nity is just like any
other superstition, and its sacred books like the impositions of
Chinese, Indian, or Mohammedan impostors. They, too, are religious, and
have their sacred books, which they believe to be divine." A profound
generalization indeed! Is a peach-tree just like a horse-chestnut, or a
scrub-oak, or a honey-locust? They are all trees, and have leaves on
them. The Bible is just as like the Yi King, or the Vedas, or the Koran,
as a Christian American is like a Chinaman, a Turk, or a Hindoo. But it
is too absurd to begin any discussion with these learned Thebans of the
relative merits of the Bible as compared with the Vedas, and the Chinese
Classics, of which they have never read a single page. Let them stick to
what they pretend to know.

The Bible is a great fact in the world's history, known alike to the
prince and the peasant, the simple and the sage. It is perused with
pleasure by the child, and pondered with patience by the philosopher.
Its psalms are caroled on the school green, cheer the chamber of
sickness, and are chanted by the mother over her cradle, by the orphan
over the tomb. Here, thousands of miles away from the land of its birth,
in a world undiscovered for centuries after it was finished, in a
language unknown alike at Athens and Jerusalem, it rules as lovingly and
as powerfully as in its native soil. To show that its power is not
derived from race or clime, it converts the Sandwich Islands into a
civilized nation, and transforms the New Zealand cannibal into a British
shipowner, the Indian warrior into an American editor, and the Negro
slave into the President of a free African Republic. It has inspired the
Caffirs of Africa to build telegraphs, and to print associated press
dispatches in their newspapers; while the Zulus, one of whom would have
converted Bishop Colenso from Christianity, if he had been a Christian,
are importing steel plows by hundreds every year. It has captured the
enemy's fortresses, and turned his guns. Lord Chesterfield's parlor,
where an infidel club met to sneer at religion, is now a vestry, where
the prayers of the penitent are offered to Christ. Gibbon's house, at
Lake Lemon, is now a hotel; one room of which is devoted to the sale of
Bibles. Voltaire's printing press, from which he issued his infidel
tracts, has been appropriated to printing the Word of God.[65] It does
not look as if it had finished its course and ceased from its triumphs.
Translated into the h