re is wholly a thing of this life; but
not more so than is the culture of men unsanctified by the religion of
Christ. A culture that terminates with death is in harmony with the
nature of a horse, but contrary to the nature of a man. What is
culture? This is a question on whose solution man's eternal destiny is
largely suspended. Our age prides itself on being an age of culture;
but do we know in what true culture really consists? As a whole, I
think not. A smattering of sentimental literature, a superficial
refinement of manners, a few borrowed phrases and appropriated customs
of "society," the rendering of a few pieces by rote, and fashionable
dress, constitute with, alas! too many the standard of culture. How
unworthy of their race are those who entertain the thought! All this
may be but the gilding of barbarism; beneath this external glitter
there may be a heart and character steeped in moral rudeness and
degradation.

True culture consists not in the cultivation of outward accomplishments.
It consists not in intellectual acquirements. It consists in the
development of the triune man--body, soul and spirit--in their divine
harmony. Without a cultivation of the spirit in harmony with its
immortal destiny, all that this world calls culture is but the gilded
tinsel that bedecks the putrefaction of death. The truly cultured man
is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is
compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate
one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion him whom God
created in His own image. As we exist first in time and next in
eternity, that culture which loses sight of either state misconceives
the full mission of man. Man's conception of his present mission and
ultimate destiny determines his standard of culture. He must have an
ideal, and if that ideal be low, his life will be correspondingly low.
Nothing but Christianity can furnish man an ideal worthy of himself;
and nothing but Christian culture can develop him in the direction of
that ideal.

Classical antiquity never conceived a destiny worthy of man. It never
contemplated him in that relation of Christ-likeness to his God, which
the Bible reveals. Even Aristotle, the most cultivated of all heathen
philosophers, thought that only a part of mankind possessed a rational
soul. With such a conception man is incapable of the highest culture.
It is degrading to his dignity. All culture based on such a hypo