other point of view
than that which the Bible, true to the most penetrating discernment of
humanity, opens to us. These ideal forms are not the empty conceits of
man's brain, bred from the fumes of his boundless egotism. They are not
the clouds that gather and form and break into airy unreality in the
atmosphere of earth. They are the shadows falling upon the soul of man
from the unseen Realities, which alone have substantial and abiding being.
The laws of nature are surely not the baseless fabric of a dream. These
ideals are simply those laws, transfigured into their spiritual
substances. Whatever in our blindness we may persuade ourselves
elsewhere, over the Bible we recognize the true character of the visions
which so strangely stir us. This is the power of the Bible. Christian
seemed to Mr. Worldly Wiseman a fool. But he saw the heavenly city, and
trudged along, sure that time would prove him in the right. Christian
carried in his hand this Book. With this Book in our hands, we, too, are
sure that the visions of Purity and Justice, which we dimly see afar, are
substantial and real, and that man will win at the last to the land where
they are the light thereof.

Whereupon I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

7. _The Bible thus inspires a buoyancy and exhilaration which feed the
fresh forces of all noble life._

No poet is needed to tell us that

Virtue kindles at the touch of joy.

We know it in our own experience. We notice it in every great revival of
religion. We trace it through the history of Christianity. The story of
the early days of Jesus is, as Renan called it, "a delightful pastoral."
In the person of humanity's greatest idealist, the highest joy of the soul
was set in the framing of one of nature's brightest scenes. Even from the
shadows of the garden of Gethsemane, He bequeaths to his little flock the
legacy of his free spirit: My joy I leave with you. The Christian Society
entered into that bequest, and in its first exhilaration overflowed the
hard coast lines of property, and realized a happy brotherhood.

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and
sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men as any man
had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread at home did take their food with gladness.

The prophets were filled with a buoyancy of spirit that scarce would let
them keep down to t