4. This literature has been very influential in the development of progressive civilization.

When the writings of Greece and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of the Christian Church.  The light of Athens went out, and the light of Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages.  The only books known to the mass of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews and the early Christians.  Thought was kept alive by them, imagination was fed from them, conscience was educated and vitalized through them.  For a thousand years there was practically but one book in Europe—­the Bible.  When the long gestation of the middle ages was fulfilled, and the modern world was born, while the educated classes read the exhumed classics of Greece, the people still read the Bible.  It gave, in the person of Luther, the impulse that restored intellectual liberty and moral health to Europe.  It has continued the best read book of Western civilization; the only book much read, until of late, by the mass of men; the one foreign and ancient literature familiar alike to the plain people in Germany and France, in England and America; the common well-spring of inspiration to thought and imagination, to character and conduct.

It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock, building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the Bible legend, “Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof.”

Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order, the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible.  The institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible.

My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness of liberalism, falsely so called.

What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful, utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy One?  Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation’s growth from barbarism.  Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or described, and then to fling these blemishes