Paradise, and Jehovah breathed into my nostrils the breath of life. I am a son of God." O man, believing in a halfand-half Bible-believing in a Bible in spots, where did you come from? Answer: "It is all uncertain; in my ancestral line away back there was an orang-outang and a tadpole and a polywog, and it took millions of years to get me evoluted." O man, believing in a Bible in spots, where are you going to when you quit this world? Answer: "Going into a great to be, so on into the great somewhere, and then I shall pass through on to the great anywhere, and I shall probably arrive in the nowhere." That is where I thought you would fetch up. O man, believing in an entire Bible, and believing with all your heart, where are you going to when you leave this world? Answer: "I am going to my Father's house; I am going into the companionship of my loved ones who have gone before; I am going to leave ali my sins, and I am going to be with God and like God forever and forever." Oh, the glorious certitudes, certainties of orthodoxy!

"Where shall I go?" said a dying Hindoo to the Brahmitic priest to whom he had given money to pray for his salvation. "Where shall I go after I die?" The Brahmitic priest said: "You will first of all go into a holy quadruped." "But," said the dying Hindoo, "where shall I go then?" "Then you shall go into a singing bird." "But," said the dying Hindoo, "where then shall I go?" "Then," said the Brahmitic priest, "you will go into a beautiful flower." The dying Hindoo threw up his arms in an agony of solicitation as he said: "But where shall I go last of all?" Thank God this Bible tells the Hindoo, tells you, tells me, not where shall I go to-day, not where shall I go to-morrow, not where shall I go next year, but where shall I go last of all!

CONTRASTED DEATH-BEDS.

Those who deny the Bible, or deny any part of it, never die well. They either go out in darkness or they go out in silence portentous. You may gather up all the biographies

that have come forth since the art of printing was invented, and I challenge you to show me a triumphant death of a man who rejected the Scriptures, or rejected any part of them. Here I make a great wide avenue. On the one side I put the death-beds of those who believe in an entire Bible. On the other side of that avenue I put the death-beds of those who reject part of the Bible, or all of the Bible. Now, take my arm and let us pass through this dividing avenue. Look off upon the right side. Here are the death-beds on the right side of this avenue. "Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!" "Free grace!" "Free grace!" "Glory, glory!" "I am sweeping through the gates washed in the blood of the Lamb!" "The chariots are coming!" "I mount, I fly!" "Wings, wings!" "They are coming for me!" "Peace, be still!" Alfred Cookman's death-bed, Richard Cecil's deathbed, Commodore Foote's death-bed. Your father's deathbed, your mother's death-bed, your sister's death-bed, your child's death-bed. Ten thousand radiant, songful death-beds of those who believed an entire Bible.

Now, take my arm and let us go through that avenue, and look off upon the other side. No smile of hope. No shout of triumph. No face supernaturally illumined. Those who reject any part of the Bible never die well. No beckoning for angels to come. No listening for the celestial escort. Without any exception they go out of the world because they are pushed out; while on the other hand the list of those who believed in an entire Bible and went out of the world in triumph is a list so long it seems interminable. O! is not that a splendid influence, this orthodoxy, which makes that which must otherwise be the most dreadful hour of life-the last hour-positively paradisaical?

STAND BY THE OLD PATHS.

"Ask for the old paths, walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." But follow this crusade against any part of the Bible, and first of all you will give up Genesis, which is as true as Matthew; then you will give up all the

historical parts of the Bible; then after a while you will give up the miracles; then you will find it convenient to give up the Ten Commandments; and then after a while you will wake up in a fountainless, rockless, treeless desert swept by everlasting sirocco. If you are laughed at, you can afford to be laughed at, for standing by the Bible just as God has given it to you and miraculously preserved it.

Do not jump overboard from the stanch old Great Eastern of old-fashioned orthodoxy until there is something ready to take you up stronger than the fantastic yawl which has painted on the side "Advanced Thought," and which leaks at the prow and leaks at the stern, and has a steel pen for one oar and a glib tongue for the other oar, and now tips over this way and then tips over that way, until you do not know whether the passengers will land in the breakers of despair or on the sinking sand of infidelity and atheism.

I am in full sympathy with the advancements of our time, but this world will never advance a single inch beyond this old Bible. God was just as capable of dictating the truth to the prophets and apostles as He is capable of dictating the truth to these modern apostles and prophets. God has not learned anything in a thousand years. He knew just as much when He gave the first dictation as the last dictation. So I will stick to the old paths. Naturally a sceptic, and preferring new things to old, I never so much as now felt the truth of the entire Bible, especially as I see into what spectacular imbecility men rush when they try to chop up the Scriptures with the meat-axe of their own preferences, now calling upon philosophy, now calling on the Church, now calling on God, now calling on the devil. I prefer the thick, warm robe of the old religion-old as God-the robe which has kept so many warm amid the cold pilgrimage of this life and amid the chills of death. The old robe rather than the thin, uncertain gauze offered us by these wiseacres who believe the Bible in spots.

CHAPTER V.

Theory of a Posthumous Opportunity.

[Next in enormity to HIGHER CRITICISM is the fallacious expectation of "A SECOND CHANCE," or a PoSTHUMOUS OPPORTUNITY of Salvation; perhaps the more mischievous device of Satan.-[EDITOR].

"If the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be."-ECCLES. II: 3.

HERE we have figuratively announced the orthodox doctrine of two destinies. Palace and penitentiary. Palace with gates on all sides through which all may enter and live on celestial luxuries world without end, and all for the knocking and the asking. A palace grander than if all the Alhambras and the Versailles and the Windsor castles and the Winter Gardens and the imperial abodes of all the earth were heaved up into one architectural glory. At the other end of the universe a penitentiary where men who want their sins can have them. The first of no use unless you have the last. Brooklyn and New York would be better places to live in with Raymond Street jail and the Tombs and Sing Sing, and all the small-pox hospitals emptied on us than heaven would be if there were no hell.

Thomas Paine and George Whitefield, Jezebel and Mary Lyon, Nero and Charles Wesley, Charles Guiteau and James A. Garfield, John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln-all in glory together! All the innocent men, women, and children who were massacred, side by side with their murderers. If we are all coming out at the same destiny, without regard to character, then it is true. I turn away from such a debauched heaven. Against that cauldron of piety and blasphemy, philanthropy and assassination, self-sacrifice and

beastliness, I place the two destinies of the Bible forever and forever and forever apart.

PAIN DOES NOT CURE.

Common-sense, as well as revelation, declares that such an expectation is chimerical. You say that the impenitent man having got into the next world and seeing the disaster will, as a result of that disaster, turn, the pain the cause of his reformation. But you can find ten thousand instances in this world of men who have done wrong and distress overtook them suddenly. Did the distress cure them? No; they went right on.

Pain does not correct. Suffering does not reform. Take up the printed reports of the prisons of the United States, and you will find that the vast majority of the incarcerated have been there before, some of them four, five, six times. What is true in one sense is true in all senses, and will forever be so, and yet men are expecting in the next world purgatorial rejuvenation. With a million illustrations all working the other way in this world, people are expecting that distress in the next state will be salvatory, though they know that some men suffer here without any salutary consequence.

AN UNPROPITIOUS BEGINNING.

Furthermore, the prospect of a reformation in the next world is more improbable than a reformation here. In this world the life started with innocence of infancy. In the case supposed the other life will open with all the accumulated bad habits of many years upon him. Surely, it is easier to build a strong ship out of new timber than out of an old hulk that has been ground up in the breakers. If with innocence to start with in this life a man does not become godly, what prospect is there that in the next world, starting with sin, there would be a seraph evoluted? Surely the sculptor has more prospect of making a fine statue out of a block of pure