modern literature, in which we hold it, and treasure it, and circulate it this day."

This Deathless Book has survived three great dangers the negligence of its friends; the false systems built upon it; the warfare of those who have hated it. Either one of these three was a severe test of its vitality, but the three together have proved of no more weight and harm than a snow-flake falling upon a ledge of granite.

At times it has seemed as though its destruction was well-nigh assured. Even the manuscript copy from Moses' own hands, lost during the reign of wicked kings, needed the careful search of Hilkiah the high priest before it was found. It was Judah's last king who first attempted the destruction of any portion of the written word, cutting the prophecy with his penknife and then casting it into the fire. The re-writing of this prophecy, thus burned, has saved it to us. One hundred years before Christ Antiochus IV.- known in all history as the Madman - in order to wreak his vengeance upon the Jews, gathered all the Scriptures he could find, and burned them. Three hundred and three years after Christ Diocletian ordered by imperial edict that all copies of the Scriptures be cast into the flames. Against such negligence and hatred, the

Word has been most sacredly guarded. The text of Shakespeare which has existed less than three centuries, is far more uncertain and corrupt than that of the whole New Testament. A careful scholar in remarking upon the singular purity of the sacred text has given as the reason, the faithful care with which it has been kept. "The reason why such detections are not common in common books," says Mr. Burton, "is the rather humiliating one, that they are not worth making.".

There has been scarcely a crime against the race that has not in its defence been charged against this book. The recent assumptions of participators of the slave trade are to the point, a method now repeated in the warfare of intemperance against purity and self-control, as if intemperance is directly sanctioned in the Scriptures. The slave ships have changed their cargoes, and the Book remains unmutilated. Its truths have been distorted into false doctrines, but all to no purpose. No text of all its pure manuscripts has been eliminated; it is a whole book for all time. What if shepherds and fishermen and ploughmen and tentmakers did write by the side of scribes and kings! Even unlearned men, as God's agents, have turned the world upside down. Divine truth makes fisher

men mighty. The wish of Erasmus has become real; since if they will "travellers and weavers peruse the Scriptures at their work." The day predicted by Tyndale has long since dawned, when the boy at the plough knows more than even the learned men of the great translator's day.

It was the boast of Voltaire that while it required twelve men to write Christianity up, he would prove that one man could write it down; and set himself to the task; but even the printingpress, on which at Ferney he published his virulent attacks, was afterwards employed at Geneva for printing the Bible; - and the eternal book still lives, while the great cyclopædist's works have never reached a complete English edition. The house in which Gibbon wrote the closing portion of the "Decline and Fall," attemping to undermine Christianity, was after his death transformed into a hotel, over one of whose rooms was the sign, "This is a Depot of the Bible;" while the income of a large portion of the estate was employed in circulating the very Gospels Gibbon had hated. It was the prophecy of Hume that by the beginning of the nineteenth century philosophy would triumph; and "superstition," by which he meant Christianity, would fade away. Hume died

the month after the Declaration of Independence; and the more than a century of revolutions and changes has left his philosophy a by-word to thinking men among whom Christianity is bearing fruit. The parlor of Lord Chesterfield, where the members of his infidel club were accustomed to meet, became afterwards a room for prayer and praise. In Florence where the Madiai were imprisoned for reading the Word, the first translation of the Bible into Italian was completed and sent out in 1864. The boast of Diocletian, of having utterly destroyed Christianity, has been often repeated, and often as made has been put to the blush of shame.

The living book has withstood the fires of Smithfield and Oxford; kings have sounded its death knell in vain. It is almost a travesty on history that the Bible House of London is built upon the very spot where stood the famous Black Friars' Church and Monastery, whose Synod more than five centuries ago condemned the circulation of the Scriptures translated by Wickliffe. By a strange history the destruction of the book has been the occasion of enlarging its circulation. The factors of this growth have usually been the same; "the first English Bible was bought up and burnt; those who bought the Bibles contributed capital

for making new Bibles; and those who burnt the Bibles advertised them." God uses the very wrath of man for his own glory and power.

Compare for one moment the parchments of the New Testament with those of the classics in respect to antiquity. Some twelve hundred manuscripts of the whole or portions of the Greek Testament are in existence; and of these "fifty at least are more than a thousand years old; and some are known to be at least fifteen hundred years old."

Over against these lists place the fact that there is not a manuscript of the classics in existence a thousand years old. Of the manuscripts of Herodotus and Plato, the two most important of such writers, there are less than thirty in existence.

Tischendorf declares that "Providence has ordered it so that the New Testament can appeal to a far larger number of all kinds of original sources than the whole of the rest of ancient Greek literature." Add to these statements the fact also that the first book printed with cut metal types was a Bible. Well has Mr. Hallam said in his "Literary History of Europe: "It is a very striking circumstance that the high-minded inventors of this great art (printing) tried at the very outset so bold a