The bible is adapted to the Christian home.  It is the book for the family.  It is the guardian of her interests, the exposition of her duties, her privileges, her hopes and her enjoyments.  It exposes her errors, reveals her authority and government, sanctions her obedience, proclaims her promises, and points out her path to heaven.  It makes sacred her marriages, furnishes names for her children, gives the sacrament of her dedication to God, and consecrates her bereavements.  It is the fountain of her richest blessings, the source of her true consolation, and the ground of her brightest hope.  It is, therefore, the book of home.  She may have large and splendid libraries; history, poetry, philosophy, fiction, yea, all the works of classic Greece and Rome, may crowd upon her shelves; but of these she will soon grow wearied, and the dust of neglect will gather thick upon their gilded leaves; but of the bible the Christian home can never become weary.  Its sufficiency for all her purposes will throw a garland of freshness around every page; its variety and manifoldness; its simplicity and beauty; its depth of thought and intensity of feeling, adapt it to every capacity and to every want, to every emergency and to every member, of the household.  The little child and the old man, hoary with the frost of many winters, find an equal interest there.  The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the high and the low, are alike enriched from its inexhaustible treasury.

It is a book for the mind, the heart, the conscience, the will and the life.  It suits the palace and the cottage, the afflicted and the prosperous, the living and the dying.  It is a comfort to “the house of mourning,” and a check to “the house of feasting.”  It “giveth seed to the sower, and bread to the eater.”  It is simple, yet grand; mysterious, yet plain; and though from God, it is nevertheless, within the comprehension of a little child.  You may send your children to school to study other books, from which they may be educated for this world; but in this divine book they study the science of the eternal world.

The family bible has given to the Christian home that unmeasured superiority in all the dignities and decencies and enjoyments of life, over the home of the heathen.  It has elevated woman, revealed her true mission, developed the true idea and sacredness of marriage and of the home-relationship; it has unfolded the holy mission of the mother, the responsibilities of the parent, and the blessings of the child.  Take this book from the family, and she will degenerate into a mere conventionalism, marriage into a “social contract;” the spirit of mother will depart; natural affection will sink to mere brute fondness, and what we now call home would become a den of sullen selfishness and barbaric lust!

The bible should, therefore, be the text-book of home-education.  Where it is not, parents are recreant to their duty.  It is the basis of all teaching, because it reveals “the truth, the way and the life,” because it is God’s testimony and message, and is “profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” and was written “for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of the scriptures, might have hope,” and be made “wise unto salvation.”