which every one uses, “The Bible,” signifies the uniqueness of this book.  It is a whole library in itself, and yet it is more than a simple collection of books.  There is a homogeneity and consistency to the whole which lead us to speak of scripture as being a single story, not many revelations.  The Bible is the exhaustless book.  It may sometimes prove exhausting to its light-minded readers, but it never exhausts itself.  “It is the wonder of the Bible,” observes Dr. Joseph Parker, who has preached more than twenty-five volumes of sermons upon scriptural subjects, “that you never get through it.  You get through all other books, but you never get through the Bible.”  On the basis of a rationalistic criticism, this quality of exhaustlessness is really inexplicable.  And when we come to realize that, after all has been said as to scrolls and tablets and styluses and human factors and copyists, God wrote the Bible, we understand why it is that scripture is so rich in treasures of wisdom.  We see that we can not exhaust the Bible because we can not exhaust God.  The Bible wields an influence that can not be estimated.  The spoken word is powerful, the printed word surpasses it.  The one is temporal, the other is eternal; the one is circumscribed, the other is unlimited.  The spoken sermon of today is forgotten tomorrow; the written word of thousands of years ago still sways the masses of today.

The whole civilized world bows down with reverence before the book of all books, the Bible.  The Roman sword, the Grecian palette and chisel, have indeed rendered noble service to the cause of civilization, yet even their proudest claims dwindle into insignificance when compared with the benefits which the Bible has wrought.  It has penetrated into realms where the names of Greece and Rome have never resounded.  It has illumined empires and ennobled peoples, which Roman war and Grecian art had left dark and barbarous.  Where one man is charmed by the Odyssey, tens and hundreds of thousands are delighted by the Pentateuch; where one man is enthused by the Philippics of Demosthenes, millions are enthused by the orations of Isaiah; where one man is inspired by the valor of Horatious, tens of millions are inspired by the bravery of David; where one man’s life is ennobled by the art in the Parthenon, scores of millions of lives are ennobled by the art in the sanctuary:  where one man’s life is guided by the moral maxims of Marcus Aurelius, hundreds of millions find their law of right and their rule for action in the Bible.  It is read in more than two hundred and fifty languages, by four hundred millions of people living in every clime and zone of the globe.  It constitutes the only literature, the only code of law and ethics, of many peoples and tribes.  For thousands of years it has gone hand in hand with civilization, has led the way towards the moral and intellectual development of human kind, and despite the hatred of its enemies and the still