stincts of nomadic life, thus forming a character at once robust and refined; alien races have been affiliated; hostile tribes united in amity; the girdle of love is being stretched round the world, a cincture which shall bind together its scattered sons and daughters into one universal brotherhood. Such have been the early fruits, the beginnings of Christianity. But the end is not yet. Time must be allowed to complete its triumphs; for while it has done marvels, we do not pretend to say that it will work miracles, or that its operations can countervail the great law of social progress. And it is well known what that law is,—that civilization in any, but more especially in barbarous lands, is of slow growth, being the aggregate of small increments, like the annual wood-circles of our exogenous trees."*

No book ever has or ever can do what the Bible has done to raise both man and woman in the social scale. It must, therefore, be specially adapted for this noble work. As Dr. Adams observes,-"Tell me where the Bible is, and where it is not, and I will write a moral geography of the world; I will show you in all respects what is the physical condition of that people."

XII. The Bible is the pioneer of justice. That the Bible is adapted to the people is thoroughly proved by its showing itself to be the pioneer of justice; as Lord Bacon observes,

* Trail's Literary Characteristics of the Bible.

"Truth is in order to goodness," and wherever it has gone its principles have frowned down and are opposed to injustice, oppression, and fraud, under all circumstances. Man needs such a revelation, and that it should speak, as the inspired oracles do, with an authority from which there can be no appeal. Fickleness would destroy its power for good. The Bible, thus viewed as a teacher of righteousness, shines with golden splendour, for it, in very truth, is "just in all its ways:" just to the rich as well as to the poor; to the high as well as to the low; to the ignorant as well as to the learned; and it is only as its teachings have been recognised and acted upon, that justice between man and man has been established in any part of the world.

Even Gibbon, "free-thinker" as he was, thus expresses himself:-"Yet truth and candour must acknowledge that the conversion of the North imparted many temporal benefits, both to the old and new Christians. The admission of the barbarians into the pale of the civil and ecclesiastical society delivered Europe from the depredations, by sea and land, of the Normans, the Hungarians, and the Russians, who learned to spare their brethren and cultivate their possessions." A book that holds the scales of justice so evenly balanced could not have been the work of bad men, and must therefore be Divine. The most reasonable Being in the universe could

not be the author of an unreasonable revelation; and, tested by the standard of justice, the Bible. may boldly claim to be the highest model of justice in the world.

We often boast of our progress, but it is needful sometimes to go back in imagination to the "good old times" to fully realize the change. Take for example the following illustration of the condition of England in the year 1685, as described by Macaulay: "There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less human than their posterity. The discipline of the workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient than at present, was infinitely harsher: masters, well born and bred, were in the habit of beating their servants; pedagogues knew no way of imparting knowledge but by beating their pupils; husbands of decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. The implacability of hostile factions was such as we can scarcely conceive. Whigs were disposed to murmur because Stafford was sentenced to die without seeing his bowels burned before his face. Tories reviled and insulted Russell as his coach passed from the inn to the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields. As little mercy was shown by the populace to the sufferers of a humble rank.

A man pressed to death for refusing

to plead, a woman burned for coining, excited less sympathy than is now felt for a galled horse or an over-driven ox. The prisons

were hells on earth, seminaries of every crime and of every disease; but on all this misery society looked with profound indifference. Nowhere could be found that sensitive and restless compassion which has, in our day, extended a powerful protection to the factory child, to the Hindoo widow, to the negro slave; which pries into the stores and water-casks of the emigrant ship; which winces at every lash laid on the back of a drunken soldier; and which has repeatedly endeavoured to save the life even of the murderer."

But what is the great cause of the contrast? Civilization has no doubt done much; the general advance of knowledge has done still more; but the question remains, What was it that gave the first impulse to civilization and the key-note to knowledge? Without hesitation, we say the Bible. It has ever been the friend of civilization and the pioneer of education. Those only who fear its teachings are heard to say, “Ignorance is the mother of devotion." While, on the contrary, those who circulate it by thousands, and proclaim its lessons from the housetops and among the highways and hedges of our land, declare, "For the soul to be without knowledge is not good.” "With all thy getting, get wisdom; it is the principal thing."

XIII. The Bible is the standard of truth. The object of the Bible evidently is, not to please, but to instruct and save men. And this can only be done in proportion as truth is taught. Knowledge of truth is the great want of the world; and the Bible is given to reveal to us the truth as it is in Jesus, and as it comes from God its Almighty Author. Without controversy, the Bible has "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Men may and often do err; God never does, and His word is like Himself, "without variableness or the shadow of a turning." Amid the conflicting theories of boasting reason, man wants an unerring standard of truth; and it is to be found only in the Bible; and the nearer we approach it, the purer truth becomes. Does man need the truth about God; where can he get it but in the Bible? Does man require the truth about himself; where can he go so safely as to the Bible? Does he long for certain knowledge of his destiny in the world to come? There again the Bible is able to satisfy the cravings of his spirit. Locke expressed a fact, when he said that the Bible has "God for its author, -salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter." Only as man adapts himself to the teachings of the Bible does he live the truth. Hence it is that in all our courts of justice, men are required, ere they can give their evidence, to take this book in their hands, and to swear by it.