What wealth can be created without capital?  Robinson Crusoe, on his lonely island, was a capitalist as well as a laborer and a land-holder.  Put him down there without any capital—­simply a naked, featherless, two-legged and two-handed, animal, without clothes, without a gun or a fish-hook, without hoe, or hatchet, or knife, or rusty nail, without a particle of food to keep him from fainting, and what will become of him?  He gathers perhaps some wild fruits from the bushes; he picks up perhaps some shell-fish from the water’s edge; he surprises a fawn or a kid, and throttles it and tears it to pieces with his fingers; he kindles a fire perhaps by rubbing two dry sticks together till they ignite with the friction; and so he keeps himself alive for a few days; but how little progress does he make!  But let him by any means have a little to begin with in the shape of implements and materials; give him an axe or a spade, a jack-knife, or only a fragment of an iron hoop, give him a gill of seed wheat, or a single potato, or no more than a grain of maize, for planting; and how soon will his condition be changed!  He has begun to be, even in this small way, a capitalist; and his labor, drawing something from the past, begins to reach into the future.  Instead of spending all his time and strength in a constant scratching for the food of to-day, how soon will he have a blanket of skins, and a hut, and a garden in which he is preparing to-day the food of future months.  Give him now a little more capital; let him have the means of stocking his farm with some sort of domestic animals; give him only a steer and a heifer, or even a pair of goats, and how soon will he begin to be rich.

* * * * *

=_James W. Alexander, 1804-1859._= (Manual, p. 480.)

From his “Discourses on Christian Faith and Practice.”

=_34._= THE CHURCH A TEMPLE.

In surveying the past, we observe a beautiful fitness and an enchanting variety in the materials which have been already built into that part of the edifice which has thus far been reared.  How unlike the corps of prophets to the corps of apostles; and how unlike the several individuals of each.  We have Scripture authority for placing these among the most honorable and sustaining parts of the fabric, near the corner-stone:  for we are “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets.”  Isaiah with his evangelic clarion.  Jeremiah with his pastoral reed of sorrows, and David with his many-voiced harp, sometimes loud in notes of triumph, and sometimes subdued to the voice of weeping, stand out with a marked individuality which becomes the more surprising, the more nearly we examine the distinctive features.  They may be likened to those immense but goodly stones, carried up in courses, along the precipitous side of the valley, to form the basis for the temple of Solomon.  The twelve apostles, including the last, and humanly speaking, the greatest, though brethren,