's Idea of God.

When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through Nature-when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation-I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all.— FARADAY.

The Nature of God.

A little child has never gone out of its native village. Its father has been a sailor. The child says to him: "Father, what is the ocean?" "Oh, my child," says the father, "the ocean-why, suppose that little brook there were to widen, and widen, and widen, till it reached away beyond that hill; and then suppose it were to widen, and widen, and widen, till it reached away beyond the mountain; and then suppose it were to reach farther and

farther til you could not see the banks of it. That would be the ocean." "What, father! As big as that?" "Oh, my child, it is a thousand times bigger than that. "Well, father, what is a storm on the ocean?" The father takes a pail of water, and sets it down, and oscillates it until the waves roll from side to side, and then he says: "That is it, on a small scale, my child. It gives only a hint of what a storm on the ocean is." The child will have a very limited conception, I take it, of such a storm from what he sees in the pail. But every drop of that water in the pail is like the water of the ocean; and every one of its waves, in its curves, its motions, its laws, represents the most gigantic waves of the sea.

Thus the lowest experiences in human nature—of love, of pity, of fidelity and of truth, small in us—are of the same essential quality as they are in God. They are vaster in God; they are in Him inconceivable in magnitude, in intensity, in fruitfulness and in beauty. But we have the root-notion; and it is not an unfair interpretation which our imagination gives. -BEECHER.

God the All-Good.

God the Lover; God the All-good; God that will not by any means clear the guilty; God that would save them. every one; God that will use pain and joy alike. in dealing with those whom He loves, to make them His children-this is the God whom I worship and against whom you sin. This is the God toward whom I call you to repent. Repent of an unfilial life. Repent of selfishness over against such bounty. Repent of all that is low and