cance of stately ritual and reverent religious forms moves him deeply and calls forth a devout response from his soul. In the first paper, writing of "Death," he says men generally contemplate it with terror, with hope, and with penitence: with terror because of its darkness, grimness, and unavoidableness. Yet it is necessary to look it straight in the face and adjust our minds to it. The Gospel of Cheerfulness preached so gaily and courageously by Louis Stevenson, and welcomed so thankfully by his readers, is a poor thing if it does not take death into account. Men also, when they look at death, instinctively cast a glance of hope beyond it to something that intimates itself from the other side of death. The terrors of death do not quench the spark of this hope. An agnostic may proclaim at his club that he for one regards himself as a candle that will presently be blown out; but when he is quite alone, and has thrown the butt of his cigar into the fire, and the last doors have banged, and he gets up and whistles himself into his bedroom-well, he would hardly be whistling so cheerily if there were not somewhere inside of him a dim, latent hope of some better fate for himself than he stated to his cronies at the club. Men could not go on living bravely if they had absolutely no hope in their hearts. Another emotion men naturally feel in contemplating life's end is penitence-not pusillanimous whimpering but a regret over some things in an irrevocable past. Even if a man repudiates the theological idea of sin, he cannot help knowing that there have been words and actions and desires in his record which he would fain blot out. And the approach of death is pretty sure to intensify such regrets. Also he is likely to have an overshadowing sense of One against whom he has sinned, and who has the right and the power to call him to account. Men usually gifted with selfesteem do not need to be told that they are alive, nor that they are fine, capable, and successful persons; but they do need to be impressively reminded that they are going to die some day, and that, in spite of their conscious respectability and excellence, there are at least a few things in the record of their lives which they would do well to be sorry for. One of these papers is on "The Dullness of Irreligious People," with the author's "second cousin, George," as an example, of whom, after receiving a visit from him, he writes: "I have seldom been so much bored; and yet he is an intelligent man, converses agreeably and listens well. Now that he is gone, I find myself considering the mystery of his abysmal dreariness. I believe it arises from his lack of the religious sense. It is not that I have tried to talk religion with him; I myself seldom care to converse about God; I am not complaining of any irresponsiveness to anything I have said. My distress about him is caused, rather, by my contemplation of that arid waste he calls his mind. Now, his mind is full of facts, well selected and arranged; he has a fine taste in architecture; the land where he dwells is a fairly pleasant and kindly place: but the trouble with it is it is not a Land of Promise. There is no prospect, nothing whatever beyond. It is like such a landscape as you might see in a commercial traveler's dream of paradise. The place he lives in is well laid out, has paved streets and respectable-looking houses; but it has no harbor, opening toward the ports of all the world, no great ships standing out to

sea for brave voyages of rich and splendid commerce; rather, prosaic barges loaded with the necessities of life towed along an inland canal by mules. In his town there are no temples. George would not know a temple if he saw it; he would think it to be a Corn Exchange. This much I know: if to live means to be like my second cousin, it is far better to die than to live. Reverting now to the dullness of irreligious people, of whom George is an example, it is a fact beyond question; they yawn in one another's company, and I am perfectly prepared to declare that their philosophy is too dull to be true. When I tell George there are more and nobler things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in his low philosophy, he dully doubts. When I say that the fact that we can and do conceive of a divine Saviour indicates that there must be one greater than our dreams; that our vision of the streets of the heavenly city paved with gold makes it probable they are paved with something better; in other words, 'Eye hath not seen,' and the rest of the quotation: my second cousin calls this rank idealism expressed in frothing rhetoric. But such faith and such visions have done more to make the world what it is of good and noble than all your steamships and Stock and Produce Exchanges, and Societies for the Propagation of Sound Thinking could have ever done. Religion is entitled to due credit for the world's measure of welfare and peace and beauty. She has a right to be listened to, with the respect due to high character and truthfulness, when she stands with confident eyes and glowing cheeks and cries to mankind: 'See what I have done for you! Have I not crossed seas, rescued captives, climbed high hills, haled you to paradise, shaken you over the red mouth of hell in salutary warning, called you hither and thither, and shown you things to come? Have I not saved you from crime when passion and even reason urged you on, lighted the lamps when sense had put them out, strengthened weak knees, and made the lame to leap, opened blind eyes and deaf ears, painted the dull world with glory? And if these proofs seem to you too unsubstantial to justify me in your eyes, have I not labored in quarries and translated and exalted them into arch and pinnacle and fretted spire? Have I not walled off houses of peace and refuge when men were at war? Have I not tuned your instruments of music and built mighty organs, and sung through human throats, and set dead words alight, and lifted you as on wings in spite of the weight of sensuality and death and hell and earthly burdens? Have I not walked with you and guided you as children, held your hands in dangerous paths, comforted you with better gifts than health or wealth, and whispered dear sacred secrets to men when they lay dying? Then can you not treat me with decent respect, even though you cannot explain my origin or understand the mystery of my power? Is it not enough for you that my friends are Beauty and Love, Art and Chivalry and Enlightenment and Philanthropy, who are all such friends with me that we live or die together?— for if you slay me, you will find them dead, too, at my side.' These dull irreligionists ought to know that without religion and the company it brings with it, the only part of even their life that is worth living would become as colorless as dead ashes. Remove Religion from the world, and in due time the race of men would appear as a set of pigs groveling in the

mire, ignorant of what lies at the other side of the nearest tree, doing nothing higher than eating, drinking, breathing, and begetting children, for whom, since they are in their own likeness, they could have little affection and no hope of any good. What, then, is to be said for people like my second cousin? Nothing. On the contrary, there is a great deal to be said against them. They are barbaric instead of cultivated, stupid instead of clever, and retrograde instead of progressive. What advantages they have over their savage ancestors they derive from breathing an atmosphere created for them by nobler men. They have received from aspiring and godly generations treasures of wisdom and knowledge on which they subsist and which they are squandering heedlessly. My cousin and I are moderately intelligible to one another only because he has pilfered the use and meaning of a vocabulary created by the religion toward which he is contemptuously indifferent. He owes his decent manners, refined speech, and mental training to long centuries of discipline under the stimulus, tutelage and direction of religion. He avails himself complacently of the innumerable advantages which the Christian faith, and aspiring struggle, and victorious endeavor of his ancestors and contemporaries have provided, and still maintain even for the benefit of thankless, unappreciative and unperceiving dullards of the world of sense and matter like my cousin George.” This man, who had counted himself a heretic, an outcast, a pariah, because of a mind in suspense about many things, is disgusted by the dull aridness of the irreligious heart and life. And this undecided and befogged man frequented churches, let the great hymns of the ages roll over him, listened to prayers and praises and the reading of God's wondrous Word, till the influence of the elements of religion permeated and saturated him, and, without defining a creed for himself as he had thought he must, he surrendered to the emotions of religion as a child surrenders his eyes to tears which come flooding up from unknown inner depths. How a man's ability to believe is affected oftentimes by his feelings and general condition, the author illustrates in one of his confidential statements of his experience. "Dear me! How plain and easy it is to me now! I seem to myself to have come up out of a small stuffy room on to the bracing house top. There I was last week, down in the depths, poking about among fossils and moth's wings and dust and confusion: my intuitions were as rusty tools; my emotions had ebbed; and, worst of all, I was regarding myself with complacency. No wonder that Christianity seemed to me in that condition quite impossible. I was bothered by the Higher Criticism and the scientific discoveries of somebody whose name I now forget. And now I have come up, and God's sky is over me, and the breeze is in my face. It is not that my intellect has ceased to work; on the contrary it is working better than ever. I see all that I saw last week; I remember everything except the name of the scientific professor; I am this moment capable of delivering a short disquisition on the authorship of Isaiah; but, thank God, my other faculties are awake as well; I am all awake; my whole being, including my best nature, seems alive now; and I could as soon doubt my own existence as to doubt the great realities of Religion and Christianity." At another time,

the man who writes thus frankly has been in a sick room where a man who had suffered pain for ten years was nearing the closing agonies. Looking upon the white face of the sufferer, helpless in the hurts and humiliations of fierce disease, horror takes possession of him, and with his sensibilities in distress and his intellect baffled by the presence of such suffering in God's world, bitterness and skeptical irony fill his mind. It seemed incredible that a "Lord of Love" was transcendent above the sky and immanent in this lower air and life-a "Lord of Love" who was Almighty, too, and could easily have arranged the human lot in some different way. It seemed like brutal carelessness. And what was that "Lord of Love" doing, while this ghastly scene was going on? Was He aware what was happening? He gave no sign, and the horror went on, ruthless and inevitable. The man's heart cried out, “Agony is the truth of life; peace is but an occasional incident in it." Just then he heard a footstep on the stairs and in came a minister. The messenger of Religion knelt by the bed, took the sick man's hand, told him that Jesus Christ died on the cross for his sake; that God does not ask us to do anything we cannot do; that He knows all our weakness and sinfulness; and that all He asks of us is contrition, confession, and trust in Him. We must say in our hearts, "My God, I am sorry for my sins because I love Thee with my whole heart." And then the minister prayed with the sick man and gave him the sacrament. Now the man who had been so rebellious and bitter sitting amid the scenes of that sick room, does not know just how the change was wrought in his feelings, but when the sacred acts of prayer and worship which the minister conducted were over, death no longer seemed to him a sickening horror; it had turned into a warm, soothing presence; it was awful still, but with the awfulness of a holy mystery; and the room no longer seemed like a slaughter house or torture chamber. It was as if, after a couple of harsh notes had been struck on some instrument, notes of rough irreconcilable contrast, another had been added that resulted in a sweet solemn chord. There was no longer that shocking inconsistency between the mellow sunny day outside and the mortal suffering inside. It was no longer true that a Lord of Love held Himself apart in some happy Heaven and amused Himself by tossing heart-breaking problems down into a cruel world full of victims. Heaven and Earth were one now; and He was seen holding them both in the great hollow of His arms against His heart in a span so vast that human eyes could not follow it, but in an embrace so warm that the man watching in the sick room was no longer chilled. The man repeats: "It is not possible for me to tell how this change came about in me nor how real it was to me. I can only say again, it was like a chord of music struck without a stroke, sounding without vibration, welling out in the stillness, like an orchestra of strings and mellow horns held long to one great harmony that reconciled good and evil, pain and joy, life and death, God and nature." And all this change of feeling was brought about by the entrance of Religion on the grim, sinister, distressing scene; by words of faith and trust sounding softly on the still air of the sick man's room; and by the low-spoken consolations of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Bergpredigt begriffsgeschicht-
liche untersucht (For. Out.), 313.
Bennett: The Mystery of God (Arena),
970.

Bennett: The Will of God (Arena), 302.
Beyer: John Oliver Hobbes, 109.

Bible on the Tongue of Lincoln, The:
Lemmon, 93.

Bilbie: A Challenged Statement (Arena),
470.

Biology as a Source of Pulpit Illustra-
tion: Smallwood, 437.
New:
Birth, Nicodemus's

Birth, The Virgin, and the Resurrection
of Jesus: Rishell, 584.

Bishop Isaac Wilson Joyce (with cut):

Bishop Oldham on the Rebirth of India

(Notes and Dis.), 955.

Bishop Stephen Mason Merrill (with

Book, A Notable (Notes and Dis.), 801.
Minister Among
Books. The

Bowen: Our English Spelling of Yester-
day-Why Antiquated? 253.
Bridgman: The Romantic