the most impressive private funerals in my recollection was that of a poor scrubwoman whose only son, of fourteen years, installed himself as master of ceremonies. The delicacy and courtesy and tact which he exhibited surprised all, for he had long been known as the worst boy in the Sunday school. It was the turning point in his life. We can imagine him in later life referring to the sad occasion and saying, "When I was a boy."

When I was a boy it was a diversion to visit the courthouse of our town at the time of the session of court and listen to the noted lawyers. Two matters impressed me: First, the evident devotion of the advocate to his client's interest and his efforts to save him from punishment. One day a lawyer confessed to friends that he came almost to love a man whom he had put forth all his skill and effort to save, while on the other hand he came to hate a criminal to whom he bore the relation of prosecutor. This was food for thought for a boy. I think the love of Christ did afterward seem larger. I remember once to have heard that great analyst, the Rev. Daniel Curry, D.D., say, "Young man, let people do for you; let them serve you; the more they do for you the more they will love you, depend upon it." Perhaps it is only when we do sometimes for our enemies that it becomes possible for us to love them. The other thing which impressed itself in the lawyer's plea was the emphasis which the advocate placed upon motive. He insisted that if the criminal could be shown to have had no motive for committing the crime with which he was charged the probability was that he did not commit it at all; a course of reasoning which would bring the Ten Commandments and the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians into close proximity-possibly a method also quite as applicable in dealing with men in the church as in the courthouse. Omniscience only is competent to judge of motives, nevertheless the laborious process of tracing human motives to their original sources might diminish the rancor of many a combat.

When I was a boy the eminent pastor of our church was subject to sudden attacks of illness. Such an attack upon one occasion prostrated him at the very commencement of the Sabbath morning hour of worship. In the large congregation there was

seated a very able clergyman of the denomination. An appeal was made to him for a sermon. When the organ ceased to play he was seen to shake his head, signifying his inability to catch the thread of a discourse; he could render no help. The sick man took up the painful burden and bore it manfully, the consciousness of his personal suffering giving him the sympathy of his hearers in an unusual degree. The lesson was impressive to one boy in the congregation. It led to the resolve never to enter a church for participation in the public worship, conducted by whatever denomination of Christians or at whatever time, either at home or abroad, without first formulating at least the outline of a sermon, should an unexpected demand be made. This provision has been tested by actual experience, and mortification and embarrassment prevented, but it was the intuition of the boy nevertheless. It was the recognition of one of those phases of character which is an approach to the divine, namely, the fact of being always ready. The divinely called minister is never off duty. To him even the holiday is a holy day. So soon as the sermon of one Sabbath is ended his eager longing for the next opportunity to preach the Gospel makes surprise impossible.

There is something more, then, than the homely preface to the octogenarian's idle tale in the reference to his boyhood recollections. It is suggestive of a principle the recognition of which may be the making of a new race. In it is discernible the corner stone of human character. It reveals associations which, next to those of a spiritual character, are the most telling known. Nothing is insignificant that can touch the imagination or the conscience of a boy. If he can but create the right vision in his mind the memory will take care of itself and of its message to the future man and the future boy. The sooner the vision of beauty appears to the boy the better. It is a great thing to get the right of way to the heart of the child. Possibly the strongest features of the character of Moses were formed in Jochebed's arms.

Hany M. Simpson

ART. XI.-PRE-SEMITIC POPULATIONS IN SEMITIC LANDS.

A USEFUL purpose may perhaps be served by gathering together the few evidences there are of the predecessors of the Semites in their respective countries. In Arabia, which is now generally accepted as the seat of the primitive Semitic race, we have no traces of an earlier population. Nor is it likely that there were such. Arabia has always been, as it is to-day, the preserve of the Semite. The Arab is the truest type of that race, and all the indications point to his having from the beginning enjoyed immunity from the corrupting influences of a foreign environment. In the valley of the Euphrates the Semites displaced the SumeroAkkadians, a Turanian race. The records of these people are in our hands, and there are traces of them in the literature of their successors. What we know of them and their influence is enough to show us that far beyond the term of their own life as a people they determined the life of the Semites (Babylonians) who had come into their heritage. Cities, kingdoms, and tribes bear names given by this ancient race. Their language and its cuneiform symbols were for a long period the exclusive media of Semitic literature. Before the Semites used their own language, they employed the Sumerian language as well as signs in writing. In fact, we must assume that the Babylonian language had become fixed in its final literary form before it was used to any extent in written documents. The population of the country had by that time become practically homogeneous and their speech was the old tribal tongue of the Semitic nomads, but greatly altered and corrupted through its long contact with the dialect of the older inhabitants. It was at this point, when the Sumerian race and speech were fast disappearing as the new race developed, that Babylonian became a written tongue. The pre-Semitic race in the lower Euphrates region shows its high degree of civilization directly by remains which indicate the possession of many of the arts and some degree of scientific knowledge and indirectly by its influence upon the Semites who came after them. Among these Sumerians commerce and agriculture were diligently followed.

Luxury of living was not unknown. Social life had passed far beyond the primitive forms which obtained in the tribes and clans of the steppe. Religion had reached the stage where a priestly class is developed; where temples are added to the ancient shrine or altar; and where the gods are no longer connected with natural objects but are exalted to abodes in the overarching heaven. Religious meditation had proceeded far in its effort to account for the facts of nature and of human life. Stories of the Creation and the Deluge along with other myths remain enshrined in the literature of their successors to show us at once the development of religious speculation and the successful cultivation of the higher forms of literary effort which prevailed in primitive Babylonia before the Semites became the ruling factor there. We do not, then, marvel at two things in the Semitic civilization of Babylonia: its high development and its marked departure from the primitive forms of typical Semitic life. What the pre-Semitic civilization had already attained is a sufficient explanation.

There is evidence sufficient of a pre-Semitic settlement in Mesopotamia. In the region of the upper Euphrates about the city of Haran there lay the kingdom of Mitâni, or Hanirabbat, whose extension may have reached to the Amanus Mountains westward, and eastward to the Tigris River. Before the famous Amarna letters were written its kings ranked with those of Egypt and Babylonia as the great world-potentates of their time and carried on an extensive commerce with their neighbors. The rise of the Mitânian power and its control of the fords of the upper Euphrates must have greatly hindered the freedom of traffic between Babylonia and the West and have opened up a new market for the merchandise of both East and West. Some have thought that the people of Mitâni were a kindred race to the Hittites, but this is hardly likely. Their center was removed considerably to the east of the point where the Hittites entered Syria, suggesting that their old home lay in a different direction. Moreover, they are clearly distinguished in the Amarna letters from the Hittite tribes, though they are said to have exercised some kind of suzerainty over the latter. Later on, it is true the Hittites did establish themselves on the Euphrates and had as their capital Car

chemish, which lay within the bounds of the ancient kingdom of Mitâni. This, however, is no support for the hypothesis of a relationship between the two peoples. The decline of Mitâni was due to three causes principally: the advance of the so-called "Aramæan" (really Arab) tribes from the Syrian Desert; the Hittite invasion; and the extension and growing power of Assyria, bringing with it a great tide of genuine Aramæan immigration from Mesopotamia. The incoming "Aramæans," while influenced by their new non-Semitic environment, were so numerous as to gradually overcome the distinctive features of the Mitânians among whom they had settled. In time, the country received a Semitic name-Beth-Eden; and though retaining independent existence until overthrown by Shalmaneser II in 857 B. C., it must have long before ceased to be Mitânian in the original sense of the term. The Aramaan wave of migration from the Euphrates valley, which was changing the character of all the races between the Tigris and the Mediterranean, had carried everything before it in Mitâni or Beth-Eden. The language of the Mitânians is preserved in one of the Amarna letters, but cannot as yet be understood or classified. The letters from this region in the Amarna collection which are composed in the Babylonian language are with us, however, and indicate that a high degree of culture prevailed in the country. That there was a settlement of Semites in the Mitânian territory before the Mitânians came it is fair to suppose, but we are not in possession of data sufficient to give any satisfactory account of its nature.

The Hittites are not to be looked upon as pre-Semitic tenants in the Semitic lands. Their entrance into Syria took place certainly after the Semitic settlement, and the influence they exerted upon the Syrian Semites, in any case not very considerable, was felt for the most part by the Aramæans who came from the region to the east of the Euphrates at a date subsequent to 1300 B. C.

The aborigines of western Syria and Palestine were of other than Semitic race. In the Semitic period there are scores of place names in these parts which can be explained on no known Semitic analogies. Furthermore, in western Syria and Palestine, as elsewhere in western Asia, except in Arabia, the Semites show