"I slowly repeated the verse, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.'

"You have been a shepherd all your life, and you have watched the heavy shadows pass over the valleys and over the hills, hiding for a little while all the light of the sun. Did these shadows ever frighten you?'

"Frighten me?' he said quickly. 'Na, na! Davie Donaldson has Covenanters' bluid in his veins; neither shadow nor substance could weel frighten him.'

"But did those shadows ever make you believe that you would not see the sun again-that it was gone forever?'

"Na, na, I couldna be sic a simpleton as that.'

"Nevertheless that is just what you are doing now.' He looked at me with incredulous eyes.

"Yes,' I continued, 'the shadow of death is over you, and it hides for a little the Sun of Righteousness, who shines all the same behind it; but it's only a shadow. Remember, that's what the Psalmist calls it-a shadow that will pass; and when it has passed, you will see the everlasting hills in their unclouded glory.'

"The old shepherd covered his face with his trembling hands and for a few minutes maintained an unbroken silence; then letting them fall straight on the coverlet, he said, as if musing to himself: 'Aweel, aweel! I ha' conned that verse a thousand times among the heather, and I never understood it so afore-afraid of a shadow! afraid of a shadow!' Then, turning upon me a face now bright with an almost supernatural radiance, he exclaimed, lifting his hands reverently to heaven: Ay, ay, I see it a' now. Death is only a shadow-a shadow with Christ behind it-a shadow that will pass. Na, na, I'm afraid nae mair.'

"As the people wended their way home that Sunday through the streets of Torquay, not a few, I am sure, repeated to themselves the words of the

Nov. 25-30. A Too MUCH UNTHOUGHT-OF CAUSE FOR THANKFULNESS.-1 Tim. i. 12.

The Revised Version is better: "I thank Him who enabled me, even Christ Jesus our Lord, for that He counted me faithful, appointing me to his service." Specially notice that last word, service. You see it is a wider word than ministry in the King James Version, and it is a word which better expresses the meaning of the original. Ministry is a service, but it is a specific form of service; whereas service is a word more comprehensive, including indeed the particular service of the ministry, but also, and as well, all other sorts of service which may be done for the Lord Christ.

It is a frequent advice, and a good one, to count your mercies. We should be more thankful and more contented did we do it oftener. When, at last, the publisher had received the end of the MS. of Dr. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, wearied with Dr. Johnson's continual delays, his publisher exclaimed, “Thank God, I have done with that fellow." Upon hearing this, Dr. Johnson remarked, "I'm glad that fellow thanks God for anything." I fear me there are too many grumbling people who never do thank God for anything.

Well, if you were to set about counting your services, what would you reckon up for which to give God thanks? Your health, possessions, influence, friends, Sabbaths, open Bibles, the delights of Christian fellowship, courtesy, liberty? Well worth your thanks are things like these. And it is a most wise and good thing to make a shining and reverent catalogue of the multiplied and various gifts of God.

But I wonder if, in your cataloguing of reasons for thankfulness, you would not forget to number as among the best

and brightest of them this-the opportunity for service.

This, as our Scripture teaches us, was Paul's surpassing reason for thankfulness.

This is the pith of the Christian idea of life-that it be a service. Consider Christ. Do you remember how Peter described our Lord (Acts x. 35), who went about doing good? How much in that description! Analyze a moment:

Who He Himself; not by proxy did He serve.

He went about. He did not wait for opportunity to come to Him. DoingHe actually accomplished good; He did not merely sentimentalize. He went about doing good; it was His habit; it was not a spirit of service now and then.

And now concerning service, the opportunity of which we ought to count great cause for thankfulness, our Scripture teaches us some most important lessons.

(a) Service is an entrusting. Counted me faithful-that is, trustworthy. George Eliot, in one of her poems, puts some most noble words into the mouth of Antonio Stradivarius, of Cremona, concerning service as a trust committed to us. Speaking of the masters who will play on his violins, Stradivarius says:

While God gives them skill,

I give them instruments to play upon,
God choosing me to help Him.

Then the thought of a rival violinmaker comes to him, and Stradivarius goes on, how nobly:

This is the thought, to make service noble: God entrusts me with service.

(b) For service there is enabling. Who hath enabled me-that is, put strength into me. There is this enabling by a sometimes special conferring of strength for special duties, and also by the action of the great law that use of one's self in service increases power for service.

(c) Concerning service, our Scripture teaches us that God will not harbor against us former refusals and failures. Notice that thirteenth verse. It is the glory of the Gospel that it divorces us from an evil past.

(d) In our Scripture there is disclosed to us what makes service valuable (14) : Faith and love. Not the greatness of the service, but the motive of it.

You make the opal shine by clasping it in your hand and so warming it. Though it seem dull before, it will glisten now. And a slight service in itself, clasped in the warm hand of love, to the Lord Jesus will glow with beauty in His eyes.

Job xix. 25-27 and Immortality and Resurrection in the Old Testament.

BY J. B. REMENSNYDER, D.D., NEW YORK CITY.

THIS is one of the weightiest passages in the Scriptures. Few bear more clearly the unique seal of inspiration.

It is one of those utterances which shine by their own light, which illuminate the deep mysteries of truth, and which, by a divine prescience, open a vista into the eternal depths. It reminds us of the incomparable sayings of Jesus. Delitzsch says of it: "Among the three pearls which became visible in the Book of Job above the waves of conflict

(viz., xiv. 13-15, xvi. 18-21, xix. 2527), there is none more costly than this third, wherein the hero himself plants the flag of victory above his Own grave. Ewald says: "Thus spring forth (verses 25-27), as from a purer celestial air borne by the Spirit, those few but infinitely weighty, sublime words, which constitute the crown of the whole contention-words of purest splendor of divine truth, without anything to dim them, which suddenly make the speaker an inspired prophet, so that he here at once begins quite unexpectedly with higher certainty."

What

The significance of this inspired outbreak of triumph and glory from Job's bed of dejection and woe is its bearing upon the Old Testament teachings respecting a future state. That it sheds any light upon the condition beyond the grave has been and is denied by many, as its testimony is reduced to such faint glimmerings as to amount to practical silence and darkness. light, then, if any, does this passage throw upon the doctrines of immortality and resurrection? The whole passage runs thus in the Authorized Version : "For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my veins shall be consumed within me. The Revised Version differs in no material point, its rendering being almost verbally identical, except in its omission of "worms and "body" in verse 26, which, however, does not affect the main

sense.

The opening words, "I know, at once arrest us. The Hebrew verb indicates absolute certainty. Job's sudden change of manners must here have arrested the attention of his friends. His meaning is: "I am about to declare a mighty truth, and I do it with authority. I feel the inspiration of the Almighty resistlessly moving within me. "That my Redeemer liveth."

The Hebrew word is Goel. The "Goel" was the nearest blood relation, whose duty it was to avenge his kinsman if unjustly slain. While Job thus refers to a usage of the time, yet his meaning goes far beyond it. No man has injured him. But he has suffered as guilty at the hands of God, and his conclusion shows clearly that it is God to whom he looks as his vindicator. It is not vengeance that he seeks, but the manifesting of his innocence. Hence both versions rightly render Goel not "Avenger," but "Redeemer. " Whether there is here a foreglimpse of Christ the true Redeemer, such as was granted to Abraham and some of the Old Testament saints, we cannot tell.

"And that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. Literally, "shall rise up"-i.e., after Job had gone down to Hades. "Upon the earth, "Hebrew aphar-literally, the dust of which man was made. Says Delitzsch: “An Arab would think of nothing else but the dust of the grave in this connection." Over the dust of Job in the grave his Redeemer, God, shall rise up and vindicate his innocence.

"And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." This is the pivotal point, the crux of the passage. Job here speaks of a conscious vision. Is it after death or in this life? If the former, then we have here an indisputable revelation of immortality. The literal translation runs: "After that they have destroyed

my · skin from (Cox-"out of;" Wordsworth-" forth from;" Delitzsch-"free from") my flesh shall see God." The verb nakaph means destroyed, devoured, torn in pieces; and the Authorized Version, without violence to the idea, supplies worms as the agents. That Job means that his body will be ut terly broken down by natural death is so evident that one marvels that scholars should be found to controvert it. Delitzsch says: "Job here looks for certain death." Oetinger: "Job here speaks of himself when his dust shall have moldered away." Oehler: "The

passage presupposes a continuation of Job's communion with God after his death." Cox: "A man whose body is torn in pieces, devoured, destroyed, reduced to dust, should be dead, if words have any force or significance. Yet in this state Job makes this declaration of himself, his cumulative and reiterative phrases showing his absolute certainty of the vision: "I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself—whom mine eyes shall behold-I, and not another." Beyond all question, immortality is here declared; the continued existence of the soul after death is set forth as a certitude. Language could not be chosen to make its revelation more clear, positive, and incontestable.

Does the passage further teach the doctrine of the resurrection? Not clearly; but it certainly seems to look more or less to it. Job does not speak of a bodiless beholding of God. But he says "From," or "out of," his flesh, in which at least there is an ambiguity, and with his "eyes" he shall behold God. He seems, therefore, to have a conception of a sensible perception, analagous to our present bodily one. The Targum sees in the passage an allusion to a future corporeal nature, as will be seen from its translation, thus: "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and hereafter His redemption will arise over the dust (into which I shall be dissolved), and after my skin is again made whole this will happen; and from my flesh I shall again behold God." Delitzsch, with a wise moderation, says: "Job's faith is here on the direct road to the hope of a resurrection; we see it germinating and struggling toward the light. "The learned Dr. Pusey goes much farther (Lectures on Daniel, p. 504): "No doubtful meaning of any words can efface from this passage the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh." St. Chrysostom varies the teaching of the fathers thus: "Those words inculcate the doctrine of the Church, the resurrection of the flesh." Those, accordingly, who utterly deny all possibility of any reference here to the resur

rection, are taking, to say the least, very rash ground.

A sound, judicious exposition of the particular expressions and general tenor of this weighty passage, therefore, deduces from it an unmistakable revelation of immortality. And this, buttressed by so many others, and by such ocular and material demonstration as the translations of Enoch and Elijah, should set at rest the questions whether or not the Old Testament makes known the reality of a future state. And further, it contains within it the germs of the blessed doctrine of the resurrection. Hearing this shout of victory in the moment of defeat, this outcry of rapture in the midst of agony, this witness of immortality in close prospect of death, and this voice of resurrection from out the dust of the grave, we stand awed by the moral grandeur of this summit of the Book of Job. And we can say, with the philosopher Jacobi : “Job, maintaining his virtue, and justifying the utterance of the Creator respecting him, sits upon his heap of ashes as the glory and pride of God, and with Him the whole celestial hosts witnesses the manner in which he bears his misfortune. He conquers, and his conquest is a triumph beyond the stars.

HAS the age the men for the deep, quiet, broad, self-denying, thoughtful and yet practical work needed? Men who can put life into their ideas, inspiration into their feelings, character into their utterances, personality into their conduct? The distractions interfere with inner culture; there is an almost irresistible temptation to yield immediately to superficial impressions; the denomination, the school, the local interest and national concerns are predominant; but the men needed must understand the age itself as the result of the past and the fountain of the future, must be masters of themselves and of the age, and must descend to the depths for the powers needed in the present crisis.

Papers in Social Science and Com

parative Religion.

BY REV. B. F. KIDDER, PH.D.

V. THE GREEK AT HOME. THERE are Greeks and Greeks. Not all of the dwellers in Hellas are Hellenes. The Slavs, who overran Thessaly and the Peloponnesus during the eighth century of our era, have unquestionably many descendants among the present population of Greece. The Wallachians, who had a roving shepherd life on Olympus and in the regions of Acarnania, although politically a part of the present Greek nation, belong to the same stock as the Roumanians of the Danube. While the Albanians, a still more powerful and important element of the new Kingdom of Greece, are probably descended from the ancient Illyrians, and are perhaps of the same blood as the Macedonians, yet the name of Greek has not lost its individuality, nor all of its traditional and peculiar quality.

Athens, more than any other city, we might almost say more than all other cities, stands for Greece; and Attica was not contaminated by the barbarian invasion.

More than this, the predominance everywhere in Greece of the Greek element is seen in the language of the people. In spite of many centuries of vicissitudes, barbarian invasion, and Turkish occupancy, there is far less difference between the Greek spoken in Greece to-day and the Greek of Herodotus, or even of Homer, than there is between the English of to-day and the English of Chaucer.

In studying the institutions of Greece as indicative of the progress of the people, we should not forget that it was only a little more than sixty years ago that the war of independence was brought to a successful close and the new Kingdom of Greece was estab

lished. Any people who can endure centuries of Turkish domination without being utterly ruined is worthy of no little consideration. To completely recover from such degradation in sixty years would be to perform the crowning miracle of social and political history.

But the Greek is free to-day in the land of his fathers, under his own immortal skies; and the movements of his mind and heart, as he builds anew the temples of his gods, are of more than ordinary interest, not only to every lover of Greece as it was, but also to every student of sociology.

As one walks the streets of modern Athens it is a little difficult to study the present by itself. The past throws its irresistible spell over everything. One cannot forget that here art reached its highest development, and philosophy attained summits from which it caught a glimpse of things divine.

But if we experience a feeling of disappointment in finding the present, in some respects, below the ideals of the past, it is only what, with equal reason, we might experience almost anywhere else in the world. England never had but one Shakespeare, and Germany today has no living Goethe or Schiller, Italy no Raphael or Michael Angelo.

It is true that the Greek of to-day is not capable of building another Parthenon; but he is capable of appreciating the old one, not as a worshiper of the past, nor (like the people of too many other lands where works of the great masters are found) for the sake of extorting money from travelers, but as a lover of the beautiful and a patron of art. He builds no fence around his priceless treasures, but he builds splendid museums, taxing his not too abundant resources heavily to this end, and makes them absolutely free to all.

Greece to-day has no living Plato or Aristotle; n academy as it once was. But no people of modern times, with