the higher law within his
heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is
all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round?
The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within
the soul.

+The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.+--Now
one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and
intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of
the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or
common-sense statement of truth,--for instance, that of universal
salvation,--he often replies in some such way as the following: "Yes, I
know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but
then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into
everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I
cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing together, passage
after passage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original
meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion;
as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, "The soul that
sinneth, it shall die." Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that
saying,--and it is well worth examination,--he was not thinking of a
modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man
of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way
until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of
scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart
another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent passage in
Psalm cxxxvii, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little
ones against the stones." That passage does not breathe the spirit of
Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus
wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do
justice to a passage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and
moral sympathy with the man who wrote it. It was written by one of the
poor Jewish prisoners carried away captive into Babylon by
Nebuchadnezzar six centuries or more before Jesus was born. Try and
picture the scene. Across eight hundred miles of desert that
melancholy procession winds its way, leaving the highland home behind
and going into slavery in the cruel city of the plain. One by one the
weakest fall and die; and where a baby is left without a mother, or the
mother cannot