less who has God and the
companionship of good books."

Books also advantage us in that they exhibit the unity of progress,
the solidarity of the race, and the continuity of history. Authors
lead us back along the pathway of law, of liberty or religion, and set
us down in front of the great man in whose brain the principle had its
rise. As the discoverer leads us from the mouth of the Nile back to
the headwaters of Nyanza, so books exhibit great ideas and
institutions, as they move forward, ever widening and deepening, like
some Nile feeding many civilizations. For all the reforms of to-day go
back to some reform of yesterday. Man's art goes back to Athens and
Thebes. Man's laws go back to Blackstone and Justinian. Man's reapers
and plows go back to the savage scratching the ground with his forked
stick, drawn by the wild bullock. The heroes of liberty march forward
in a solid column. Lincoln grasps the hand of Washington. Washington
received his weapons at the hands of Hampden and Cromwell. The great
Puritans lock hands with Luther and Savonarola.

The unbroken procession brings us at length to Him whose Sermon on the
Mount was the very charter of liberty. It puts us under a divine
spell to perceive that we are all coworkers with the great men, and
yet single threads in the warp and woof of civilization. And when
books have related us to our own age, and related all the epochs to
God, whose providence is the gulf stream of history, these teachers go
on to stimulate us to new and greater achievements. Alone, man is an
unlighted candle. The mind needs some book to kindle its faculties.
Before Byron began to write he used to give half an hour to reading
some favorite passage. The thought of some great writer never failed
to kindle Byron into a creative glow, even as a match lights the
kindlings upon the grate. In these burning, luminous moods Byron's
mind did its best work. The true book stimulates the mind as no wine
can ever quicken the blood. It is reading that brings us to our best,
and rouses each faculty to its most vigorous life.

Remembering, then, that it is as dangerous to read the first book one
chances upon as for a stranger in the city to make friends with the
first person passing by, let us consider the selection and the
friendship of books. Frederic Harrison tells us that there are now
2,000,000 volumes in the libraries, and that every few years the press
issues enough new volumes to make a pyramid equal