This is the fundamental secret of the power of the Bible. The love of goodness and the love of God are one. Aspiration is unconscious worship, and worship is aspiration conscious of its object. Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. But this noble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has many aspects in the Bible. The Bible turns upon us every phase in which Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives her heavenly beams. 1. _We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes._ The maxims of a Poor Richard are anticipated here, as quaint, as terse, and as sagacious in the ancient Jew as in the modern American. Our scientific teachers would replace eloquent declamation concerning vices, such as drunkenness and debauchery, by illustrated lectures upon the physiological effects of violations of nature's laws. They would teach men that the laws of health are found in the laws of temperance and purity. The Hebrew sages had this vision of Wisdom. Their proverbial sayings abound with graphic pen-pictures of the folly of vice. No illustration of the physical consequences of debauchery could be more impressive than the vivid sketch of the foolish young man, going after the strange woman as an "ox goeth to the slaughter," knowing not that Her house is the way to hell, Going down to the chambers of death. The favorite name for sin in these proverbs is Folly. Wisdom crieth to the sons of men, in that noblest writing of the sages: Blessed is the man that heareth me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at the posts of my doors. For whoso findeth me findeth life, And shall obtain favor of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul. All they that hate me love death. 2. _These laws of life that work for our health and wealth loom, however, into mystic and sacred forms, as of the laws heavenly and eternal, whose "seat is the bosom of God."_ When Crito urges his beloved master to escape from the death that had been unjustly decreed for him, Socrates replies in a noble personification of the Laws, as rebuking him for the thought of such an attempt to evade them; and he must be dim-sighted, indeed, who does not see in the forms of the State Laws, the shadows of the Eternal Laws, august and awful, whose constraint was round about his will. That is the vision which we catch through every form of law, sanitary, social, or ecclesiastical, in the Bible. In the earliest code of the Hebrew statutes known to us, a collection of tribal "Judgments" or "dooms," this high and mystic sense of obligation steals over us. Amid the quaint enactments recorded in the Book of Covenants, whose language carries us back to times of extreme simplicity, we hear the words