There was a very suggestive spectacle on the streets of London one day, just after Elizabeth had become England’s Queen.  As she was riding by the little conduit at the upper end of Cheapside an old man came out of it, carrying a scythe and bearing a pair of wings.  He represented Father Time coming out of his dark cave to greet the young Queen.  He led by the hand a young girl clad in flowing robes of white silk, and she was his daughter, Truth.  Truth held in her hands an English Bible, on which was written “Verbum Veritatis,” and which she presented to the Queen.  It was a pageant prepared for the occasion but suggestive for this occasion as well.  Truth is the daughter of Time.  Our backs may be bent and our hair may be gray before we can lead Bible truth forth by the hand.  We may be old before we know much; our intellectual life may be matured in fullest measure and we still can know more; we must grow a pair of wings before we know it all—­even if we do then.

The Bible is the conquering book.  It has already dominated English literature, so that almost the whole of its text from Genesis to Revelation might, if all the copies of the Bible were suddenly lost from the world, be restored in piecemeal fragments gathered out of the books in which the Book has been quoted, Then, besides, there are the Bible thoughts that have indirectly, we might almost say insidiously, permeated the literature of Europe and America.  More than that, the Bible has been industriously for years securing its own translation into hundreds of tongues and dialects of the globe.  The Koran does not take pains to translate itself, and, indeed, refuses to be translated; but in contradistinction with such apathy of false faiths, the Bible courts transcription into foreign tongues, loses nothing in the process, but thereby gains for itself the homage of multitudes who, on reading it for the first time, cry, “This is the book we long have sought, that finds us out in the deepest recesses of our being and satisfies the profoundest cravings of our souls.”  The Bible is the comforting book.  There is no volume like it for consolation.  It is the only sure and steady staff for pilgrim spirits to lean upon, and the only book that is quoted at the bedside of the sick.  It is a book to wear next the heart in life, and upon which to pillow the head in death.  No other so-called “scriptures” of the world say the things that the Bible says, or supply the hopes that its promises afford.  The Bible is not simply a book; it is The Book.  It is the best book of any kind that we have.  We can not do without it, either here or hereafter.  There are many books in the world, but there is only one book.  The Bible is unique.  It is in a class by itself.  It seeks to control everything, but it co-ordinates itself with nothing.  It sets forth imitable examples of character, but it is not itself imitable.  No one has ever written or ever will write a second Bible.  The very phrase