to lose, the image of the Man who, were his memory dropped from out our lives—­our religion, morals, philanthropy, laws and institutions would lose their highest force.  These books have taught statesmen the principles of government, and students of social science the cardinal laws of civilization.  The fairest essays for a true social order which Europe and America have known have laid their foundations on these books.  They have fed art with its highest visions, and have touched the lips of poesy that they have opened into song.  They have voiced the worship of Christendom for centuries, and have cleared above progressive civilization the commanding ideals of Liberty, Justice, Brotherhood.  Men and women during fifty generations have heard through these books the words proceeding from out the mouth of God, on which they have lived.  Amid the darkness of earth, the light which has enabled our fathers to walk upright, strong for duty, panoplied against temptation, patient in suffering, resigned in affliction, meeting even death with no treacherous tremors, has shone from these pages.  In their words young men and maidens have plighted troth each to the other, fathers and mothers have named their little ones, and by those children have been laid away in the earth in hope of eternal life.  All that is sweetest, purest, finest, noblest in personal, domestic, social and civic life, has been fed perennially from these books.  The Bible is woven into our very being.  To tear it from our lives would be to unravel the fair tapestry of civilization—­to run out its golden threads and crumble its beautiful pictures into chaos.

* * * * *

Yet we are threatened to-day with no less a loss than this.  The Bible is certainly not read as of old.  It is not merely the distraction of our busier lives, or the multiplicity of books upon our shelves, that turns men and women away from these classics of our fathers.  Men and women no longer regard these books as did their fathers.  They can no longer use them as their parents did; they see no other way to use them, and so they leave them unopened on their tables.

An intelligent lady said to me some time since:  “My children don’t know anything about the Bible.  I cannot read it to them, for I do not know what to say when they ask me questions.  I no longer believe as I was taught about it:  what, then, can I teach them?”

A confession which, if all parents were as frank, would have to be made in many other households.  Where it is still used in home readings, it is, in hosts of houses, with the pain which mothers know when their children’s honest questions cannot be as honestly answered.