Outside of Christendom, while there are many books which we can thankfully and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it.  The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures.  To dip into these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul bath, most cleansing and invigorating.  The Sacred Books of the East may well be sacred to us Westerns.  A sense of grateful awe steals over me as, looking on these volumes, I think of the generations which they have fed with spiritual sustenance and have guided in the way of life.  The light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines through these pages.  The All-Father has drawn nigh to the souls of His children, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost.  It is an inestimable privilege to have these Bibles of Humanity ranged along our shelves, and to have their choicest words at hand upon our tables, in some apt anthology.  It would be well if their great sayings could be read in our churches, in connection with our Old Testament lessons, as the voices of the ethnic prophets of the Son of Man.  But if we have allowed the thought that any of these sacred books might become a substitute for our fathers’ Bible, we may correct our crude enthusiasms by the authority of the greatest living master in Comparative Religion.  In the preface to the edition of the Sacred Books of the East that noble monument of our generation’s scholarship Max Mueller, writes: 

Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or the Koran of Mohammed are books full of primeval wisdom and religious enthusiasm or at least of sound and simple moral teaching, will be disappointed on consulting these volumes....  I cannot help calling attention to the real mischief that has been done, and is still being done, by the enthusiasm of those pioneers who have opened the first avenues through the bewildering forest of the sacred literature of the East.  They have raised expectations that cannot be fulfilled, fears also that, as will be easily seen, are unfounded....  I confess it has been for many years a problem to me, aye, and to a great extent is so still, how the Sacred Books of the East should, by the side of so much that is fresh, natural, simple, beautiful and true, contain so much that is not only unmeaning, artificial and silly, but even hideous and repellant.[57]

Our own Bible, as I have frankly owned, holds the truth as the gold is held in the ore.  Truth nowhere exists “native” in human writings; but the proportions of the “mineralizer” are vastly greater in all other Bibles than in our own.  There is no book known that can take its place on the lecterns in our churches, or on the tables by which, in quiet hours, we seat ourselves, a-hungered for the bread of life.