THE BIBLE AT THEIR FOUNDATION,

and which, without it, it is fair to say, would not be in existence to-day.  Those who are the best are guided by its precepts.  Those who are the wisest have implicit confidence in it.  Those who are the most eloquent have studied it intensely.  Those who are powerful in narration of events have imitated its divine simplicity.  Have it at your bedside.  Your mind will broaden faster under its influence than under that of the daily newspaper.  If you have not time to read both, sacrifice the paper.  The paper is trash.  The Bible is solid gold.  If you fill your mind with grand thoughts, your mind will be noble.  You will have principle.

WHERE CAN YOU FIND AS GRAND LANGUAGE

in any politician’s speech?—­“The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thundereth; deep calleth unto deep; the voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness.”  Where can you find as graceful speech?—­“He shall come down as rain upon the mown grass; mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.”  The day is now dawning in this Western world when taste and poetic feeling are to flourish.  We have got the dollars.  We must now get something for the dollars.  Now will the Bible, as ever at such epochs in the past, shine out anew, the criterion, not only of the soul, but of the sentiments—­the book that is first under the scholar’s lamp and alone in his bedchamber.

[Illustration]

THE EVENING OF LIFE.

     Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
       Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh
     A melancholy slave;
       But an old age serene and bright,
     And lovely as a Lapland night,
       Shall lead thee to thy grave.—­Wordsworth.

Age is the outer shore against which dashes an eternity.  The mysterious ocean is either tempestuous or tranquil, just as we view it.  If we look hard down the cliff of death we are appalled with the force of the waves; we are frightened by the din and shock of collision.  But if we gaze afar off we see no great disturbance.  All is moving with the true poetry of motion, in the fitness of God’s plan, even as viewed by one of His works.  “The more we sink into the infirmities of age,” says Jeremy Collier, “the nearer we are to immortal youth.  All people are young in the other world.  That state is an eternal spring, ever fresh and flourishing.  Now, to pass from midnight into noon on the sudden; to be decrepit one minute and all spirit and activity the next, must be a desirable change.  To call this dying is an abuse of language.”  Death to the aged is natural, therefore as pleasant and easy as any other natural office of the body.  Indeed, it is far easier than the operation by which we even get our teeth in youth.  If we, then, are able to forget that greatest shock of pain so quickly as we do, why shall we dread a little sinking of the breath, and the unwilling battle of a body that is tired and