had done before them; generation after generation finding inspiration where still it flows fresh and full for me.  Thus every reverently minded man ought to feel concerning the Bible.  The latest of these books is probably seventeen hundred years old, and the earliest has been written twenty-seven hundred years; while in the more ancient of these writings lie bedded some of the oldest fragments of literature known to us.  These books have been the constant companions of men and women through two or three score of generations.  The crawling centuries have carried these books along with them—­the solace and the strength of myriad millions of our kind.  Forms, now turning into dust, holy in our memories, read these familiar pages.  Men whose names carry us back through English history knew and prized these writings; Cromwell, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Great Alfred.  When Rome was the seat of empire, Constantine heard them in his churches.  Aurelius informed himself about them.  In the lowly hamlet hidden away among the hills of Galilee, the boy Jesus listened to these tales of Hebrew heroism and holiness from His mother’s lips.  Judas, the hammerer, fired his valiant soul from them; and, while wandering in the hill country of Judaea, David chanted, to his harp’s accompaniment these legends of the childhood of his race.  The Bible is hallowed by the reverent use of ages.

2. These books form the literature of a noble race.

The Old Testament is a Library of Jewish Letters.  The germ of the collection was planted by Nehemiah when “he, founding a library, gathered together the acts of the kings, and the prophets, and of David, and the epistles of the kings concerning the holy gifts."[17] This germ grew gradually into its present shape.  The Apocrypha belongs to it, and is rightly bound up in our Bibles, for reading in our churches.  These books of the Canonical and Apocryphal writings do not cover the whole literature of the Hebrew nation.  Many writings have been lost inadvertently.  Many have been dropped as unworthy of preservation.  We have the garnered grain of Hebrew literature in our Bible—­a winnowed national library.  It includes histories, juridical codifications, dramas of love and destiny, patriotic songs and state anthems, the hymnal of a people’s worship, philosophic writings of the sages, collections of proverbial sayings, works of religious fiction, orations of statesmen, and oracles of mystic seers.

The New Testament is the literature of the Christian Church in its creative epoch; the work still, in the main, of Jewish hands, as Judaism was blossoming into a universal religion.  It is thus the literature of the most important religious movement civilization has experienced; a movement whose unspent forces we are feeling still, in the flooding tides of progress.  It, too, forms a winnowed library; the siftings of Sayings of Jesus, lives of Christ, apostolical and other letters, visions and romances; and holds the