His last words were in the tribute which celebrated the anniversary of the birth of Oliver Wendell Holmes:

The hour draws near, howe'er delayed and late,
When at the eternal gate

We leave the words and works we call our own,

And lift void hands alone

For love to fill. Our nakedness of soul

Brings to that gate no toll;

Giftless we come to Him, who all things gives,
And live because he lives.

Of the five great poets of one generation three were produced by America-Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes—and two by England-Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" is too well known to need repetition here. We would simply call attention to the fact that in the last verse he reproduces the theme of Charles Wesley and passes it along:

For though from out our bourn of time and place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

"Never say of me that I am dead," said Browning, as he lay dying in Venice. His last words in verse are contained in the Epilogue to "Asolando." They ring with the courage and bravery of his life:

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of men's worktime

Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,

"Strive and thrive," cry, "Speed-fight on, fare ever There as here!"

It has been suggested that this reads as if the poet "had written his epitaph."

With one more of these death songs we conclude this little collection. In Edinburgh there lived a lady who was both a poet and a prose writer. Of poetry she wrote little, but what woman was more widely known than the talented author of Makers of Florence, Makers of Venice, and other charming books-Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant? On June 21, 1897, four days before she died, she dictated the following beautiful words which express the essence of true immortality:

On the edge of the world I lie, I lie,
Happy and dying, and dazed and poor,
Looking up from the vast great floor

Of the infinite world that rises above

To God, and to Faith, and to Love, Love, Love!
What words have I to that world to speak,

Old and weary, and dazed and weak,
From the very low to the very high?

Only this-and this is all:

From the fresh green soil to the wide blue sky,
From greatness to Weariness, Life to Death,
One God have we on whom to call;

One great bond from which none can fall;
Love below, which is life and breath,

And Love above, which sustaineth all.

Heirs to a twofold immortality, they lie buried yet not buried. Their words cause them to live on forever in the life of mankind. Their faith gives to them the greater immortality not the immortality of genius, but the immortality of love. We no longer hear "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes," but "I am the resurrection and the life."

8.G. Ayres

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

FROM an unlikely source, from a man whose standpoint is outside of all creeds, Christian or pagan, comes this tribute to the Hebrew Scriptures:

Jehovah, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, is the most awful, the most imposing, and the most imminent of all the gods. . . . With a gentle and loving alter ego who stands between his stern and awful majesty and guilty and trembling man, namely, Jesus Christ, he is still the God of the most enlightened of the human race. With what power and solemnity he figures in the old Bible; how he filled and shook the hearts of the old bards and prophets! Open the Scriptures almost anywhere, and one seems to hear his awful voice and feel his terrible tread. It shakes the earth; it fills the heavens; the universe is the theater of his love and wrath. What an abysmal depth of conscience in those old Hebrews; what capacity for remorse, for reverence, for fear, for terror, for adoration; what a sense of the value of righteousness, and of the dreadfulness of sin! In them we see the unsounded depths of the religious spirit-its tidal seas; bitter and estranging, but sublime. Other sacred books are shallow and tame, are but inland seas, so to speak, compared with this briny deep of the Hebrew Bible. What storms of conscience sweep over it; what upreaching, what mutterings of wrath, what tenderness and sublimity, what darkness and terror are in this book! What pearls of wisdom it holds, what gems of poetry! Verily, the Spirit of the Eternal moves upon it. The Bible is such an expression of the awe, and reverence, and yearning of the human soul in the presence of the facts of life and death, and of the power and mystery of the world, as pales all other expression of these things; not a cool, calculated expression of it, but an emotional, religious expression of it. To demonstrate its divergence from science is nothing; from the religious aspirations of the soul it does not diverge. Little wonder it still sways the hearts and lives of men. Their imaginations go out upon it. Immensity broods over it. It is a record of the darkest deeds, and luminous with the sublimest devotion and piety. It is archetypal, elemental. The light of eternity is upon its face.

THE following plain, wise, admonitory words, spoken by the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Central New York to young clergymen, may find a wider hearing and a larger usefulness on these pages:

There are temptations which nothing but self-sacrifice will overcome. You are in your well-lighted, comfortable study some evening. Outside the weather is forbidding. You sophisticate with yourself. You say: "To be sure, over the mountain yonder, or out on the marsh, or down in the slums, there is a sick

woman whose baby also is ill with scarlet fever; there is that smart hack driver who has lately stopped drinking and beating his wife, and I told her I would come down this evening and help her encourage him; there are some orphan children that may not have bread in the morning; there are two or three candidates for admission to the Church whom I should not be so likely to find at any other time; there is that contumacious vestryman who has got hold of a bit of parish gossip, and got hold of it, as usual, wrong end first, and will make more trouble with it in twenty-four hours than I can set right in a month, unless I see him; and there is Norah, the washerwoman, who is suffering for want of work, and she ought to know about the place I heard of to-day, so she can make sure of it to-morrow. But no! They can wait. I have in mind a capital subject for an uncommonly interesting sermon. I have been told that my special talent lies in the pulpit, and I think so myself. There will be hundreds of people in the church next Sunday, and they are of more account than half a dozen uncultivated folks in the outskirts. Preaching is a divine ordinance and must be attended to. I shall be excused if stay here and study and write." That is dastardly sophistry, and the sermon you make under those conditions is a sham, as you are a sham; and God does not use shams for any permanent or glorious upbuilding of his kingdom anywhere. Just how he will insert debility and failure into your ministry you may never know; but he will do it, for he cannot deny himself. Shirk your pastoral work, your humane work, your work of love, for the sake of your preaching, and you sap your preaching at its root. It was a pathetic but pungent satire of a dying lady, poor but polite to the last, who was asked if her clergyman should be sent for: "No, I thank you, I think not; he has never been to see me in these six years since I moved into the parish, and it would be a little awkward to have the ceremony of an introduction to my acquaintance just as I am breathing my last." Quite as good was the remark of another woman on her minister's habits: "Six days of the week he is invisible, and the seventh he is incomprehensible." The "invisible" goes to account for the "incomprehensible."

"A PRIMITIVE AND CHILDISH NOTION."

IF we should believe what is told us by certain gentlemen who must be some centuries older than they appear, we would conclude that Christianity has been logically and scientifically dead a long time, though not yet sensible of it. It must be like the woman in Hardy's poem, "The Slow Nature." The foundations went from under it, they say, a long while ago, and it remains standing through sheer obstinacy, mere force of habit, or an inconsequent mind, like the gunner who stood by his gun and kept on loading, taking aim, and firing after his head was blown off. Unlike Dr. Holmes's katydid, which says "an undisputed thing in such a solemn way," these antique gentlemen keep repeating a thing which is not only generally disputed, but abundantly disproved. Their oft-reiterated irreligious dogma is that "dogmatic religion may be said to have received a fatal wound three centuries ago when the Ptolemaic

system was succeeded by the Copernican, and the real relation of the earth to the universe was disclosed." Yes, it " may be said," and it is so said by a few benighted and belated persons, who must be ignorant of the nature of things, unacquainted with modern history, and unaware of great Christian events now going on around them; but it must be retorted, with the instantaneousness of a rifle-flash, that there is no evidence of the truth of such a statement, so that whoever says it makes an assertion which he cannot prove, and which he ought to know is completely disproved by notorious facts under his own eyes and over all the world.

These antiquated doctrinaires reason that if Copernicus's astronomic theory is true, then the Gospel is false. Firing off their misconstructed syllogisms at Christianity, they watch to see it drop dead. They are the surprised and mystified victims of their own false reasoning and materialistic philosophy. They declare, with Goldwin Smith, that "Christian doctrine is geocentric; it assumes our earth to be the center of the universe, the primary object of divine care, and the grand theater of divine administration." They are three hundred years out of date and have modern Christianity that much out of focus. It is a pity they are not better informed and more careful in their statements. They ought to know that as a matter of fact Christian theology does not assume the earth to be the center of the universe, and as a matter of reasoning it has no need to assume it. In being the chief support of the schools and colleges which teach the Copernican astronomy Christianity does not undermine its own doctrines. And the idea that it has any logical, polemical, or apologetic need for Ptolemy or his geocentric theories is, as John Fiske curtly and pungently remarks, "a primitive and childish notion." Christianity holds, not exactly as Mr. Smith puts it, but that this small earth is among the objects of divine care, one of the avenues of divine manifestation, and that man is.not so insignificant as to be beneath the notice of the immanent God revealed by modern science when rightly interpreted, but long ago declared by Holy Scripture, who filleth all in all and upholdeth all things by the word of his power, who, as Paul said, is not far from any one of us, in whom we live and move and have our being; of whom Tennyson wrote, "Closer is he than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." When a befogged and belated professor