Now, what the fashion-plate is, a great part of literature is. It is something which gets old, out of fashion, outworn, when it is a hundred years old. People live largely upon a contemporaneous literary diet. The most of the literature for each generation is produced by itself, and therefore the human nature of it, like the dresses of the fashion-plate, is in a little while out of date, and seems old. I am not as old as I look to be, but I have seen several kinds of literary fashions come and go. I have known men to be famous, producing a book nearly every month, whose name would now be strange, and there are few here who have thought of them for a long time. Other books have taken their places. They were novels, stories, histories, and even poems, but they have gone out of date, because the human nature they dealt with was a temporary and passing human nature—that of a fashion-plate. And the same effect must attend most of the novels being written in our day, because there is a passion upon us for this sort of living detail, this sort of temporary book. There is so little of permanent universal human nature in an ordinary novel of the period, that when you are done with it you have learned but very little about man. The great defect with this class of books is that they do not deal with universal human nature, and it is the power of Shakspere that he deals largely with universal human nature. And here we discover the likeness that reigns there. We recognize ourselves and our neighbors. We have struck one of the old lines of humanity, and are acquainted with the people we meet. They wear togas, we wear trousers; but we know each other for brothers. The defect of Shaksperean human nature very soon appears when you lay it down along side of the gospels. You have a little universal human nature in Shakspere, in the gospels you have almost nothing else but universal human nature. If you ask yourselves why we are interested in certain incidents that occurred nearly two thousand years ago, in a foreign land, that occurred in connection with a people for whom we have nothing but antipathy, what will be the answer? Why are we interested in this old history lying back there in a world that had almost nothing like our world except men, and the eternal rocks, and the ever flowing streams? Why, belting the green earth, should we find men everywhere singing about this passage in human history? What is the charm of it that reaches human nature so widely? Undoubtedly there is much charm in the delightful truth which it contains; more in the delightful power behind it, but much also in the fact that when we open these gospels we find ourselves in the presence of men and women like ourselves, in the presence of human nature, undying, eternally the same. In any of these passages you find yourself suddenly reminded of yourself. You feel in every throb of a human heart in the gospels something which allies the old heart with yourself.