Hammurabi's laws in fifteen pages resemble Deuteronomy to a certain degree, but are much more meagre; they often recall our old Swedish law with its trivialities. For instance: "If anyone strikes out a man's teeth, his teeth shall be struck out; but if he strikes out the teeth of an emancipated slave, he shall pay one-eighth of a mina of silver." In any case God is one, and His laws are in principle the same. The Bible may have used the same source as Hammurabi. But when the heathen try to use the laws of the Assyrian clay tablets in order to prove that the Bible is not inspired, they miss the mark. "Inspired" means "received from God." See how the heathen has adorned his paltry pamphlet with a frontispiece, which asserts, against his will, that Hammurabi's laws were also inspired. For the frontispiece portrays Hammurabi receiving his laws from the Sun-god. =Strauss's Life of Christ.=--Now that I am sixty years old, it occurred to me to see what sort of a book Strauss's _Leben Jesu_ is before I depart. In my youth, in the 'sixties, we read in school (of our own accord, however) "the last Athenian's doctrine of the Bible," but we never succeeded in seeing the original _Life of Jesus_. And although I have been in libraries, collected books, visited second-hand book-stalls, I have not seen Strauss's book. It seemed as though it had been confiscated by the Invisible Powers. Now when I am sixty, it has arrived and I tried to read it. But I could not. It was simply unreadable! All these many pages contained nothing, and what was printed seemed to me incomprehensible, soulless, dry. A man who writes a book about what he does not understand; a student who has learnt the æsthetic systems by heart; a philosopher who tries to define the beautiful; a mathematician who wants to prove or disprove axioms; a drunken man who tries to play the flute; a feeble foolish attempt to explain God's great miracle in the Atonement. I threw the book away, else I should have gone to sleep over it. Strauss died in 1874, and in spite of the last stage of his development, when he did not believe any more in the immortality of the soul, he spent his last hours in reading Plato's _Phædo_, in which at the death-bed of Socrates the immortality of the soul is so clearly demonstrated. His death was like that of Socrates, his pupils said. But they do not inform us whether the cup of poison was at hand.