to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes, but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought to become living epistles known and read of all men while we strive to express the best that God has given us to see; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, the Spirit who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, Isaiahs, and Pauls of history is with us to-day as He was with them. +The unity of truth.+--But, someone will remonstrate, What then are we to believe? For by speaking in this way you erect as many standards of truth as there are individuals. What the ordinary man wants is to be told just what to believe, so that he can settle down and be at rest. It is small comfort to tell him that every scripture statement may be more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his own perception, or perhaps to his own fancies, as to what is true. I know all that kind of argument. It is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It was used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest people of His time. It was used again at the Reformation. It is still used by sacerdotal controversialists, and looks very plausible on the face of it. A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church, the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infallible Confession of Faith is almost universally discredited, and common honesty is compelling Protestants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book. The supposed infallible church has by no means been invariably self-consistent. Besides, the important point is this; no man really believes or can believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily believing them, no matter how tenaciously they may be adhered to. But all truth is really one and the same. I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's point of view about some aspects of it, but if we are both in earnest and faithful to what we have seen, we shall arrive in the end at the same goal. Religious thinkers and teachers are never really so far apart as seems to be the case. It is in the expression of the truth that they differ, not in the truth itself. Language is never more than approximately convenient expression of the reality it is meant to declare. The man of the future will realise this better than the man of the present or the past. He will replace all external authority by the principle of spiritual autonomy.