Moses, David, Isaiah, Paul and John.  These men and the others wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.  The messages of the Bible are the loftiest in the range of human thought.  There have been many magnificent periods like the age of Elizabeth, the time of the Renaissance and the age of Victoria, but no other single century has ever done anything equal to the production of the New Testament in the first century.  The Bible has a sound psychology.  It seeks to influence the whole man.  It pours white light into the intellect.  It grapples with the great themes upon which thinkers stretch their minds.  John Fiske’s three subjects are all familiar themes to the readers of the Bible.  Its style is incomparable in grandeur and variety.  It approaches the intellect with every form of literary style.  It is the supreme intellectual force in the life of the common people.  It has been teacher and school for the millions.  The Puritans, for example, used it as a poem, story book, history, law and philosophy.  Out of it New England was born.  It has been the chief representative of the English language at its best.  Anglo-Saxon life and learning are saturated with it.  The literature of England and America is full of the Bible.  Shakespeare and Tennyson are specimens.  Each of these authors quote from nearly every book in the Bible, and each of them refers to the Bible not less than five hundred times.  Herbert Spencer admits that it is the greatest educator.  It is winning its place in school and college.  No education is complete without a knowledge of this literature.  It is the privilege of Odd-Fellowship to enthrone the Bible in the lodge-room, and in the home.  It teaches the intellectual life from above and lifts it to the Bible’s own level.

Dean Stanley was visiting the great scholar, Ewald, in Dresden, and in the course of the conversation, Ewald snatched up a copy of the New Testament and said, in his impulsive and enthusiastic way, “In this little book is contained all the wisdom of the world.”  There is a sense in which this statement is not extravagant.  The book contains the highest and fullest revelation of truth the world has known.  The greatest themes man’s mind can ponder are here presented.  The most profound problems with which the human intellect has ever grappled are here discussed.  We maintain that a mastery of the contents of this book will in itself provide an intellectual discipline no other book can give.  Refinement of character, refinement of thought, refinement of speech, all of the essential characteristics of the intellectual as well as of the spiritual life, have been found in our own church from the beginning, among those whose only advantages have been a personal religious experience and the consequent love and continuous study of God’s word as well as among those who have had all the advantages of the schools.  No man need be afraid of exhausting the truth in the Bible.  No man can ever flatter himself that he has got beyond it.  Whatever his intellectual attainments may be, the Bible will still have further message for him.