How joyfully they gathered around the cheerful hearth to read this book divine.  How often their hearts drew consolation from its living springs!  What a balm it has poured into bleeding and disconsolate hearts.  It has irradiated with the glories of eternal day, the darkest chamber of their home.  What brilliant hopes and promises it has hung around the parental heart!  And here too are the names of our parents,—­long since gathered with their fathers.  Here too are our names, and birth, and baptism, written by that parental hand, long since cold in death!

  “My father read this holy book
    To brothers, sisters dear;
  How calm was my poor mother’s look,
    Who loved God’s word to hear. 
  Her angel-face—­I see it yet! 
    What thronging memories come? 
  Again that little group is met
    Within the halls of home!”

That old family bible!  Do we not love it?  Our names and our children’s names are drawn from it.  It is the message of our Father in heaven.  It is the link which connects our earthly with our heavenly home; and when we open its sacred page, we gaze upon words which our loved ones in heaven have whispered, and which dwell even now upon their sainted lips; and which when we utter them, there is joy in heaven!  We would, therefore, say to the infidel, of this “family tree,” as the returning child said to the woodsman, of the old tree which sheltered the slumbers and frolics of his childhood, “I’ll protect it now.”

The old family bible!  What an inheritance from a Christian home!  Clasp it, child, to thy heart; it was the gift of a mother’s love!  It bears the impress of her hand; it is the memento of her devotedness to thee; and when just before her spirit took its flight to a better land, she gave it as a guide for her child to the same happy home: 

  “My mother’s hand this bible clasped;
  She, dying, gave it me!”

And the spirit of that sainted mother shall still whisper to me through these sacred pages.  In the light of this lamp I follow her to a better home.  With this blessed chart I shall meet her in heaven.

“With faltering lip and throbbing brow,
I press it to my heart.”

Every Christian home has a family bible.  It is found in the hut as well as in the palace.  It is an indispensable appendage to home.  Without it the Christian home would be in darkness; with it, she is a “light which shineth in darkness.”  It is the chart and compass of the parent and the child in their pilgrimage to a better home.

                          “Therein thy dim eyes
  Will meet a cheering light; and silent words
  Of mercy breathed from heaven, will be exhaled
  From the blest page into thy withered heart.”

Like an ethereal principle of light and life, its blessed truths extend with electric force through all the avenues and elements of the home-existence, “giving music to language, elevation to thought, vitality to feeling, intensity to power, beauty and happiness.”