The legal portions of the Bible give us the like lesson, even though the approach to the lesson is different. Here we discover that humanity is worthy enough to call for conservation and protection. The legislation reaches to hygienic and sanitary details of minute character. The whole effort is to build a protecting fence about men. The Ten Commandments, studied in this light, become a very human document. Their harsh and negative quality is softened into gentleness. They guard the goods of man--his property, his wife and children, his body, his good name. It would be possible to regard the Decalogue as a series of prohibitions in which the word "not" occurs with forbidding frequency. In this case the appropriate accompaniment is thunder and lightning, and the appropriate scroll for the writing is stone. This viewpoint is one sided and unfair. The Ten Commandments are prohibitions only because they are protections. They have been through many ages the kindly sentinels of society. They have taken the side of God, of his dumb creatures, and of men and women and little children. Considered in any just way, the legal portions of the Bible are a tribute not merely to divine authority, but to human worth. The prophetical books add their lesson, and from a still different angle. They are filled with protests against man's conduct, with wrath against his insincerities, and with predictions of his coming woe. The mouths of the prophets were not filled with compliments. Those stern men were not the flatterers of their own generations. Their sayings could be so elected as to make a degrading estimate of men. But here again we must get the full meaning of the message. In their last analysis the prophecies are a marked tribute to potential man. Beyond the disturbed present they see the peaceful future. Beyond the clash of swords and the swish of spears they see the mild and productive era of the plowshare and the pruning hook. Beyond the unreal altars they see the incense of true worship arising to God. The prophets were, in the best sense, optimists, and they were optimists because they believed that all men would some day yield to the Lord. They beheld the whole earth filled with righteousness. They saw the stone cut loose from the mountain and filling the wide world. The healing river was to flow to all peoples. Jerusalem was to be the universal joy. The day would dawn when it would be unnecessary to say to any man, "Know thou the Lord." The most dismal of the prophets foretold the perfect day. But all this means that the prophets foretold the perfect man and the perfect race. To proclaim that humanity, under the guidance of God, is so capable is to dignify human life beyond measure.