soul the high and true ideal of character and life, and pervade the whole institution with the spirit of law. and order, of integrity and virtue, of industry, temperance and fidelity, of courtesy, purity and refinement, of high manhood and unwavering responsibility, and of deep reverence for all that is noble and good? Here only is the true standard and here only the impelling power to attain the standard. For the guidance of a great body of young men away from the sweet influences of home life and the vigilance of home surroundings and neighborhood guardianships, we must choose between a military discipline, impossible except in a military school, and there of the surface, or a system of espionage odious and degrading, and the persuasive and ennobling power of a diffused Christianity, freely and kindly molding the whole and all the parts to manly virtue, tending evermore toward the "good, the beautiful, and the true."

On the

It would be easy, if it were not invidious, to give examples of institutions which, having virtually disowned the controlling power of religion, have exhibited a lamentable lack of moral restraint and a helpless surrender of their charge to temptation and vice. other hand, the prince of modern English teachers, the man who in his short history of fifteen years at Rugby, amid bitter opposition, made a profounder impression on a larger number of ingenuous young men, and produced a more salutary effect on the whole system of education in England than any other man of his time, if not of any time, went to his work

with a determination to make it "a place of Christian education" and "to form Christian men." Just after his election he wrote thus: "Whether I shall be able to make the school what I wish to make it, I do not mean wholly or perfectly, but in some degree, that is, an instrument of God's glory and of the everlasting good of those who come to it, that indeed is an awful anxiety." How thoroughly and constantly he interwove the Bible into his instructions, and with what strong incessant pressure he brought its principles and motives to the conduct of his students and to the whole polity of the school, may be read in the pages of his loving friends and pupils, Thomas Hughes and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley.

Every moral consideration, theoretical or practical, individual or collective, calls for the ascendency and control of Christianity in the college. And the rising tide of warning and rebuke against the attempt to crowd out religion and religious instruction from the college course is one of the hopeful signs of the times.

II. We come to the same result on intellectual grounds. A knowledge of Christianity and of the volume on which it is founded may boldly challenge a place in the equipment of a properly educated man. Instead of apologizing for its introduction, the apology is needed for its omission. To leave it out of history and literature simply fulfills the hackneyed saying, "The play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted." It is like ignoring the sun and the sunlight in a picture of the noonday heavens.

Christianity claims a clear and open recognition by reason of the part it has played in the world's activity, its thought, its literature, its life. Whatever may be men's estimate of its value, the place it has gained and held is no matter of doubt or of question. No such

vast and constant factor has appeared in the world's history, and, judged by whatever standard, no such personage as Jesus Christ has trod this earth's surface. The phenomenon is too stupendous, too ubiquitous, too perpetual, too irrepressible, to be dismissed. A silent force, destitute of all external helps and resisted by all human appetite and passion, yet making its way to the headship of the world, on its way baffling and capturing the world's great empire, conquering the northern hordes that conquered that empire, carrying literature and science to the tribes of the earth and the isles of the ocean, lifting low savages to dignity and purity, transforming wicked men and transfiguring moral men, deathless before the sword and cannon, thriving under the rack and fagot, handing down through dark ages, by its vital institutions, the perishable literature of the past, upheaving the nations with its crusades, its refor mations, its missions, its stubborn stands for liberty and its seeds of revolution, dotting the earth with its ever-spreading churches, mastering a multitude of the master minds and leading now the leading nations, furnishing the grandest themes and inspirations for the painter, the musician, and the architect, as well as the leisure, the safety, and the resources for the labors of the scientist, forming the substratum of all modern

thought and the undercurrent of all modern history, compelling alike the gaze of friend and of foe, and calmly and resolutely bent on the subjugation of a resisting world—such a force as this asks no man's pardon for a peremptory demand on the attention of the student. History presents no agency so vast, philosophy no study so profound, science no problem so remarkable. What sort of education is that which would deliberately exclude a survey of this broad area in the world's life, this most potent factor in its movements? What but the training of another Kaspar Hauser, shut away in his cellar from the great realities of the world in which he lives?

And the volume that contains and transmits this mighty agency, the volume that the world knows as the Book, the BIBLE - what good reason can be given. why in a course of education it should be kept out of sight, thrust into a corner, or treated otherwise than with that conspicuous honor which its central position in the world's literature requires? In its contents, its circulation, its moral influence, and its intellectual stimulus, it is confessedly without a rival. No volume. has so secured, or so endured, translation into the languages of the earth. No volume has ever so spoken to every age, class, and condition. No volume has been so centrally and vitally related to human thought and human achievement. No other volume so absolutely refuses to grow old. Intellectually its contents are of commanding excellence. It antedates, and by some thousand years anticipates, all other history.

One chapter in Genesis contains a record of the early nations which all the nations together could not supply -"the most learned among all ancient documents," says Bunsen, "and the most ancient among the learned." The famous Chaldean account of the deluge, with its garrulousness, its seven days' duration, and its frightened gods crouching "like dogs" in the heavens, seems absurd beside our sober narrative. The migration of Abram from Ur of the Chaldees was a more momentous event than the fabled voyage of Æneas or the colonizing of Carthage. In comparison with the exodus, the anabasis was a trivial incident. Joshua's subjugation of Canaan was a great military movement, fraught with more far-reaching consequences than the Norman conquest. Jerusalem, the city of twenty-seven sieges, has as weird a history as any other city on the globe, and the Jewish race. a vitality unparalleled and unique. The Galilean Sea, but thirteen miles in length, has witnessed events more marvelous than the great and classic Mediterranean. What are the laws of Solon or Lycurgus beside that decalogue and the laws of Moses a lawgiver, says Milman, "who has exercised a more extensive and permanent influence over the destinies of mankind than any other individual in the history of the world." Where are there more true and touching narratives or more faithful and more thrilling biographies? Where in the world's literature do there stand out such majestic characters as Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Elijah, Daniel, John, Paul? What collection of aphorisms