I was also impressed in journeying on the other side the sea with the difference the Bible makes in countries.  The two nations of Europe that are the most moral to-day and that have the least crime are Scotland and Wales.  They have by statistics, as you might find, fewer thefts, fewer arsons, fewer murders.  What is the reason?  A bad book can hardly live in Wales.  The Bible crowds it out.  I was told by one of the first literary men in Wales:  “There is not a bad book in the Welsh language.”  He said:  “Bad books come down from London, but they can not live here.”  It is the Bible that is dominant in Wales.  And then in Scotland just open your Bible to give out your text, and there is a rustling all over the house almost startling to an American.  What is it?  The people opening their Bibles to find the text, looking at the context, picking out the referenced passages, seeing whether you make right quotation.  Scotland and Wales Bible-reading people.  That accounts for it.  A man, a city, a nation that reads God’s Word must be virtuous.  That Book is the foe of all wrong-doing.  What makes Edinburgh better than Constantinople?  The Bible.

Oh, I am afraid in America we are allowing the good book to be covered up with other good books!  We have our ever-welcome morning and evening newspapers, and we have our good books on all subjects—­geological subjects, botanical subjects, physiological subjects, theological subjects—­good books, beautiful books, and so many good books that we have not time to read the Bible.  Oh, my friends, it is not a matter of very great importance that you have a family Bible on the center-table in your parlor!  Better have one pocket New Testament, the passages marked, the leaves turned down, the binding worn smooth with much usage, than fifty pictorial family Bibles too handsome to read!  Oh, let us take a whisk-broom and brush the dust off our Bibles!  Do you want poetry?  Go and hear Job describe the war-horse, or David tell how the mountains skipped like lambs.  Do you want logic?  Go and hear Paul reason until your brain aches under the spell of his mighty intellect.  Do you want history?  Go and see Moses put into a few pages stupendous information which Herodotus, Thucydides, and Prescott never preached after.  And, above all, if you want to find how a nation struck down by sin can rise to happiness and to heaven, read of that blood which can wash away the pollution of a world.  There is one passage in the Bible of vast tonnage:  “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  Oh, may God fill this country with Bibles and help the people to read them!

I was also impressed in my transatlantic journeys with the wonderful power that Christ holds among the nations.  The great name in Europe to-day is not Victoria, not Marquis of Salisbury, not William the Emperor, not Bismarck; the great name in Europe to-day is Christ.  You find the crucifix on the gate-post, you find it in the hay field, you find it at the entrance of the manor, you find it by the side of the road.