find persons exciting our admiration through their virtues. Let us not
stop in cold admiration, but reflect how we may engraft similar virtues
upon our own souls. It is deep and earnest Thought alone that can teach
us to know ourselves, and without this knowledge we are in constant
danger of cherishing repulsive vices such as we should abhor in others,
and of neglecting the culture of virtues such as in others we esteem
indispensable. Society at large, too, is around us, and domestic
circles, with all their complex relations, their jarring discords, or
their heavenly harmonies; and all are full of food for Thought. The true
and the false, the right and the wrong, are everywhere, and the highest
wisdom is to be able to distinguish one from the other. He who has
spent his whole life in intellectual pursuits may, in this greatest
wisdom,--the only wisdom that belongs to eternity equally with time,--be
the veriest fool; while he who has patiently and prayerfully and
obediently studied no book but the Bible may be so taught of God that he
shall possess all that man while on earth can possess of this highest
wisdom.

It is beautifully said by William von Humboldt, that "exactly those
joyful truths which are the most needful to man--the holiest and
the greatest--lie open to the simplest, plainest mind; nay, are not
unfrequently better, and even more entirely, grasped by such a one,
than by him whose greater knowledge more dissipates his thoughts. These
truths, too, have this peculiarity, that, although they want no profound
research to attain to them, but rather make their own way in the mind,
there is always something new to be found in them, because they are in
themselves inexhaustible and endless."

While the Bible is left to us, while human beings surround us, while our
own souls are to be cleansed, renewed, and saved, we miserably deceive