in such a character as that of Florence Nightingale. And the homage which the world-even the infidel world-is paying to such virtue, is but an unconscious tribute paid to the truth of Christianity. For what but that mighty influence of redeeming love which first attracted the women of Galilee to the cross of their suffering Saviour, could have called these young women away from their homes of elegant ease and affluence—the one to go and die upon an inhospitable heathen coast after years of privation and peril, the other to brave all the risks of war and pestilence in a foreign land, and to watch day and night at the couch of sickness and death. What book but the Bible, and what influence but that which went forth from Calvary, ever formed a character like this? If goodness be a test of truth, who will dare to say, in the face of such examples, that Christianity is not the very truth of God?

You need not fear to place the Bible in the hands of your daughters, just as it is, and in all its parts. For though it treats, with unsparing fidelity, of all subjects, and all shades of character, the vicious and the vile, as well as the virtuous and the good, yet, unlike any other book of genius, it leaves on all a hallowed influence. No one was ever corrupted by the plainspoken simplicity of the Bible.

Like the light of heaven, it is never contaminated by contact with impurity. It is as pure when shining on the stagnant marsh, as when playing around the tops of the snow-clad mountains. Beautifully and truly has it been said, that, "the finger of inspiration, like the finger of the sunbeam, touches corruption, and still remains pure." For, when the Bible speaks on themes too delicate for common speech, we are made to feel as though we were listening to the voice of God.

For beauty and sublimity, for taste and genius, for truth and

purity, there is no book of education for our sons and daughters in the world, that can take the place of the Bible. It is the book which every pious woman seeks to put into the hands of her child, as the earliest and best pledge of a mother's love, and which, ere long, when she comes to make her last legacy, she wishes to leave as a holy relic, sacred to a dying mother's memory. Whatever has been the success of the Bible on other fields, there is one field where its triumph has been complete, so far as it has gone. It has gained the female heart. It has won the victory of woman's love. It has linked her destiny with its own in the everlasting bonds of mutual affection and mutual interest. And the hold, which the Bible has to-day throughout Christendom upon the heart of woman, is as strong and indissoluble as that which woman herself has upon the heart of man. So, that if the infidel sneer were true, that the Bible is fit only for women and children, it would be none the less true, that it has thereby controlled the destiny of the world. For as all men, infidels included, were once children born of women, how could God make a book more fit for man than by making it fit for women and children.

But we must close; and we know not how to close such a theme more appropriately than in the strong hypothetical language of another : "If Christianity should ever be compelled to flee from the mansions of the great and the noble, from the academies of philosophy and the halls of legislation, from the thrones of power and the throngs of busy men, we should find her last retreat around the hearth-stones of Christian homes, her last sanctuary in the hearts of the women and children of our firesides; her last altar on earth would be the female heart; her last audience, the children gathered around a mother's knees, her last sacrifice, the secret prayer escaping in silence from ber lips, and heard perhaps, only at the throne of God."

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CHAPTER VI.

REPRESENTATIVE YOUNG MEN OF THE BIBLE.

Range and Limits of the Theme-The First of Young Men-The First Two BrothersCharacter of Joseph-The Youth of Moses-Sketch of David and Jonathan-Sketch of Samuel and Saul-Saul and Samuel at Endor-Character of Absalom-The Young Man as Sovereign-The Young Men of the Captivity-Young Men of the New Testament.

I. RANGE AND LIMITS OF THE THEME.

IN speaking of the Young Men of the Bible as one of its attractions, and introducing them to you as the subject of a separate chapter, we would not, by any means, wish to incur the charge of taking undue liberty with sacred and venerable names; or, of attempting to modernize antiquity beyond what is just and reasonable. Some degree of familiarity of this kind may do us good, just as it does to be brought into immediate contact or communication with the distant parts of the earth. We must modernize antiquity, somewhat, in order to appreciate it; even as we translate foreign tongues into our own idiom before we can feel their full import. The time is probably not distant, when the whistle of the steam-car shall be heard over the hallowed hills of Judea, and the electric telegraph will, no doubt, soon stretch its wires along the base of Ararat and across the plains of Shinar. And so, the morè we can be made to feel that our antipodes on the other side of the globe are our

fellow-citizens, and the more we can be made to realize that the antediluvians on the other side of the flood were our brothers, men of like passions with ourselves, the better shall we understand them, and the better will it be for the world.

The young men of the Bible! How rich, how comprehensive, how suggestive the theme! How full of hope to the aged, how full of enthusiasm to the young, how fraught with interest to all! The majority of men in our day claim to be young men ; at any rate, feel themselves to be young; and this, for all the purposes of energetic life, is, in fact, equivalent to being young. To picture to ourselves the men of antiquity as young men, is, therefore the most effective mode of bringing them home to our own experience; because it is as young men that we have most in common with them. It is as if the old world and the new stood face to face, and thus shook hands with each other on friendly and familiar terms.

The patriarchs of the Bible, who stand in solemn grandeur, like sentinels along the lines of history, or, like mighty monarchs with the crown of centuries upon their heads, were all young men once; as truly young and hopeful as any of us. And if we wish them to come down from their hereditary heights to converse with us awhile, we must conceive of them as young men, like ourselves. Let us endeavor to get the impression fully into our minds that the first men in the world were young men n; that, before there were any patriarchs or venerable names in history, young men stood forth upon the stage of life as the fresh materials out of which all the patriarchs and ancients of history had to be fashioned. The child, it has been said, is father to the man; in the same sense, the young men of the earliest ages have become the founders and forefathers of the world. To them belongs, unsought, the high

distinction of being the model men of all ages, the original fountains of all biography, the forefathers of all history. They have become to all generations, what they were to their immediate successors, the primitive and standing types of humanity, the representative ideas after which all other men have been, to some extent, moulded into their several shapes and characters of greatness.

The young men of the Bible have been imitated, reproduced, and rivalled, a thousand times by their successors; but they have never yet been surpassed by any of them, either in native genius, in mighty prowess, in heroic achievement, or, in exalted piety. Born amid the glories of a new-created world, cradled in the lap of the most ancient civilization of our race, blessed with the birthright of the earliest of all human primogeniture, and crowned by God himself as kings and priests of this whole visible creation, they have ever stood prominent amongst men, like Saul among the Benjamites. They have held their supremacy through all the lapse of time; and no young man of their successors has ever been able to snatch from their grasp the sceptre of wisdom, power, and glory.

There have been mighty men of valor and renown in every age; giants have walked the earth more than once, and the sons of genius have scaled the mountains in almost every ancient and modern land; more than one young Scipio has wrested glory from the hands of an aged Hannibal; more than one Pitt wielded the helm of statesmanship and empire in early youth; many a young man, even in our day, when individual power is well-nigh lost in that of the masses, has made his mark upon the world, and left his foot-prints deeply imbedded in the sands of time. But then it must never be forgotten, that whatever heights of glory, valor, and virtue, these mighty men of

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