.

[1] I am indebted for some of them to an article in _The Christian
Union_.

CHAPTER XIII.

BOOKS.

Books have an influence on life and conduct the extent of which it is
impossible to estimate. "The precepts they inculcate, the lessons they
exhibit, the ideals of life and character which they portray, root
themselves in the thoughts and imaginations of young men. They seize
them with a force which, in after years, appears scarcely possible."
These words of Principal Tulloch will not appear too strong to any one
who can look back over a long period of life. Such must ever feel that
books have had a powerful effect in making them all that they are.
There are many considerations that go to show the importance of books.

Books are the accumulated treasures of generations.--They are to man
what memory is to the individual. If all the libraries in the world
were burned and all the books in the world destroyed, the past would be
little more than a blank. It would be a calamity corresponding to that
of a man losing by a stroke the memory of past years. The literature
of the world is the world's memory, the world's experience, the world's
failures. It teaches us where we came from. It tells us of the paths
we have travelled. Almost all we know of the history of this world in
which God has placed us we know from books. "In books," as Carlyle
says, "lie the creative Phoenix ashes of the whole past--all that men
have desired, discovered, done, felt, or imagined, lie recorded in
books, wherein whoso has learned the mystery of spelling printed
letters may find it and appropriate it."

Books open to us a society from which otherwise we would be
excluded.--They introduce us into a great human company. They enable
us, however humble we may be, to hold converse with the great and good
of past ages and of the present time--the great philosophers,
philanthropists, poets, divines, travellers. We know their thoughts,
we hear their words, we clasp their hands. The chamber of the solitary
student is peopled with immortal guests. He has friends who are always
steadfast, who are never false, who are silent when he is weary, who go
forth with him to his work, who await his return. In the literature of
the world a grand society is open to all who choose to enter it.

Books are the chief food of our intellectual life.--There are men that
have, indeed, done great things who have read but little. These have
had th