r the Heavenly Wisdom. They stand amid the wild
whirl of selfish strife in the society of their day, and lift on high the
holy forms of Justice and Brotherhood, as though expecting their
commonplace cotemporaries to turn aside from practical affairs, and seek
for them; and, so subtle and searching are the appeals of these heavenly
visions, men do actually turn from mammon to worship these impoverishing
divinities; and a great movement arises, looking to the bringing down of
these ideals upon the earth, as the ruling powers in the court and the
exchange. The regenerating force of Christendom has lain in the coming of
these prophets, generation after generation, to the children of men, to
lead them upon the mount where they should clearly see those lofty shapes,
commanding instant loyalty from honest souls. The ominous travail-throes
of society to-day await one stimulus to free the new order that is
struggling to the birth--the passion for ethical and social ideals, which
the Bible, rightly administered, would inspire.

The prophetic spirit is the vital force of the Bible. Its insistent power
reappears in Paul; a man consuming in the fires of this holy passion, and
kindling its ardors in the souls of untold myriads. His great letter to
the Romans, so strangely misread as a mere dogmatic treatise, breathes and
burns with this lofty enthusiasm. Its central thought, its threading
_motif_, heard anew in every critical movement of the argument,
is--Righteousness. The Master in whom the Bible centres, enriches earth
with a new benediction:

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.

This highest passion of mankind is wakened by the Bible as by no other
book. Through it, the mystic Forerunners reveal themselves to the human
soul most alluringly; enthralling it with their pure charms, dispelling
the illusions of the senses and the glamor of the world, in the light of
their holy loveliness. The Eternal Wisdom calls from out these pages to
the sons of men:

Hearken unto me ye that follow after righteousness.

6. _The Bible reveals these ethical ideals as no mere alluring visions,
but as the substantial realities of being._

Men say to those who speak of these high conceptions--"They are the dreams
of sentimentalists, the will-'o-the-wisp lights that beguile men away from
the _terra firma_; to be trusted and followed by no practical man."
"Idealist" is a term of reproach. And justly, from any