ng the mythology of the ancients, may have been needful for
the later Greeks, who would preserve religion from the death that was
stealing over it, in the divorce of the educated and the popular thought
of the Grecian Bible. Such a use of Homer, however, must have missed the
essential charm of Homer--the immortal poetry of these heroic legends; the
breath of fresh, simple, wholesome human life which animates them, and
which through them inspired men to brave and noble being. Socrates saw
this in his day.

"I beseech you to tell me, Socrates," said Phaedrus, "do you believe
this tale?" "The wise are doubtful," answered Socrates, "and I should
not be singular if, like them, I also doubted. I might have a rational
explanation.... Now I have certainly not time for such inquiries; shall
I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription
says. To be curious about that which is not my business while I am
still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous."[54]

Wisely speaks the finest Biblical critic of England in our day:

No one knows the truth about the Bible who does not know how to enjoy
the Bible; and he who takes legend for history, and who imagines Moses,
or Isaiah, or David, or Paul, or Peter, or John, to have written
Bible-books which they did not write, but who knows how to enjoy the
Bible deeply, is nearer the truth about the Bible than the man who can
pick it all to pieces but who cannot enjoy it.... His work is to learn
to enjoy and turn to his benefit the Bible, as the Word of the
Eternal,[55]

The right use of the Bible is to feed religion.

Coleridge said:

Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and the habits of
reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ours Ives and in
nature.[56]

The use of the Bible then is to ennoble our ideals, to quicken our
aspirations, to clear the illusions of the senses, to dissipate the glamor
of the world, to purify our passions, to bring our powers well in hand to
a firm will; and, through the mystic laws of nature and of conscience
which we thus endeavor to obey, to breathe within our souls a sacred sense
of the Presence of a Power, infinite and eternal and loving
righteousness--whom to know "is life eternal."

De Quincey classified all writings as belonging either to the literature
of knowledge, or the literature of power. There are books to which we go
for information. The