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life, is yet willing to do and bear, willing to suffer and endure all things, for love of God and man. Many persons have said that the agony in the garden showed weakness in Jesus. It certainly did show that he was a man, but a man preparing his flesh for a willing sacrifice. Every nerve of his woman's nature was on fire with pain; and as a man he cried, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; but all the greater was the heroism of the resolution which followed:

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Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." There is no other measure of his fortitude than the struggle it cost him to bring his mind to it. Paul showed the same kind of endurance when he said, amid trials which made him sick of life, that it was far better for him to depart and be with Jesus, but to remain in the flesh was necessary for his brethren. Wellington was wont to say that the best soldier was the man who was afraid of death, but was not afraid of duty. It is not the man who can not feel what peril is, nor the man too much abstracted to see it, who suffers to most purpose or does his work best; but the man who sees trial, who feels suffering in all its intensity, and yet, for the sake of duty, will endure all things. It is not simply that Jesus suffered what others inflicted upon him which makes his example the best type of endurance. He was impelled to inflict hardship upon others. He was to do a work, to speak a truth, which must bring great strife and suffering into the world. It would set father and mother against daughter and son, and make foes of the members of the same household, until it seemed to him as if he had been sent, not to send peace on earth, but a sword. That was hardness. He must speak a great many unpleasant truths, tell his best friends of their worst faults, and commit to his disciples a doctrine which would bring them to poverty and

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social disgrace. That was hardness. Yet loving peace, and harmony, and comfort, he saw that war for principle, discord for duty, discomfort for the truth and right, was far better than peace, and harmony, and comfort could be while the world was full of unrebuked wickedness. From the beginning he expected hardness, and prepared for it, and taught his friends to expect it; and when it came, there was endurance enough to match it.

My friends, my word to you is this. Expect hard fortune, and equip yourselves for it. Expect the loss of property, and friends, and outward advantage. But count the cost of a strong personal life in a world like this; count the conditions of obtaining an immortal existence separate from all the existences of the universe; consider what a foundation of strength, honor, and heroism it must have; and see how the changes of life are always bringing us back to the original sources of power, and how much iron the healthful blood must hold, and then learn to endure it, not as an accident, not as an unmeaning fatality, but as the condition of fulfilling the proudest prophecy of the soul.

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XI.

JUDGING THE BIBLE.

WHY does not man yield to some freak of his corrupt nature, and some time take a notion to throw away Shakespeare, or Homer, or Beethoven, or renounce his love of the Alps, or Niagara, and call them all ugly and unworthy of reverence? Because all these things meet a want of his nature, and hence he keeps and loves them. They require no other authority than their own power to satisfy man's love of beauty. And why does not man agree with himself, all at once, to abolish the difference between right and wrong? Because the distinction satisfies a demand of his conscience, which is an essential and permanent demand; and that alone is sufficient to perpetuate the distinction. And the same is true of truth in all its forms. In the long run, man separates truth from error. The truth he will not give up; the error he can not be compelled to keep.

Now, if the Bible is to take its place among the things which satisfy some permanent want of the nature of man, it must share the fate of all other objects. It must be trusted to his moral and religious nature, precisely as Shakespeare is trusted to his æsthetic nature, or Euclid and Newton to his intellectual nature. And if men had as much confidence in the Bible, as a source of supply of man's reli

gious want, as they have in Shakespeare and Euclid in their respective spheres, they would never demand any other authority for the Bible. The very effort which they make to keep it by force of outside authority betrays a want of faith in it. When we begin to prop a building, it shows we are losing confidence in its ability to stand on its own foundation. Otherwise they would say, "If man will keep alive Shakespeare, and Newton, and Plato, on account of the partial beauty, truth, and goodness in them, surely they will need no whip nor spur to compel them to keep alive the Bible, with its truth, beauty, charity, and love." Do we betray a want of faith in the Bible when we put it beside other books, and give it to man in the full faith that his love for truth and beauty, which have made even Homer and Plato immortal on the earth, will make the Bible immortal also? Or do they show a want of faith, who will not trust their Holy Book in an equal trial for immortality with a nature which has made even profane books immortal? When "You must not point out the untruth of the Bible: if you do, men will throw away the truth of it;" or when they say, "If you point out the deformity, they will throw away the beauty;" or, "If you reject the immorality, they will despise its morality," they betray the saddest want of faith both in the Bible and in man. For do but consider it a moment. If we condemn the act of Noah, while in a state of drunkenness, breathing horrid curses upon his own children, will men therefore think the less fondly of that dying cry of Jesus, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do?" If we condemn the doctrine, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," will men therefore despise the other command, "Love thine enemy"? If we reject the miracle of turning water into wine, will it make the

men say,

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parable of the prodigal son less beautiful? If we think the doctrines of demoniacal possession and the millennium erroneous, will it affect the blessing pronounced upon the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the merciful, the faithful? Will it not rather give power and prominence to the true and beautiful objects of the Bible, if we take the brush of criticism and paint these errors into a dark background, or the unimportant things into neutral tints, just where they belong?

I can tell you, friends, some one who loves it must perform this friendly office for the Bible, or the work will be roughly done by those who do not love it. The inconsistencies of the old claim for the Bible are seen and perfectly well understood outside the church; and if the pulpit is not magnanimous enough to confess its old error, the Bible will be thrown aside altogether, as it is indeed now in a fair way of being. For it is plain to be seen that the Bible was never read less, in Christendom, than it is at this day. Thousands and tens of thousands never hear it, except as it is badly read from the pulpit, and even then many are glad when that part of the service is over. A most religious churchwoman said to me not long since, "I can not understand why it is, but I seem to care less about reading the Bible the older I grow, and the more readily I learn to associate the thought and presence of God with all things around me." She felt that it was very wicked; and yet no amount of trying would seem to improve the matter any. Now, her feeling is the feeling of thousands, who find all the essential truths of the Bible more freshly and powerfully illustrated in the literature, art, and science of the day than in the foreign and obscure statements of the Bible. If this tendency is ever counteracted, it will be done by teaching

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