If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut? -HERRICK JOHNSON.

Other books we may read and criticise. To the Scriptures we must bow the entire soul, with all its faculties.

-E. N. KIRK.

Let the oracles of inspiration be cited continually, both as authority and illustration, in a manner that shall make the mind instantly refer each expression that is introduced to the venerable book whence it is taken; but let our part of religious language be simply ours, and let those oracles retain their characteristic form of expression unimitated, unparodied to the end of time.

There are many persons of combative tendencies, who read for ammunition, and dig out of the Bible iron for balls. They read, and they find nitre and charcoal and sulphur for powder. They read, and they find cannon. They read, and they make portholes and embrasures. And if a man does not believe as they do, they look upon him as an enemy, and let fly the Bible at him to demolish him. So men turn the word of God into a vast arsenal, filled with all manner of weapons, offensive and defensive.

H. W. BEECHER.

A loving trust in the Author of the Bible is the best preparation for a wise study of the Bible.

- H. CLAY TRUMBULL.

The reason why we find so many dark places in the Bible is, for the most part, because there are so many dark places in our hearts.

- A. THOLUck.

When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ.

·ROBERT MCCheyne.

My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.

HORACE BUSHNELL.

Parents, I urge you to make the Bible the sweetest, the dearest book to your children; not by compelling them to read so many chapters each day, which will have the effect of making them hate the Bible, but by reading its pages with them, and by your tender parental love, so showing them the beauty of its wondrous incidents, from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of Bethlehem and Calvary, that no book in the home will be so dear to your children as the Bible; and thus you will be strengthening their minds with the sublimest truths, storing their hearts with the purest love, and sinking deep in their souls solid principles of righteousness, whose divine stones no waves of temptation can ever move.

Give the Bible the place in your families to which it is justly entitled, and then, through the unsearchable riches of Christ, many a household among you may hereafter realize that most blessed consummation, and appear a whole family in heaven. -H. A. BOARDMAN.

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against Thee.

Merely reading the Bible is no use at all without we study it thoroughly, and hunt it through, as it were, for some great truth. -D. L. MOODY.

I never saw a useful Christian who was not a student of the Bible. If a man neglects his Bible, he may pray and ask God to use him in His work; but God cannot make much use of him, for there is not much for the Holy Ghost to work upon. - D. L. MOODY.

Study the Bible topically. If you will study assurance for a week, you will soon find it is your privilege to know that you are a child of God.

- D. L. MoODY.

Go through John's Gospel, and study the "believes," the "verilys," the "I ams; " and go through the Bible in that way, and it becomes a new book to you.

-D. L. MOODY.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.

-JOSEPH Cook,

When you read the sacred Scriptures, or any other book, never think how you read, but what you read.

-JOHN KEMBLE.

The duty which God requireth of man is obedience to His revealed will.

delight to do Thy will, O my God; yea, Thy law is within.

my heart

PSALMS.

BROTHERHOOD.

Enough of good there is in the lowest estate to sweeten life; enough of evil in the highest to check presumption; enough there is of both in all estates, to bind us in compassionate brotherhood, to teach us impressively that we are of one dying and one immortal family.

HENRY GILES.

My friends, let us try to follow the Saviour's steps; let us remember all day long what it is to be men; that it is to have every one whom we meet for our brother in the sight of God; that it is this, never to meet any one, however bad he may be, for whom we cannot say, Christ died for that man, and Christ cares for him still. He is precious in God's eyes, and he shall be precious in mine also.”

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

God has taught in the Scriptures the lesson of a universal brotherhood, and man must not gainsay the teaching. Shivering in the ice-bound or scorching in the tropical regions; in the lap of luxury or in the wild hardihood of the primeval forest; belting the globe in a tired search for rest, or quieting through life in the heart of ancestral woods; gathering all the decencies around him like a garment, or battling in fierce raid of crime against a world which has disowned him, there is an inner humanness which binds me to that man by a primitive and indissoluble bond. He is my brother, and I cannot dissever the relationship. He is my brother, and I cannot release myself from the obligation to do him good.

-WM. M. PUNSHON.

Kings and their subjects, masters and slaves, find a common level in two places at the foot of the cross, and in the grave

I stand by my kind; and I thank God for the temptations that have brought me into sympathy with them, as I do for the love that urges me to efforts for their good. I hail the great brotherhood of trial and temptation in the name of humanity, and give them assurance that from the Divine Man, and some, at least, of His disciples, there goes out to them a flood of sympathy that would fain sweep them up to the firm footing of the rock of safety.

-J. G. HOLLAND.

Jesus throws down the dividing prejudices of nationality, and teaches universal love without distinction of race, merit, or rank. A man's neighbor, henceforth, was every one who needed help, even an enemy. All men, from the slave to the highest, were sons of one Father in heaven, and should feel and act toward each other, as brethren. No human standard of virtue would suffice; no imitations of the loftiest examples among men. Moral perfection had been recognized alike by heathen and Jews, as found only in likeness to the Divine, and that Jesus proclaims as, henceforth, the one ideal for all humanity. With a sublime enthusiasm and brotherly love for the race, He rises above His age, and announces a common Father of all mankind, and one grand spiritual ideal in resemblance to Him.

-J. C. GEIKIE.

C.

CARES.

Anxious care rests upon a basis of heathen worldly-mindedness and of heathen misunderstanding of the character of

God.

- ALEXANDER MACLAREN.