A laboring man had come up from the country for a holiday in London. He seemed strong and active, tho his hair was gray; and standing in the Roman Gallery, he looked wonderingly at the long line of statues and busts of the Roman emperors. As I pointed out one and another to a friend with me, he stept forward and said, “Have they got Julius Cæsar here?” I at once told him that the bust stood at the end of the gallery and he walked toward it, but soon came back again, evidently not quite satisfied. I asked him if he had found it.
“No,” he said, “I couldn’t see him.” So I took the old man back to where it stood, and pointed it out.
“You are interested in these things?” I inquired.
“Yes,” he replied, “and now I can tell folks when I go home that I’ve seen him. Which is the one that was alive when Jesus Christ was crucified?” I soon showed him Tiberius Cæsar, and then Augustus, telling him how God had through his means set the whole Roman world in motion, in order that according to prophecy Christ might be born in Bethlehem. And then I asked him if he knew the Lord Jesus Christ. With a bright, satisfied look lighting up his fine old face, he said, “Ah, yes! one gets to know summat of Him in a lifetime.”
There were many things to be seen in London, but evidently the British Museum stood first and foremost in his estimation, because he could there see portraits of those about whom he read in the Bible.—Ada R. Habershon, “The Bible and the British Museum.”
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BIBLE, LIVING ON THE
We never fully realize the value of the Bible till it becomes our very life. The way to deal with the Bible is not merely to study it or to meditate upon it, but actually to live on it, as that squirrel lives on his beech-tree.
A preacher, one day, resting under a beech-tree, pondering on the divine wisdom that had created it, saw a squirrel running round the trunk and up the branches, and he said to himself, “Ah! little creature, this beech-tree is much more to you than it is to me, for it is your home, your living, and your all.” Its big branches were the main streets of his city and its little boughs were the lanes. Somewhere in that tree he had his house and the beechnuts were his daily food.
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