Those who enjoy large opportunities of study, and especially those who have the responsibility not only of learning but of teaching, must beware of setting their own narrow limits to the domain of what is useful and true. It has a far wider range than the wants which we feel in ourselves or which we can trace in others. Even the whole experience of mankind would not suffice to give the measure of it. We dishonour rather than reverence the Bible, when we attempt to confine ourselves and others to the study of it. Much of its secret and inexhaustible store of treasure will remain undiscovered by us, until our hearts are warmed, our intellects quickened, and our experience enlarged, by the masterpieces of human genius. "To the pure all things are pure." In the first century, in which the perils of heathenism to Christianity were tenfold what they are at present, St. Paul in plain terms told his converts that if they liked to accept the invitations of their heathen friends and acquaintances, they need not scruple to do so (1 Cor. x. 27); and by his own example, he shows them that they may enjoy and use what is beautiful and true in heathen literature. Let us beware of narrowing the liberty wisely allowed by him. Each one of us can readily find out what is dangerous for _himself_. There is plenty that is not dangerous: let him freely enjoy that. But the limits that are wise for ourselves are not to bind others. Their liberty is not to be circumscribed by our conscience. "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." FOOTNOTES: [73] χρηστὰ ὁμιλίαι instead of χρησθ' ὁμιλίαι. [74] Lightfoot on "Seneca and St. Paul," in _Philippians_, pp. 288, 300. [75] J. H. Newman, _The Scope and Nature of University Education_, pp. 336-342. The whole discourse, "The Church and Liberal Education," is an eloquent and noble vindication of the claims of literature. CHAPTER XXI. _THE MEANING AND VALUE OF SOBERMINDEDNESS.--THE USE AND ABUSE OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION._ "But speak thou the things which befit the sound doctrine: that aged men be temperate, grave, soberminded, sound in faith, in love, in patience, that aged women likewise be reverent in demeanour, not slanderers nor enslaved to much wine, teachers of that which is good; that they may train the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be soberminded, chaste, workers at home, kind, being in subjection to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed: the younger men likewise exhort to be soberminded."--TITUS ii. 1-6.