seven knew nothing of Peter's sheet; twenty-eight were laid low by Jonah's gourd."

In the face of such facts we do not wonder at the proposal of Chancellor MacCracken of New York University* that colleges and universities should require from every Freshman a Sunday School diploma certifying that he knew by heart the ten commandments, the sermon on the mount, a church catechism, and a score of the psalms and classic hymns. "So much as in us lies," he added, we will make the college a place for preserving and strengthening reverence for things divine."

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The times are peculiarly ripe for a rediscovery of the English Bible by the American people. Its charm would grip the attention of the heterogeneous America, if only given a chance, as strongly as it did the Puritan generation of England, and its moral fibre alone can give the tone and strength vital to the well-being of the new age in the new America.

It is the church's duty, the church's prerogative, to take the lead in this matter. Expository preaching of the Bible should have a greater place in her pulpit. She should bravely and reverently welcome the best of the constructive teachings of modern scholarship, she will prove recreant to her responsibility if she does not equip the Sunday School with the best of pedagogical methods, and she is making great strides in this direction. She must lay upon her people the necessity of reading the Bible in the *E. W. Work, "The Fascination of the Book."

home; of setting up again what used to be known as the family altar.

Nor will the hop-scotch method of taking a verse here and another there, here a little, there a little, out of its own surroundings, and interpreting according to preconceived ideas suffice. The delightfully varied style and authorship of the different books in the Bible, as well as the knowledge that these books were without chapter divisions for more than a thousand years and without verses for fifteen hundred years, and that they were broken into verses only to while away the tedium of a certain monk as he journeyed from Paris to Lyons, should stamp as puerile any arbitrary and mechanical method of Bible study and interpretation.

In the summer of 1914, Dr. Cope, Secretary of the Religious Education Association, in an address before the Association of Hebrew Rabbis opposed the study of the Bible in the public schools. Later Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, in addressing the same convention, said he wished Dr. Cope were present that he might ask him why no Jewish rabbis were ever on the program of the Religious Education Association.

The church and the home must forever be the main source of Biblical instruction. Nevertheless, Dr. Cope, as Secretary of the Religious Education Association, would have come far nearer voicing the strength of all education if he had accented the necessity of the presence of religious atmosphere in education, if he had insisted that children should

be brought up to see God moving in history, in geology, in every branch of life. The ten commandments, great passages from the prophets, certain of the Psalms, the sermon on the mount, and the Lord's prayer, to which no truly religious could sincerely have any objection, and whose usage in school exercises would give to the children a moral background they could never forget.

If in the church, in the Sunday School, the home, in education, this masterful book is given a chance once more, will it master the hearts of men, the lives of the people, the destiny of the nation.

T

IX

NOT AS THE WORLD GIVETH

Not as the world giveth, give I."-JOHN 14: 27.

HESE words were spoken by the Man of
Nazareth that night when He met with His

disciples in the upper room for the last time. They stamp themselves in memory to be hallowed and cherished as are the faint murmurs of our dearest friend whose dying bedside we gather round. They are to be cherished even more than such a message, for they are the dying message of Him who came that we might have life and have it more abundantly. He was about to leave this world and when He left it He made His will. His soul He bequeathed to the Father, His body to Joseph, His raiment to the soldiers, His mother He left to John; to His poor disciples, He said, "My peace I leave unto you, yet not as the world giveth, give I."

At death as in life, He would give. His had been a life at one with God. The Father's will was His. His had been a life at one with man in every experience. In that experience His mission had constantly been one of giving, He gave the smile of gladness to the joyful and tender touch of sympathy to the sorrowful. We might sum up His

life in the words, "He gave." It was because of this giving spirit that His life was ever in harmony to the divine. It was because of this giving spirit that His deeds were ever helpful to mankind. This was wherein His peace consisted, that He gave His will in subjection to His Father's and His life in service to man. What a simple thing, then, is this peace of Christ which He left to us, His disciples, as His last and most precious gift.

Yet how often we look upon it as something wonderful, supernatural, which we can never attain unto, nor understand. It is wonderful; it is supernatural. It is a wonderful thing that the spirit of God should sojourn with our human spirits. Yet it is not a thing beyond our attaining. Your experience tells you so. You know that it comes through being in harmony with God, through doing kindness for others.

The peace that our Christ left to us, His disciples, as His last and most precious gift, is a peace that comes through the giving of self in service, through the following out of the words of the text: "Not as the world giveth, give I." Let us consider this idea of giving as Christ conceived it that we might become acquainted with true giving and understand the noble power of Christianity as endeavour.

The words of Jesus "not as the world giveth, give I" show a keen appreciation on His part of a vast difference between giving as He conceived of it and giving as it was commonly understood among men. Would any man see Christ's conception of