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dismembered parts some long, hard words; he has made diagrams of him self, ghastly wood-cuts,- and blood- colored pictures, and still he is a puz zle to himself; a puzzle in life, because he cannot tell how he came to live; a puzzle in sickness, because he cannot tell how to get well again; a puzzle in death, because, he does not know whether so much antiquity should be inhumed or cremated. Once he was satisfied with the absurd physiology of the “ Timaeus” (for even Plato was not always divine), and then he laughed at the rude guesses of the Greek. A strange course has man passed through, take him body and soul to gether. His body! He sprang spon taneously out of the earth; he evolved; he developed; he began existence as a cellular tissue, and fell under infinite obligations to an ethereal fluid; and in short, he-can trace himself back to a “ primordial form.” When he meets a certain animal he is not quite sure which of them is expected to speak first. His soul! According to one ancient (Heracleitus) it “ mutated” ; another (Anaxagoras) called it Air; and Pythagoras pronounced it a Num ber and a Harmony—-a judgment in which nonsense is finely set to music.— Dr. Parker. DECLINE IN BIBLE KNOWLEDGE Hon. James Bryce said, in an address at London University: “ It is with great regret that one sees in these days that the knowledge of the Bible seems de clining in all classes. Looking at it from only the educational side, the loss of the knowledge of the Bible and of all the Bible means would be incalcula ble to the life of the country. It would be a great misfortune to the country if generations of children grew, up who did not know their Bible. It is a sin for which those responsible for the ab sence of the Bible from our schools and homes need to repent.”
of the religious teacher, and the pri vate member of the church. Each is to be judged by his fruits; the former by his good or bad fruit; the latter by the presence or absence of fruit. The comparison of the faithless disciple to a tree/ without fruit, is similar to that before given— salt which has lost its sa vor. In both illustrations there is sem blance without reality, shadow without substance, promise of good without ful fillment. ¿Sfe MUSINGS OF MAN It is singular that man has never been able to make himself quite out, he has been zealously mindful of the doc trine that “ the proper study of man kind is man.“ He wants to know ex actly whence he came and what he is; but the voice which answers him is sometimes mocking, and always doubt ful. He is not sure whether his years can be numbered, or whether he has come down from immemorial time. His age puzzles him much. His choice lies between thousands and millions of years. He is sensitive on the question of time. Once he found a piece of pot tery deeply buried at the mouth of the Nile, from which he inferred (not then knowing the history of Roman pot tery) that he must be, say a million years old; then he found out—-like oth er old china dupes— that the pottery had been turned off the lathe of some comparative modern, whereupon he grew young again, and became modest with a sense of relative juvenility. This modesty became him well, and would have bloomed long but for the disturb ing fact that he found a flint hatchet in an out-of-the-way place, and there upon he resumed his antiquity and gloripd in it in many expensive books. Nor has he been less troubled about his body. He has founded colleges upon it, and museums, and learned lecture ships, and a profitable profession with many costly branches. He has taken himself to pieces, and written upon the
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