ng has been
that she has made us wiser than we were about
things that last.

Rev. Charles M. Sheldon, author of _In His Steps_, a story of which
three million copies were sold, said:

During the past two years I have met nearly a
million people from the platform, and no audiences
have impressed me as have the Chautauqua people
for earnestness, deep purpose, and an honest
desire to face and work out the great issues of
American life.

This is from the Rev. Robert Stuart MacArthur, the eminent Baptist
preacher:

I regard the Chautauqua Idea as one of the most
important ideas of the hour. This idea, when
properly utilized, gives us a "college at home."
It is a genuine inspiration toward culture,
patriotism, and religion. The general adoption of
this course for a generation would give us a new
America in all that is noblest in culture and
character.

Dr. Edward Everett Hale, of Boston, Chaplain of the United States
Senate, in his _Tarry At Home Travels_, wrote:

If you have not spent a week at Chautauqua, you do
not know your own country. There, and in no other
place known to me, do you meet Baddeck and
Newfoundland and Florida and Tiajuara at the same
table; and there you are of one heart and one soul
with the forty thousand people who will drift in
and out--people all of them who believe in God and
their country.

More than a generation ago, the name of Joseph Cook was known throughout
the continent as a thinker, a writer, and a lecturer. This is what he
wrote of Chautauqua:

I keep Chautauqua in a fireside nook of my inmost
affections and prayers. God bless the Literary and
Scientific Circle, which is so marvelously
successful already in spreading itself as a young
vine over the trellis-work of many lands! What
rich clusters may ultimately hang on its
cosmopolitan branches! It is the glory of America
that it believes that all that anybody knows
everybody should know.

Phillips Brooks, perhaps the greatest of American preachers, spoke as
follows in a lecture on "Literature and Life":

May we not believe--if the students of Chautauqua
be indeed what we have eve