ught of law can quicken._

Violations of physiological law Nature stamps as folly. Offences against
social laws the State brands as crime. Transgressions of Ideal and Eternal
Law become sin. It is not only foolish or disgraceful to break the moral
law, it is wrong. This is the sense of guilt in disobedience that is
roused in each of us by the Bible, as by no other book; that has been
quickened in Europe, historically, by these sacred Scriptures, as by no
other writings. The Bible has given to humanity a new and intense ethical
perception of evil.

The strenuous moral earnestness of the Puritan and the Methodist is
vitalized from these books. The very type of saintship in Christendom is
unique. It is no mere ceremonial correctness for which the priestly
Ezekiel pleads with tender pathos:

Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions whereby ye
have transgressed, and make you a clean heart and a new spirit; for why
will ye die, O house of Israel?

It is this intense sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin which
oppressed the great-hearted Paul, and wrung from him the bitter cry:

O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death.

How vividly this sense of sin expresses itself in the Fifty-first Psalm!
There is here a plaint infinitely deeper than the chagrin and remorse of
the man who has committed an "indiscretion," or become entangled in an
"intrigue;" there is the cry of a soul that has betrayed its highest,
holiest fidelities, and lies low in the dust before the Heavenly purity:

Wash me throughly from my wickedness,
And cleanse me from my sin.
Cast me not away from Thy presence,
And take not Thy Holy Spirit from me.

To enter into the spirit of this sigh of penitence is a new knowledge of
the human heart. The Bible thus leads men to live as in the presence of an
awful Power of Holiness, which is searching through and through our
beings. We cannot understand the Biblical "salvation" unless we have
fathomed, at least, the shoaler experiences of these saintly souls of old,
and know some little of the depths of sin.

5. _The Bible wakens in the breast of man an ethical passion for the ideal
and eternal law, which, apart from early Buddhism, has no parallel in
history._

The prophets are aflame with the ardors of this sacred enthusiasm. The
ordinary passions of mankind are rivaled in intensity by the mystic
passion of their souls fo