in the year.” The case seemed to me to be an exceedingly sad one until I began to ask myself, of what man that ever lived could it be said they preached his funeral sermon twice a Sabbath for fifty-two Sundays in the year, and the story still had such freshness that the people would come out and hear it? What other thing was ever so well done that a fool might talk about it, and still a certain amount of interest attach to it despite the poor telling? Here lies one of the uses of the dramatic power of the gospel. When a man of humble attainments has it to tell, he has only to follow the book to make it an interesting story. The moment he strikes a real point of interest, the attentive soul feels that that is what it came for, and, what is better, that it is said to him. In short, the enduring power of this story lies in great part in this fact. The consistency between the beginning and the end and the logical order of things, comes out in a thousand powerful ways. For instance, the peculiar truth that reappears in the words which are sculptured on Shakspere’s tomb. Take the same thought as it reappears—the same thought slightly turned over—as it is repeated in “Middlemarch,” or in that best human version of all, that of Watts: “Princes, this clay must be your bed, In spite of all your towers; The tall, the wise, the reverend head, Must lie as low as ours.” You will find the thought, in good and bad versions, everywhere. Do you wish to take this thought fresh from the fountain? Come to the temple, where the disciples, accustomed to nothing great in art, fresh from Galilee, stand gazing in admiration at the glory of the great edifice and one of them cries out: “Master, behold these stones; and what manner of a building is this?” And listen to the Master as he says: “There shall not remain one stone upon another,” and you have the fountain head of all these streams running down into our poetry. Mark the wonderful consistency, and the wonderful movement of this story—consider it as a drama. You may regard the gospels as beginning at that moment when suddenly there was with the angel a great company of the heavenly hosts, appearing to the shepherds as they watched their flocks by night. It practically ends when the disciples, after the ascension, returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple singing the song which began in angel mouths and ends in human mouths. The purpose of the story was to sing that angelic music into the human heart.