pages from beginning to end, but these have always been the first to admit that it required, and would bear, perusal again and again, and that the more men study it, the more they will be amazed at its wonderful depth, and attracted with its magnificent beauties:

The learned Le Clerc tells us, that while he was compiling his Harmony, he was so struck with admiration of the excellent discourses of Jesus, and so inflamed with the love of his most holy doctrine, that he thought that he had but just begun to be acquainted with what he scarcely ever laid out of his hands from infancy. During the time that Dr. Kennicott was employed on his Polyglot Bible, it was the constant office of his wife, in their daily airings, to read to him those different portions to which his immediate attention was called. When prepa

ring for their ride the day after this great work was completed, upon her asking him what book she would take, "O," exclaimed he, "let us begin the Bible !"

"The fairest productions of human wit," remarks Bishop Horne, "after a few perusals, like gathered flowers, wither in our hands, and lose their fragrancy, but these unfading plants of Paradise become, as we are accustomed to them, still more and more beautiful; their bloom appears to be doubly heightened, fresh odors are emitted, and new sweets extracted from them. He who hath once tasted

their excellences, will desire to taste them again, and he who tastes them oftenest will relish them best."

"I know not a better rule of reading the Scripture," says John Newton, "than to read it through from beginning to end, and when we have finished it once, to begin it again. We shall meet with many passages which we can make little improvement of, but not so many in the second reading as in the first, and fewer in the third than in the second."

"The Bible," says Cecil, "resembles an extensive garden, where there is a vast variety and profusion of fruits and flowers, some of which are more essential, or more splendid than others; but there is not a blade suffered to grow in it, which has not its use and beauty in the system. Salvation for sinners is the grand truth presented everywhere, and in all points of light; but the pure in heart sees a thousand traits of the Divine character, of himself, and of the world; some striking and bold, others cast, as it were, into the shade, and designed to be searched for and examined."

"A man's love of Scripture at the beginning of a religious course," remarked Dr. Arnold, "is such as makes the praise which older Christians give to the Bible seem exaggerated; but, after twenty or thirty years of a religious life, such praise always sounds inadequate. Its glories seem so much more full than they seemed at first."

And this experience of the inexhaustibleness of the Bible, let it be noted, was not confined to the persons just named. Ten thousand times ten thousand witnesses there have been, and there are, that the love of the sacred volume grows with the perusal, and that it affords to the student of its pages ever fresh delight. It is not so with other things. Interest in them is abated by repetition and familiarity. The sweetest song that minstrel ever sang upon earth, soon becomes hackneyed, and we get tired of it. The richest viands, by becoming common, lose their relish. The most beautiful landscape loses its power to inspire by being often surveyed. Most books we read, even those which are most intensely interesting and exciting, will not bear reading more than twice or thrice.

This, however, is not true of the Bible. The more we read it, the more we desire to read, and the more we find to read. It still has, after assiduous and repeated perusal, the charm of novelty, like the great orb of day, at which we are wont to gaze with unabated astonishment from infancy to old age. After all our delving, there are yet profounder depths to be sounded; after all our soaring, there are still loftier heights to be scaled. The veteran, whose whitened locks, and wrinkled brow, and bended form, indicate that the time of his departure must be to him the absorbing theme, turns over the pages of this volume with an interest undiminished

by accumulating years. The legate of the skies brings forth things new from it, as certainly as he did when commencing its exposition fifty years ago. The public assembly listens to it, when read, from year to year, with eyes fixed, and ear awake; an attention that never tires, and an interest that never cloys. "Select, if you can," says Robert Hall, "any other composition, and let it be rendered equally familiar to the mind, and see whether it will produce this effect."

Silence of the Bible.

FROM Some men's questions more can be learned than from other men's answers. From some men's silence more instruction can be derived than from other men's speech. Indeed, it has become a proverb, that it is evidence of wisdom to know when to keep quiet.

"Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread."

The sciolist, whose pride is as great as his ignorance, will express himself freely on subjects on which the profound scholar prefers to be mute. The one knows, the other does not, that an insufficient explanation of a difficult thing is worse than none. Many a man has lost a cause at the Bar by not submitting it without argument to the good sense of the jury. Many a physician has lost the confidence of the public by attempting too much, or by showing in his talk a want of power of diagnosis, which seasonable taciturnity might have concealed. Many a man, in entering a gallery of paintings, or sculpture, where art has placed its grandest achievements, has betrayed his utter lack of æsthetic cultivation, by a boisterous and pretentious manner - the very opposite of that subdued frame, which such productions always generate in those who have taste to appreciate them. Many a man, by opening his mouth ou