thought had in it no adequate conception of humanity; the word meant a species of refined culture, while all that in its present use denotes love to men is the direct result of Christian truth. Greece and Rome knew no such virtue as "humility," until the Apostles of Christ converted their word of contempt into the term of the beautiful. So, likewise, there was not in all the literature of Greece a word to express "brotherly love," until Christianity coined its own. "To him (Jesus Christ) alone is due the Christian significance of such words as charity, humility and humanity."

In Christian thought and action these new principles have ever since been regnant. The old rule, "my rights and others' duties," has been controverted by the teachings of Christianity; "my duties and others' rights." The teaching of the Book means self for the world's sake, and never the world for the sake of self. "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant."

Thirdly: Heroism in duty. Every man is measured by his belief, or rather the object of his trust incites his actions. Devotion to the State made the heroes at Thermopylæ. Heroism is not a product of nerve and muscle, but of that ideal that in its largeness dwarfs the mere fleshly nature.

The loftier the ideal, the more resolute the deed. Let man know that truth is grander than life, and he will die for the truth. Let him know the sublimity of immortality, and in his complaisance he will fear no bodily harm, since men can not kill the soul. Let him recognize the superior claims of the divine will, and he will regard death as the gate of life, rather than betray duty. Carlyle thus speaks of the world's heroes: "the thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts; it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and the actual their religion, as I - say, was the great fact about them."

Man

Martyrs belong to the truth, not to error. never dies for what he does not esteem greater than self, and for what he does not love. Hirelings are poor guardians of the flocks. The faith is proven in the heroism. in the heroism. The purer the religion, other things being equal, the more martyrs. In proportion as faith assents to the doctrines and truths of the Bible as pre-eminent, it follows that heroism will reach its highest examples. Heathenism makes few if any martyrs, since martyrdom is voluntary. Death under Juggernaut is not martyrdom, but expiation to obtain something not reached;

while death for the truth is the manner of witnessing for what is attained.

Lecky thus speaks of Christianity: "One great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed; but that it should do so was precisely what might have been expected."

Granting such a heroism in sacrifice for the truth as related to the well-being of men, we are prepared to consider some of the effects wrought by the truths of the Bible against the teachings of the world's sages. Our limits will confine us to the more purely subjective and charitable phases of such a power, leaving for other occasions its work over the national life and literature.

I. The Book and the Sacredness of Life. It is probable that character may be known by the estimate it places upon life. Where human life seems of little value, it is certain there must be some serious defect in him who forms the estimate; the lesser respect reveals the lesser manhood. A Nero, torturing and murdering his subjects by thousands, is a monstrosity. The time is coming when all history will tarnish and despise the crown of every king or captain who has sought personal distinction or power at the cost of any

life of citizen or soldier. Peace is a nobler national

issue than war. Wars may be "holy" where to sustain a vital principle is of greater importance than to live. We are not dealing with exceptions in so great a theme touching the terrible right to take life in self-defence. The right of the State to take the criminal's life is yet under debate; and not the least of arguments in its favor is the fear of undue executive clemency unless the criminal is once and forever put beyond human reach; and yet just so far as such a suggestion has weight, it tells against the State rather than against the criminal; thus bringing us again to the statement that character is revealed in what it does with the life of others.

We are to pass back into centuries and among peoples where murders ran riot. We are to look upon Greece with all her wit; and Rome with all her power; mirroring their own brutishness in revolting customs and inhuman teachings. We might not sail beyond Britain to see a human life taken because of having stolen a sheep; but those were yet darker days when the blood of the innocènt and the helpless was accounted by brilliant names as of no higher value than that of a beast. It is a lurid picture, the building of fires on whose

leaping flames, as chariots, the souls of God's best beloved have burst from their bodies of anguish; a terrible act when the Church has assumed the right to use swords and scimitars upon whom it did not like; yet, if possible, darker even than such as these were times in which fathers and mothers in Israel tossed into the burning arms and against the red-hot breast of Moloch the children of their firesides, as if such a holocaust were what Jehovah could wish.

Hell itself has been almost outdone in human hatred. The peaceful curfew has been made the tocsin for despair; the tolling of bells has become. the signal for human slaughter. Strange that the moans of nature were not enough for death! Passing strange that the life, which at its best is only a flying shuttle, should be broken among its earliest threads!

The sacredest thing of earth is the most mysterious. Science with all its acumen has given no solution of that mystery. Whence came this that brings a flush to the baby's face, that takes away with itself that flush as it goes? What is that power making the human arm strong as if its nerves were steel, but whose going leaves it nerveless as the ashes men cast into the street?

What