One cannot be well read unless well seasoned in thought and experience. Life makes the man. And he must have lived in all his gifts and become acclimated herein to profit by his readings. Living at the breadth of Shakspeare, the depth of Plato, the height of Christ, gives the mastery, or if not that, a worthy discipleship. Life alone divines life. We read as we live; the book being for us the deeper or the shallower as we are. If read from the reason, it answers to the reason, but fails of finding imagination, the moral sentiment, the affections, fails of making valid its claims upon the deepest instincts of the heart,--those critics of inspiration and interpreters,--all books owing their credibility to the fact of being written from, and addressed to these, as eye-witnesses and sponsors. Mothers of our mothers we are ever at their teats. Most owe more to tradition than to culture or literature; the best of literature as of nurture, being still largely tinctured with tradition. Our debt to the Hebrew scriptures has been greater doubtless than to any literature hitherto accessible to us of the Saxon stock; greater than to all foreign literatures besides. And now the instincts prompt thoughtful minds as never before to explore the prime sources and drink freely at the fountains. "Are mouldy records now the living springs, Whose healing waters slake the thirst within? Oh! never yet hath mortal drank A draught restorative That well'd not from the depths of his own soul." Very desirable it were since the gates of the East are now opening wide and giving the free commerce of mind with mind, to collect and compare the Bibles of the races for general circulation and careful reading. For still out of the Theban night rays the light of our day and blends with all our thinking and doing--China, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Palestine, Greece, Rome, Britain--the christendom and world of to-day. Why nibbling always where Ye nothing fresh can find Upon those rocks? Lo! meadows green and fair! Come pasture here your mind, Ye bleating flocks. VII. COUNSELS. "Counsel is not so sacred a thing as praise, since the former is only useful among men, but the latter is for the most part reserved for the gods."--PYTHAGORAS. [Illustration: Decorative banner of a butterfly among leaves] COUNSELS. I.--RELIGIOUS. "Who shapes his Godhead out of flesh or stone, Knows not a God; but he who lives like one."