h animated those words. We are writing a Bible with our own lives
to-day, a Bible which may never be read in its fulness by human eyes,
but every letter of which is known and read in heaven. Every noble
life is a word of God to the world; every brave, unselfish deed is a
ray of eternal truth. Our characters ought to become living epistles
known and read of all men while we strive to express the best that God
has given us to see; for the same eternal Spirit of Truth, the Spirit
who has been the teacher of all the Elijahs, Isaiahs, and Pauls of
history is with us to-day as He was with them.

+The unity of truth.+--But, someone will remonstrate, What then are we
to believe? For by speaking in this way you erect as many standards of
truth as there are individuals. What the ordinary man wants is to be
told just what to believe, so that he can settle down and be at rest.
It is small comfort to tell him that every scripture statement may be
more or less fallible, and that he must trust to his own perception, or
perhaps to his own fancies, as to what is true. I know all that kind
of argument. It is as old as, or older than, Christianity itself. It
was used in all sincerity against Jesus by some earnest people of His
time. It was used again at the Reformation. It is still used by
sacerdotal controversialists, and looks very plausible on the face of
it. A devout and earnest Roman Catholic will tell you that in
Protestantism there are a thousand different creeds, all claiming to be
authoritative, and that the principle of private judgment can only lead
to intellectual and moral chaos. Your Protestant literalist will tell
you that the Romanist criticism has a good deal in it, and that you
must have a final standard of authority, either the infallible church,
the infallible Book, or the infallible Confession of Faith. But
notwithstanding the dogmatists the supposed infallible Confession of
Faith is almost universally discredited, and common honesty is
compelling Protestants to abandon the theory of an infallible Book.
The supposed infallible church has by no means been invariably
self-consistent. Besides, the important point is this; no man really
believes or can believe a thing until it becomes, so to speak, part of
himself. Holding propositions is not necessarily believing them, no
matter how tenaciously they may be adhered to. But all truth is really
one and the same. I may be unable to take exactly my neighbour's