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Show IMMORTAL BOOK OF RUTH Great Pastoral Idyl Will Live Becausj It Is Founded on Recital of Loving-Kindness. The Book of Ruth, is the greater', pastoral idyl in literature. It is founds on loving-kindness, the loving-kindness of the Moabltess revealed to h family, and the loving-kindness of Boaz, the wealthy Israelite, to Ruth, his kinswoman. It also contains tlm germ of that great-heartedness which is the center of the gospel of Christian love. It is a bootf that opens with tenr and famine, and ends with the sound of wedding bells. The story turns upon the straightforwardness straight-forwardness of Boaz, who showej kindness and manliness to Ruth, a member of a nation that was Israel's foe, and in that kindness founded a new house, the house of Jesse an-j David, the royal line that began a greater than David. It was the firr mingling of the blood of the Jew nn Gentile, symbolic of the cosmopolite width of the Christian religion. It wa the sign that that religion was no: to be founded upon wealth or upon social caste, but upon the large, whole-gome whole-gome love of the human heart. Boaz is immortal among Bible heroe." for his kindness, his plain, everyday generosity, his sense of protection and care for the lonely, unprotected Moa-bltish Moa-bltish girl, his dead kinsman's wife, who in her poverty gleaned In his harvest har-vest field after the reapers. Boaz gave orders to his reapers that they should allow her to glean even among the sheaves of barley, and by his large-heartedness large-heartedness gained a wife, and, more than that, made a place for himself la that Immortal company who are renowned re-nowned for naught but for being kind, Christian Herald. |