Men who deny the religion will recognize its power. "France must have religion," said an early minister to Louis Philippe; "the only true foundation of a nation is morality, and the foundation of morality is religion; and this again rests upon the Bible." In the most solemn moment of the life of Girard, disciple of Voltaire, he penned for his "will" that no ecclesiastic, missionary or minister of any sect, should ever hold any connection with the college that should bear his name; nor should they trespass within its premises as visitors; but as if there could be morality apart from religion, he willed that the purest principles of morality should be taught. True to their trust the guardians of such an institution were compelled to adopt the Bible that he scorned as the best book of morals.

The skepticism of Thomas Jefferson did not deter him from copying into a manuscript volume of forty-six pages, for his own private use, all the ethical precepts of Jesus of Nazareth. These are his words: "Of all the systems of morality, ancient and modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus." Again having spoken of cutting away all other portions of the Scriptures save those contain

ing the words of Jesus, he continues: "There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

Akin to such an estimate is that of Franklin concerning Jesus of Nazareth: "I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see."

Pantheism claims its Goethe; and yet bowing before Jesus as "a manifestation of the highest principle of morality," the great German master thus spoke concerning the Gospels: "there is in them the reflection of a greatness which emanated from the person of Jesus, and which was of as divine a kind as was ever seen upon earth." We are quoting no ephemeral language in this greatest literary character of the nineteenth century, in his clear conviction: "let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences go on gaining in depth and breadth, and the human mind expand as it may, it will never go beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity as it glistens and shines forth in the gospel."

Mr. Lecky in his reference to Jesus has said that "the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften man

kind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists. The power

of the love of Christ has been displayed alike in the most heroic pages of Christian martyrdom, in the most pathetic pages of Christian resignation, in the tenderest pages of Christian charity."

"It is impossible," says Stuart Mill, in his Dissertations, "to find in the ideals of any philosophy, even the latest, a single point which is not anticipated and ennobled in Christianity."

It was because of no deep leaning to revelation that Fichte wrote: "the ancient and venerable record," (in which we find the Hebrew teachings,) "taken altogether, contains the profoundest and the loftiest wisdom, and presents those results to which all philosophy must at last return."

The multiplication of witnesses does not add to the truth. The Book as a power in morals has challenged its opposers. It was the great expounder of our Constitution who said in his Plymouth oration: "Whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens;" an opinion echoed by Gov. Seward when he declared: "the existing government of this country could never have had an existence but for the Bible."

We need not pass back to Sir Isaac Newton to

learn that the Scriptures of God are the sublimest and profoundest philosophy; nor need we stand by the death bed of Sir Walter Scott, the "wizard of the North," to learn that among all books there is but one, even as among men there has been but One whose being was divine. "Know it well," says Harvard's philosopher, "the only choice for us in this piping nineteenth century, lies between this old philosophy of the Hebrew, and the philosophy of despair, the pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer,"

The dethronement of Olympian Jupiter has left no dreary void; the rent veil of Isis has brought no disaster; the old myths have faded away while Truth has found her place. The unreal has given way to the real. The instability of civilization without the Bible is recognized on all sides.

You recall the matchless description of Macaulay upon the gift of Athens to man; a description illustrative at the same time of the tendency to degeneration among nations and the power of the intellect that survives. "Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the suc

cessive depredations of Romans, Turks and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And, when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when perhaps travellers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts,―her influence and her glory will still survive, - fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.”

We tear down no history to exalt the Book that was venerable before Grecian history began. Against the world, but for Palestine, Greece would stand alone. Her writers could point to the Vale of Tempe, but not Gethsemane; the boasted mountain was Olympus, and not Calvary; her oracles dubious and uncertain were no unfading, undying word; from her philosophers the apostle to the