And when the South Wind breathes upon these letters on the floor, I see at once that they are symbols of the Indispensability of Jesus. Literature, with all its hoarded wealth, is as inaccessible as the diamonds of the moon until I have mastered the alphabet. The alphabet is the golden key that unlocks to me all its treasures of knowledge, poetry and romance.

'I am—the Alphabet!' He says; and He says it three separate times. For the words occur thrice in the Apocalypse. In the first case they refer to the unfolding of the divine revelation; in the second they refer to the interpretation of historic experience; and in the third they refer to the unveiled drama of the future. As the disciples discovered on the road to Emmaus, I cannot understand my Bible unless I take Him as being the key to it all; I cannot understand the processes of historical development until I have given Him the central place; I cannot anticipate with equanimity the unfoldings of the days to come until I have seen the keys of the eternities swinging at His girdle.

The alphabet is, essentially, an individual affair. In order to read a single sentence, I must learn it for myself. My father's intimacy with the alphabet does not help me to enjoy the volumes on my shelves. The alphabet is indispensable to me; and so is He! There is something very pathetic and very instructive about the story that Legh Richmond tells of The Young Cottager. 'The rays of the morning star,' Mr. Richmond says, 'were not so beautiful in my sight as the spiritual lustre of this young Christian's character.' She was very ill when he visited her for the last time. 'There was animation in her look—there was more—something like a foretaste of heaven seemed to be felt, and gave an inexpressible character of spiritual beauty even in death.'

'Where is your hope, my child?' Mr. Richmond asked, in the course of that last conversation.

'Lifting up her finger,' he says, 'she pointed to heaven, and then directed the same finger downward to her own heart, saying successively as she did so, "Christ there!" and "Christ here!" These words, accompanied by the action, spoke her meaning more solemnly than can easily be conceived.'

In life and in death He is our one indispensability. In relation to this world, and in relation to the world that is to come, He stands to the soul as the alphabet stands in relation to literature.