eagerness but with
enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which sometimes reaches to curious extremes. I
might mention, in example, the case of a rich man who recently visited
Japan on his way from India. He had in New Zealand a valuable property; he
was a man of high culture, and of considerable social influence. One day
he happened to read an English translation of the "Bhagavad-Gita." Almost
immediately he resolved to devote the rest of his life to religious study
in India, in a monastery among the mountains; and he gave up wealth,
friends, society, everything that Western civilization could offer him, in
order to seek truth in a strange country. Certainly this is not the only
instance of the kind; and while such incidents can happen, we may feel
sure that the influence of religious literature is not likely to die for
centuries to come.

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese,
apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special
beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high
as a monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. If it is not the
greatest of religious books as a literary creation, it is at all events
one of the greatest; and the proof is to be found in the inspiration which
millions and hundreds of millions, dead and living, have obtained from its
utterances. The Semitic races have always possessed in a very high degree
the genius of poetry, especially poetry in which imagination plays a great
part; and the Bible is the monument of Semitic genius in this regard.
Something in the serious, stern, and reverential spirit of the genius
referred to made a particular appeal to Western races having certain
characteristics of the same kind. Themselves uncultivated in the time that
the Bible was first made known to them, they found in it almost everything
that they thought and felt, expressed in a much better way than they could
have expressed it. Accordingly the Northern races of Europe found their
inspiration in the Bible; and the enthusiasm for it has not yet quite
faded away.

But the value of the original, be it observed, did not make the value of
the English Bible. Certainly it was an inspiring force; but it was nothing
more. The English Bible is perhaps a much greater piece of fine
literature, altogether considered, than the Hebrew Bible. It was so for a
particular reason which it is very necessary for the student to
understand. The En