How often, while wandering among the ruins of Kuyunjik, Nebi Yunus, and Khorsabad, have I not had brought home to me the far-reaching changes in our knowledge of the Near East, which have been effected by the startling discoveries that were made three-quarters of a century ago in the palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib and Asurbanipal! But nothing impressed me more than the first question which Scriptural students always make regarding these discoveries, “How do they bear on the Bible”? It is the same question which has so often been asked about the revelations of geology in their bearings on the Sacred Text. Something is discovered which at the first blush is regarded as militating against the accuracy of the Sacred Scriptures. After further investigation, this same discovery is viewed as being strongly confirmatory of the Bible, while still more careful examination shows that the teachings of the new science not only do not but, by their very nature, cannot question, much less impeach the veracity of the Book of Books. It is true that one’s view of the Bible may be enlarged with one’s advancing years; that one’s understanding of it may be improved by more profound study, and by the progress of research; but science, whether it appear in the guise of geology, or Assyriology, or of what has falsely been called the science of evolution, can never invalidate a single one of the fundamental teachings either of Scripture or of the Church of Christ. This thought was borne in upon me with unwonted force as I stood one day above the ruins of Asurbanipal’s library. Gazing at a cluster of keleks--skin rafts--bearing their light traffic down the historic Tigris, as they did when Assyria ruled the East, and recalling the pictures I had formed of “Nineveh the great city” when as a boy I read my first history of the Bible--a book that was to exert so paramount an influence on the studies and thoughts of my after life--I asked myself, “In what respect does my faith to-day differ from that which I held three score years ago”? I had then, as Pasteur once said of himself when at the zenith of his fame and mental vigor, the faith of a Breton peasant.[377] Since that far-off time when I delighted to picture the glories of Nineveh and Babylon and dwell on the famous campaigns and victories, the superb palaces and entertainments of Sennacherib and Assuerus and Nebuchadnezzar, I have striven to keep abreast with the intellectual movement of my time and, in so doing, I have never found anything in any of the new sciences that could by any legitimate interpretation be construed as being at variance with the teachings of the religion of my boyhood. We now know incomparably more about the history, the social and economic condition of the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians than we did before the explorer brought to light the literary treasures of Nippur, Telloh, Abu-Habba, and Nineveh; but we have discovered nothing which is competent to discredit any of the