choicest mental products of this fertile era.  In it are gathered memoirs of the Founder of Christianity, doctrinal and ethical treatises from the hand of the man who, under Christ, was the chief factor in the early Church; similar essays, in the form of letters, from other more or less important leaders, representing the various phases of original Christianity; a fragmentary and free sketch of the apostolic labors, and the last great effort of apocalyptic genius, in the Revelation of St. John, the Divine.

3. This literature of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church is intrinsically noble.

The Bible has lost much of its fresh charm for us, with whom its finest sayings are household words.

We parsed Virgil and Homer in our boyhood until the aroma of poetry exhaled from their hackneyed pages, and we can scarce think of them now save as grammatical exercises.  The Bible has thus palled upon our imagination, through the uninspiring familiarity of early task-work.  But were it possible to read it in our manhood for the first time, how the blood would beat and the nerves thrill over some of its pages.  We should then understand the sensations of a French salon upon a certain occasion.  Our shrewd philosopher-minister Franklin, had previously heard the literati wont to gather there ridiculing the Bible, and had guessed that they knew little of it.  Upon this evening he observed that he would much like to have the judgment of the assembly on a certain Eastern tale he had lately come across, unknown probably to most of those there present, though long ago translated into their own tongue.  Whereupon, drawing from his pocket a copy of the Bible, he had a Parisienne, let into the secret, read in her sweet tones the book of Ruth.  The company was thrown into raptures over the charming tale, which lasted until they found its name.

How fresh, with the crisp air of morning, are these tales of primitive tradition!  How naif these simple stories of Hebrew heroes!  What so fine in religious poetry as some of the strains from the Jewish Hymnal?  What a noble drama is Job, the Hebrew Faust!  How wise the proverbial sayings!  What pure passion and lofty imagination stir through the pages of the greater prophets!  Where are to be found letters like those of Paul?  What biographies have the artless simplicity of the Synoptic Gospels, or the mystic spirituality of the Gospel according to St. John!

No critic of our age has finer literary feeling or more dispassionate judgment than Matthew Arnold; and he has edited the second section of Isaiah as a text book for the culture of the imagination in English schools.  In the introduction to this Primer he observes:  “What a course of eloquence and poetry is the Bible in our schools.”

Goethe shared Arnold’s love of the Bible, and was so constant a reader of it that his friends reproached him for wasting his time over it.  Burke owned his indebtedness to the Bible for his unique eloquence.  Webster confessed that he owed to its habitual reading much of his power.  Ruskin looks back to the days when a pious aunt compelled him to learn by heart whole chapters of the Bible, for his schooling in the craft of speech, in which he stands unrivaled among living Englishmen.