charming stories of Hebrew heroism and holiness the imagination has caught
sight of the infinite mysteries amid which we walk on earth. Their touch
has quickened conscience into life. Through their voices the whispers of
the Eternal Power have thrilled the soul of youth, and men have learned to
worship, trust, and love the Father-God. These books have preserved for us
the story of the Life which earth could least afford to lose, the image of
the Man who, were his memory dropped from out our lives--our religion,
morals, philanthropy, laws and institutions would lose their highest
force. These books have taught statesmen the principles of government, and
students of social science the cardinal laws of civilization. The fairest
essays for a true social order which Europe and America have known have
laid their foundations on these books. They have fed art with its highest
visions, and have touched the lips of poesy that they have opened into
song. They have voiced the worship of Christendom for centuries, and have
cleared above progressive civilization the commanding ideals of Liberty,
Justice, Brotherhood. Men and women during fifty generations have heard
through these books the words proceeding from out the mouth of God, on
which they have lived. Amid the darkness of earth, the light which has
enabled our fathers to walk upright, strong for duty, panoplied against
temptation, patient in suffering, resigned in affliction, meeting even
death with no treacherous tremors, has shone from these pages. In their
words young men and maidens have plighted troth each to the other, fathers
and mothers have named their little ones, and by those children have been
laid away in the earth in hope of eternal life. All that is sweetest,
purest, finest, noblest in personal, domestic, social and civic life, has
been fed perennially from these books. The Bible is woven into our very
being. To tear it from our lives would be to unravel the fair tapestry of
civilization--to run out its golden threads and crumble its beautiful
pictures into chaos.

* * * * *

Yet we are threatened to-day with no less a loss than this. The Bible is
certainly not read as of old. It is not merely the distraction of our
busier lives, or the multiplicity of books upon our shelves, that turns
men and women away from these classics of our fathers. Men and women no
longer regard these books as did their fathers. They can no longer use
th