Then Austin Abbott put his notebook into his pocket and with intense earnestness made a plea for fidelity in our relation as pastors-"for you are all copastors of this flock. Dear brethren, let us value the one and the next one and every one in our dear church. Each 'one' is a center. Each one has his view of the church and of doctrine. Each one has a measure of influence. No one is too insignificant to be cared for and prayed for, and visited and loved by the pastor and by the official board. Brethren, remember the word 'one.' Think of the value of ‘one,' the power of 'one,' and let us resolve to look after and help all the 'ones' in our church. If every one of us (there are twelve of us here to-night) should every day look after and talk to and pray for one member of our church or Sunday school we should as a board bring under our notice and into our hearts and before our Lord (12x7=)84 people every week. In seven weeks we could thus visit and in some way personally aid and inspire every member of our great church. Let us begin with those most in need. Put down the names to begin with this week: 'Snyder, Grob, Sanford, Stark, Saxton.' Find two others and-report to me as you have need of my special service." And then the pastor told them of several people of the church and congregation on whom he had recently called, and he urged them to be true assistant pastors. Then we bowed our heads and again our pastor prayed. He was our pastor, our theological instructor, our friend. What a blessing he was to us and to the whole church! So many pastors forget what a power for good one honest, earnest soul can be!

This new program of our pastor's was repeated in a general way in every meeting of the official board. The list of members was always called. Several new families were found through the conversations that the new plan of calls by the official board developed. The list of "special cases" increased as the brethren became interested in the new measure of supervision. The official meeting itself increased in number. All the class leaders and stewards came. New enthusiasm was created. Indeed, the old church was beginning to be a new church. And everybody noticed that the congregation increased every Sabbath. People who had been remiss and indifferent to the church because they had been utterly neglected by the church now began to attend the services. A call or two from pastor, class leader, faithful women, and even the church trustees stirred people up and brought them out. The pastor's interest in the children-individually-enlisted them. And how they all, old and young, did sing! And how they did listen as Austin Abbott preached! studied his people. He knew them. He could preach!

He

Abbott had an interesting habit of studying men. I believe he kept private notes about individuals. He headed the notes "Studies in Character." He studied motives, the sensitive sides of people-the danger, the weakness, the strength, the adaptability, and the special needs of each and all. His conversations opened men to him. He was generous

and never abused his opportunity nor their revelations. He did not believe in the Roman Catholic “confessional,” but he did believe in drawing people out for their own good that he might apply the particular phase of Gospel truth as each one had need. He kept a private record of religious experiences committed to him. He did not do it as a scientific psychologist, but as a pastor and friend, a true Christian curé. He had a curious way of associating individuals in his church, especially in his official board, with strong types of character, with representative men in broader spheres. One man put him in mind of Abraham Lincoln, another of Horace Greeley. He read the life of John Fletcher and of Mary Fletcher. He said they lived then and there in his congregation. He had a Benjamin Franklin, a Hester Ann Rogers, a Hugh Price Hughes, and a Frances Willard in his church. The people themselves-the originals and the counterparts would have had hard work to detect the points of resemblance. But Abbott said: "I feel it. And it helps me to know and to appreciate people. I seldom make a mistake when I anticipate a reply from my counterpart, say, of John Wesley or Dr. Buckley. But once or twice my Bishop has disappointed me!" After all, the study of biography is one of the most suggestive and stimulating of all studies. To know the lives of people of distinction, to study their qualities of character and to see them after a fashion reincarnated, enables one to appreciate more fully the now dead and glorified; and it does give one a livelier interest in the living and reveals their possibilities of achievement and influence.

The readers of "The Itinerants' Club" department of the Review will be glad to know that the Fraternity of Lifelong Educational Endeavor is laying good foundations, enlisting earnest men, and maturing practical plans, and that its "announcement" in due form and in due time will open to ministers an excellent way for self-improvement by a utilization of professional service and a fellowship through correspondence as enlightening as it will be stimulating. A passage or two from one of its official communications will suggest some of its possibilities.

One of the members of the F. L. E. E. writes concerning Dr. Coe's book on The Religion of a Mature Mind: "I have read it once, and some parts of it twice. But my reading is somewhat broken, and I find myself unable to gather up easily the impression from it as a whole. I am not sure that there is a 'lack of harmony between its basal principles and the theology of our Church,' but I am sure that it represents a point of view different from that which prevailed before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. In that good old time the point of view was God's Transcendence; in the new time which Coe's book seems to forecast, and to some extent interpret, the point of view is God's Immanence. While the terms of theology in these two views remain the same, yet the contents of doctrine are very differently conceived. God's Immanence, when worked out in all its implications, makes the Bible a different book,

Conversion, Prayer, Witness of the Spirit, etc., all of them quite different conceptions. I cannot help but feel that we are nearer the truth in the new than the old. The religious phenomena of our day seem to press us to an acceptance of the new view. I know of some who have broken away from the old view without having gained the new, and they confess that they are 'at sea.' I do not agree with the first chapter of Coe's book as a complete statement of all the facts. The portrayal of 'Modern Manhood' is a somewhat idealized one. Some conspicuous men exhibit the qualities mentioned, while many are exhibiting tendencies that are ignored. Many are self-indulgent to a degree that indicates the extreme of selfishness, even though this selfishness takes higher forms than of old."

To the members of the F. L. E. E. the following suggestions have been forwarded:

1. "Have you read The Temptation of Jesus, by A. Morris Stewart? A remarkable book. Mankind in the Making, by H. G. Wells (Chapman & Hall, London), I have, but have not read it. A sip here and there has confirmed the strong and commendatory review in a London daily which led me to order it. In America to-day, where Jesuitism has a grip on the public press and knows where the Methodist Book Room is located, it would not harm Methodist preachers to read Papal Aims and Papal Claims, by E. Garnett Man, barrister-at-law. It is published by Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London. And The Programme of the Jesuits, by W. Blair Neatby, published by Hodder & Stoughton, all ministers and all Americans should read and understand. Have you read Mary North, by Lucy Rider Meyer? Revell publishes it."

2. A wise minister occasionally buys a dozen little blank books about five inches long and two and a half inches wide. One of them he carries in his vest pocket all the time and keeps it as a snare to catch and cage casual thoughts that come to the surface of consciousness, challenging attention. Once entertained, they begin to reward you like buds warmed into blossom or birds into song. This minister says: "I never let a thought go that comes to me in that fashion. I put it down and with the related thoughts that follow fill one side of a leaf in my little pocket "Thought-Snare.' The back of that leaf I leave blank. When my book is full I take it apart and classify my leaf-notes in envelopes labeled according to topics. Sometimes I get twenty or thirty distinct thoughts on one subject in the course of a few weeks, and twenty or thirty more later on. And these are my thoughts. They came to me. I planted them. I cultivate them. Then I classify and arrange them, and thus sermons and conversations and newspaper articles grow in my own preserve. The vest-pocket "Thought-Snare' has been a great gain to me."

ARCHEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL RESEARCH.

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF BABYLON.

Herodotus, describing the city of Babylon as it stood in his days, says: "The city stands on a broad plain, and is an exact square, a hundred and twenty furlongs in length each way, so that the entire circuit is four hundred and eighty furlongs. While such is its size, in magnificence there is no other city that approaches to it. It is surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and deep moat, full of water, behind which rises a wall fifty royal cubits in width, and two hundred in height. . . . In the circuit of the wall are a hundred gates, all of brass with brazen lintels and side posts. . . . The outer wall is the main defense of the city. There is, however, a second inner wall, of less thickness than the first, but very little inferior to it in strength." Several other Greek writers describe and give the dimensions of Babylon, but none of them are quite as extravagant as Herodotus, whose account must be regarded as absurd exaggeration.

Much has been said of the grandeur and magnitude of ancient Babylon, since the "Father of History" penned the above lines, but of that written too much has been drawn from poetic imagination, rather than from scientific sources. This is true even of comparatively recent writers, for even as recent an authority as M. Jules Oppert, though a scholarly man, has allowed himself to be completely misled on the topography of Babylon by the classic writers. The city described by this distinguished French Assyriologist is fifty times larger than what the actual facts warrant. That Babylon was great and magnificent goes without saying, but that it was fourteen miles long and equally wide, thus having an area of nearly two hundred square miles, or that its walls were nearly four hundred feet high, is difficult to believe, nay, incredible. If the mounds now visible on the site of this ancient capital be any standard from which we may infer its dimensions, the description above given is a gross exaggeration. We say this, fully mindful of the annually recurring floods of the Euphrates, swift of current, through the ruins of old Babylon. Nor do we forget that the outer walls may have included within its circuit a large area of land devoted to agricultural and horticultural purposes, which, during extended sieges, could be turned into good use.

Excavations have been carried on with more or less success and with many interruptions among these ruins for nearly one hundred years. Mr. Claudius James Rich, an officer of the East India Company, stationed at Bagdad (1811-1817), was the first one to make anything like a scientific excavation among these ruins. His Memoirs of the Ruins of Babylon, though now somewhat antiquated, are still regarded as valuable and full of reliable information. Sir Robert Ker Porter, another Englishman, visited Babylon in 1818, where he studied the topography with much care.

The results of his investigations were given to the public in a book conaining a very full description, with plans, drawings, and sketches of the ancient mounds in and around the great city. These two works were now followed in rapid succession by books from Layard, Loftus, Botta, Oppert, and others celebrated for their discoveries in Assyria and Babylonia.

The labors of Botta deserve special mention. The French government, always favorable to archæological research, aroused to intense enthusiasm by the discoveries of Botta, who after wonderful success among the ruins of Khorsabâd, forwarded to Paris many of the novel objects dug from the mounds, made large appropriations for exploration in the Euphrates and Tigris valleys. "When now these extraordinary monuments themselves had found a worthy place in the large halls of the Louvre, constituting the first great Assyrian museum of Europe; when these gigantic winged bulls, with their serene expression of dignified strength and intellectual power, and these fine reliefs illustrating different scenes of peace and war of a bygone race before which the nations of Asia had trembled, stood there again before the eyes of the whole world, as a powerful witness to the beginning of a resurrection of an almost forgotten empire, the enthusiasm among all classes of France knew no bounds" (Hilprecht).

An expedition was now (1851) sent out in charge of Fresnel, Thomas, and Oppert, which prosecuted its work for four years. Oppert published the result of the work done and gave a plan and description of ancient Babylon, showing the exact (?) location of the city walls, gates, temples, citadels, streets, canals, etc. Oppert's Babylon, like that of Herodotus, is a product of the imagination, and entirely too large; for the outer wall is made to include an area of 510.76 square kilometers. Exaggerated as this description of Oppert was, it nevertheless passed for nearly half a century as absolutely accurate. But it now appears that his great city has shrunk into one fifty times smaller than that reconstructed by him. Not only were the general dimensions incorrect, but very few of the places which he professed to have identified were what he claimed for them. Doubtless the most accurate thing published up to this time on the topography of Babylon is the last number of Der Alte Orient (5 Jahrgang, Heft 4). It is written by Dr. Fr. H. Weiszbach, the Assyriologist of "Die Vorderasvatische Gesellschaft," now engaged in excavations among the ruins of Babylon. From here on we shall make liberal use of this valuable contribution.

The German Orient Society, favorably known for its excellent work among the ruins of Assyria and Babylonia, commenced work at Babylon in 1898. These operations, still in progress, are conducted on absolutely scientific principles. No guesswork, no inferences, but careful digging and recording of results, day by day, as the work progresses. In some sense this expedition to Babylon has not been successful. Tablets have not been exhumed by the tens of thousands as by the French at Telloh, or by the Americans at Nippur; nor has there been brought to light any object comparable in value to the Hammurabi Code, found by de Morgan