Professor Harper's Licture,

A small audience gathered in Sever 11 last evening to hear Professor W. R. Harper of Yale University. Professor Harper took for his subject the Literary Study of the English Bible. He impressed his audience with the fact that although we are living in an age when everything new is most sought for and the old ridiculed. yet the old ought not be lost sight of. Just as the literature of the ancients and their philosophy is being studied to bring out the new that is in the old, so must the Bible be studied to bring out new truths and impress them on the mind in a new way. The Bible must be comprehensively studied and interpreted. There is more respect due to the man who thoroughly studies the Bible with a view to disprove its truths than to the man who accepts truths in a general sort of way. The Bible must be studied in a new way by college men. Of the college man, being the man of education and intellect, more is expected than of the ordinary, uneducated classes.

The two factors of Bible study are the spirit and the method. The spirit must be one of reverential, yet voluntary historical research. The spirit must be historical, because in order to understand the writer's language we must be acquainted with the usages of his time. The method must be above all an independent one, and one like the method adopted by the student in other college work. It must be a comprehensive method. Professor Harper said that the Sunday School and Bible teaching of today was doing actual harm, because entered into in a compulsory spirit and in a non-comprehensive way. The Bible is of no real use when studied by texts or chapters, which have no relation with what has gone before or is to come, but it must be studied so that the lessons will be logically connected and each verse and chapter bear some relation to the book as a whole. Each book has its weight in a general knowledge of the Bible. In conclusion Professor Harper urged Harvard men especially to study the Bible because so many smaller institutions were ever ready to follow the example of Harvard, if from no better motive than simply to do as Harvard does.