pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky, but the stars are there and will reappear."
Once a pupil asked to be excused from exercises in which choice extracts from the Bible were sometimes read, simply because they were from the Bible; but he listened with pleasure to good thoughts from other books, though these books contained many a palpable error. Aside from the view which makes the Bible the Sacred Book of the Christian believer, he had not thought of its value to a large portion of the human race. He had not regarded it in the light of history and philosophy. The ideals for which the Hebrew race has stood, the wonderful prophecies of great and far-seeing men, the grand poems of faith and promise, the words of condensed wisdom, the maxims for right living, the Beatitudes, the teaching of the Parables, the spirit of adoration, the moral code, the allegorical wisdom never had been contemplated apart from the religious view, against which he had imbibed a prejudice.
Permit me to speak from the standpoint of history and philosophy. The Christian religion is a chief source of our peculiar civilization, of the character of our institutions, of the growth of altruism, of the equality of man, of the supreme worth of the inner motive, of charity, of liberty. It has given the world the highest examples of pure and devoted lives.
I have a friend who is struck with the tale of how Buddha, wearing a Brahman's form, when "drought withered all the land," encountered a starving tigress with her cubs, and, in the unbounded pity of his heart, offered himself a sacrifice to their hunger.
