never
exhausts itself. "It is the wonder of the Bible," observes Dr. Joseph
Parker, who has preached more than twenty-five volumes of sermons upon
scriptural subjects, "that you never get through it. You get through
all other books, but you never get through the Bible." On the basis of
a rationalistic criticism, this quality of exhaustlessness is really
inexplicable. And when we come to realize that, after all has been
said as to scrolls and tablets and styluses and human factors and
copyists, God wrote the Bible, we understand why it is that scripture
is so rich in treasures of wisdom. We see that we can not exhaust the
Bible because we can not exhaust God. The Bible wields an influence
that can not be estimated. The spoken word is powerful, the printed
word surpasses it. The one is temporal, the other is eternal; the one
is circumscribed, the other is unlimited. The spoken sermon of today
is forgotten tomorrow; the written word of thousands of years ago still
sways the masses of today.

The whole civilized world bows down with reverence before the book of
all books, the Bible. The Roman sword, the Grecian palette and chisel,
have indeed rendered noble service to the cause of civilization, yet
even their proudest claims dwindle into insignificance when compared
with the benefits which the Bible has wrought. It has penetrated into
realms where the names of Greece and Rome have never resounded. It has
illumined empires and ennobled peoples, which Roman war and Grecian art
had left dark and barbarous. Where one man is charmed by the Odyssey,
tens and hundreds of thousands are delighted by the Pentateuch; where
one man is enthused by the Philippics of Demosthenes, millions are
enthused by the orations of Isaiah; where one man is inspired by the
valor of Horatious, tens of millions are inspired by the bravery of
David; where one man's life is ennobled by the art in the Parthenon,
scores of millions of lives are ennobled by the art in the sanctuary:
where one man's life is guided by the moral maxims of Marcus Aurelius,
hundreds of millions find their law of right and their rule for action
in the Bible. It is read in more than two hundred and fifty languages,
by four hundred millions of people living in every clime and zone of
the globe. It constitutes the only literature, the only code of law
and ethics, of many peoples and tribes. For thousands of years it has
gone hand in hand with civilization, has led th