Fear God and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.

Of this danger I think that I see signs, in some of the great masters to whom we owe our new criticism, in some of the manuals which are popularizing it, and in some of the gifted preachers who are reconstructing theology around it.  The science of religion is absorbing too much of the life that should go into the art of religion; and we have fine forms of thought, mantled with flabby flesh of feeling, in which no red blood of holy passion pulses.

To read Homer with a view of understanding the fables of superstition, and of interpreting the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought of the Grecian Bible.  Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the essential charm of Homer—­the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and which through them inspired men to brave and noble being.  Socrates saw this in his day.

“I beseech you to tell me, Socrates,” said Phaedrus, “do you believe this tale?” “The wise are doubtful,” answered Socrates, “and I should not be singular if, like them, I also doubted.  I might have a rational explanation....  Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall I tell you why?  I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says.  To be curious about that which is not my business while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54]

Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day: 

No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses, or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it....  His work is to learn to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the Eternal,[55]

The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.

Coleridge said: 

   Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of
   reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in
   nature.[56]

The use of the Bible then is to ennoble our ideals, to quicken our aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor of the world, to purify our passions, to bring our powers well in hand to a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving righteousness—­whom to know “is life eternal.”