the scriptures of holiness, the writings whose genius is goodness.  Their charm is “the beauty of holiness,” the graciousness of Goodness as she unveils herself therein.  And this genius of gracious Goodness which irradiates the inner court of this temple, lays such a spell upon the souls of men inasmuch as she is seen to be the very daughter of God; according to the soliloquy overheard by mortal ears, wherein Wisdom sings: 

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way,
Before His work of old.

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Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him,
And I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.

Religion becomes the worship of the God who is the source and standard of goodness, the love of the Eternal who loveth righteousness, the child’s crying out into the dark—­O righteous Father.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.

The Bible is the choicest extant literature of the people of religion, the record and embodiment of the evolution of ethical worship, through its varied moods and tenses, into its perfect type in Jesus Christ our Lord.  The Bible-books form, therefore, the classics of the soul, in which we are to study the nature and secret of goodness; the manual which every earnest man and woman, intent on building character, should use habitually for ethical culture, and for the ethical worship which is its inspiration.  This is the truest use of the Bible.

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The intellectual use of the Bible, in critical and historical studies, is legitimate and needful.  Reason should lay the bases for faith.  Knowledge must rear the altar on which worship is to be lighted.  Theology shapes religion.  It is all important, therefore, that the books which the intellect chiefly uses to found and form its thoughts of God should be rightly used, so as to give man right conceptions of the Divine Being, and to waken right feelings toward Him.  This intellectual use of the Bible is not for scholars alone.  There is no longer any isolated class of scholars.  All educated people are now taken into the confidence of the learned, in every sphere of knowledge.  The average man will reason about the great mysteries quite as much as the scholar; perhaps more than the true scholar, and with more insistent dogmatism.  To the issue of that simpler, nobler Religion of Christ which is struggling to the birth within the womb of Christianity, in the travail throes that are upon our age, it is of vital moment that all intelligent people should learn to use their Bibles intelligently in a knowledge of the nature of its writings, and in reasonable reasonings therefrom.  Therefore I have spoken concerning the critical and the historical uses of these sacred writings.