You may criticise the Bible, you may criticise Christians, but, after all, there is something in Christianity that cannot be explained away as a superstition or a delusion; there is something that cannot be dismissed by a scoff or with indifference. Somewhere and at some time it will have the final word, and it will be heard. I commend it to your honest and earnest judgment now. Try it; I ask no more. Settle the great questions that press on every heart as the Bible opens the way of settlement to you, and wait the issue. You can lose nothing; you may gain everything. The fact is as remarkable as it is familiar that no man in the last hour here--the hour, often, of supernal light--ever wanted to take back or to change his faith in the Man of Nazareth as the Son of God and the Saviour of men. When the shadows are melting in the great realities, and the mysteries of life are about to be finished and the verities of the future are to be proved, no man has yet been found to mourn that in the face of all difficulty and doubt and denial here he was a Christian. Can that, or anything approaching it, be said of any form of atheism or infidelity or unbelief? As ever, yours, C----. LETTER IV. MY DEAR A----: I had supposed my last letter would end our correspondence. Your kind reply has gratified me more than I can express. Without further words, let me take up at once the question that you put, I am sure, sincerely. You ask, "What _is_ 'the way of settlement that the Bible opens to the great questions that press us?'" The questions of supreme interest are few and simple. Is there a God? Is there a future existence for us? How can that existence be made a safe and satisfying one? If you are willing to allow any authority to the Bible at all, there can be no doubt as to the first two questions. There is a God by whom we were created and to whom we are responsible; there is a future existence. Those two questions are settled, if the Bible can settle anything. And they are settled, let me add, in harmony with the profoundest instincts and the most imperative demands of our nature. Whatever a few souls in their struggling dissatisfaction and sad unrest may persuade themselves, the great yearning heart of humanity will quiet itself on nothing less than God and immortality. Even your former guide, Mr. ---- (let me hope I may speak of him now as only your _former_ guide), cries out in the presence of the dead and before the awful silence of the grave, "_Immortality_ is a word that hope through all the ages has been whispering to love. All wish for happiness beyond this life; all hope to meet again the loved and lost." Yes, there are hours when the most hopeless are glad to turn to the hope that the Bible alone gives, when the bitterest rejecters of God and his word long for the consolation that only the rejected word affords.