proached him for wasting his time over it. Burke
owned his indebtedness to the Bible for his unique eloquence. Webster
confessed that he owed to its habitual reading much of his power. Ruskin
looks back to the days when a pious aunt compelled him to learn by heart
whole chapters of the Bible, for his schooling in the craft of speech, in
which he stands unrivaled among living Englishmen.

Emerson writes:

"The most original book in the world is the Bible. This old collection
of the ejaculations of love and dread, of the supreme desires and
contritions of men, proceeding out of the region of the grand and
eternal seems ... the alphabet of the nations, and all posterior
writings, either the chronicles of facts under very inferior ideas, or
when it rises to sentiment, the combinations, analogies, or degradation
of this. The elevation of this book may be measured by observing how
certainly all observation of thought clothes itself in the words and
forms of speech of that book.... Whatever is majestically thought in a
great moral element, instantly approaches this old Sanscrit....
Shakspeare, the first literary genius of the world, the highest in whom
the moral is not the predominating element, leans on the Bible; his
poetry presupposes it. If we examine this brilliant
influence--Shakspeare--as it lies in our minds, we shall find it
reverent, not only of the letter of this book, but of the whole frame
of society which stood in Europe upon it, deeply indebted to the
traditional morality, in short, compared with the tone of the Prophets,
_secondary_.... People imagine that the place which the Bible holds in
the world, it owes to miracles. It owes it simply to the fact that it
came out of a profounder depth of thought than any other book."[18]

Even what seem to us valueless books turn out, when studied naturally,
most interesting and suggestive.

Jonah, that stone of stumbling and rock of offence to the modern youth,
becomes, when rightly read, a noble writing, full of the very spirit of
our age. Around the tradition of Jonah, the son of Amittai, a prophet of
whom we know nothing in other writings, some forgotten author has woven a
story, to point a lofty moral. Jonah feels himself called to go to Nineveh
and cry against it, because of its wickedness. Quite naturally he does not
relish such an errand.

The prospect of a poor Jew's reforming the gay and dissolute me