entious love. Hard as the
granitic core of earth is the core of religion in the Bible.

The "stern law-giver" of Israel was Duty. Her supreme authority, which
enjoined with absolute command the most unpleasant action, was--"I ought."
She saw that "laws mighty and brazen" bind man to a right, which he may
distort or deny, but cannot destroy--his Saviour or his Judge. Mystic in
its sacredness, Conscience sat shrined within the soul of the holy men who
spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; her voice the very voice of
God. The Power in whom we live and move and have our being is revealed in
these books as the Eternal Righteousness. The moral law is seen to be the
throne of the Most High.

In Emerson's phrase:

Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the
individual will.

"What do I love when I love Thee?" sighed Augustine. Israel might have
answered that question in Augustine's own words:

Not the beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the
brightness of the light so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of
varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and
spices, not manna and honey. None of these do I love when I love my
God; and yet I love a kind of light, a kind of melody, a kind of
fragrance, a kind of food, when I love my God,--the light, the melody,
the fragrance, the food of the inner man. This it is which I love when
I love my God.[58]

But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent:

O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing which is evil....
If a man say I love God and hateth His brother he is a liar.

This is the fundamental secret of the power of the Bible. The love of
goodness and the love of God are one. Aspiration is unconscious worship,
and worship is aspiration conscious of its object.

Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

But this noble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has
many aspects in the Bible. The Bible turns upon us every phase in which
Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is
lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives
her heavenly beams.

1. _We have here the simple, homely, prudential aspects of virtue, which
have always been particularly powerful on certain ages and classes._

The maxims of a Poor Richard are anticipated here, as quaint, as terse,
and