the last from shipwreck there may be, it tells not. The wise father neither promises nor threatens. He leaves His children to understand that obedience brings happiness; disobedience, suffering. God governs His children. as a wise father, and to all our questionings—“What pay for doing right?" "What penalty for doing wrong?" -keeps a silence that is more eloquent than speech. The Bible contains no clear revelation respecting the nature of either eternal life or eternal death. It discloses nothing to curiosity. We can gather from its intimations some probable conclusions; but every kind of dogmatism respecting the eternal future is unscriptural.--LYMAN ABBOTT. The Book of Job. I propose to say something of the nature of this extraordinary book-a book of which it is to say little to call it unequaled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it does through and through the most deeply seated Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were hewn iu a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history are alike a mystery to us. It existed at the time when the canon was composed, and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of the language and contents of the poem itself.FROUDE. The Four Gospels. Why was this Gospel told four times over? A good story is none the worse, perhaps, for being twice told; but it is a great deal the worse for being three times told, while it is often utterly mangled and murdered the fourth time. You know what a risk is run by this repetition. Have not critics in all ages said: "Yet that is what spoils it; that is where we get hold of it and tear it to pieces? If it had only been told once, a very large amount of critical strife and contention would have been removed; but in telling it four times, a great many discrepancies arise, and so we are able to cast doubt upon the whole thing. Now, I think it was told four times because it was told every time by the best story-teller that ever tried it. John wanted to write a composition upon this key-note-the essential Godhead and Divinity of that Man from Nazareth. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory." Not that John believed this more, and others less, but that was a side of Jesus that fascinated John. "I handled God; here is the head that leaned upon the bosom of Omnipotence." And like every true musician, he ends on the key-note with which he started: "These things are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name."--MCNEILL. The Bible a Westminster Abbey. Heroism is indeed the beautiful in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to the surface again, as when, in scraping off a dingy wall in Florence, the workmen came upon the portrait of Dante. Often there come men who throw aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of beggars, and let out the image of God within. Into no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no school of art, has there entered such a band of heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the Christian's book should have been composed by one of these children of heroism. The Bible is a Westminster Abbey, where none but the great sleep.--SWING. New Testament Better Than the Old. "Well, after all, is the New Testament brighter than the Old? Had not the Old Testament saints a grip of something tangible and real? Had not they an advantage that we have not? Oh, if there were only an Elijah living! If there were only an Elisha living today!" Ah, my friends, we are living, after all, under a greater dispensation. Elisha was compelled to say: "The Lord hath hid it from me." He had to confess limitation; and, says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, these great prophets, these great priests, these great mediators of a by-gone age, were not suffered to continue by reason of |