tantine heard them in his churches. Aurelius informed himself
about them. In the lowly hamlet hidden away among the hills of Galilee,
the boy Jesus listened to these tales of Hebrew heroism and holiness from
His mother's lips. Judas, the hammerer, fired his valiant soul from them;
and, while wandering in the hill country of Judaea, David chanted, to his
harp's accompaniment these legends of the childhood of his race. The Bible
is hallowed by the reverent use of ages.

2. _These books form the literature of a noble race._

The Old Testament is a Library of Jewish Letters. The germ of the
collection was planted by Nehemiah when "he, founding a library, gathered
together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David, and the
epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts."[17] This germ grew
gradually into its present shape. The Apocrypha belongs to it, and is
rightly bound up in our Bibles, for reading in our churches. These books
of the Canonical and Apocryphal writings do not cover the whole literature
of the Hebrew nation. Many writings have been lost inadvertently. Many
have been dropped as unworthy of preservation. We have the garnered grain
of Hebrew literature in our Bible--a winnowed national library. It
includes histories, juridical codifications, dramas of love and destiny,
patriotic songs and state anthems, the hymnal of a people's worship,
philosophic writings of the sages, collections of proverbial sayings,
works of religious fiction, orations of statesmen, and oracles of mystic
seers.

The New Testament is the literature of the Christian Church in its
creative epoch; the work still, in the main, of Jewish hands, as Judaism
was blossoming into a universal religion. It is thus the literature of the
most important religious movement civilization has experienced; a movement
whose unspent forces we are feeling still, in the flooding tides of
progress. It, too, forms a winnowed library; the siftings of Sayings of
Jesus, lives of Christ, apostolical and other letters, visions and
romances; and holds the choicest mental products of this fertile era. In
it are gathered memoirs of the Founder of Christianity, doctrinal and
ethical treatises from the hand of the man who, under Christ, was the
chief factor in the early Church; similar essays, in the form of letters,
from other more or less important leaders, representing the various phases
of original Christianity; a fragmentary and free sketch of the ap