s of fiction could not have written the
scenes which most rouse our moral nature, could not have conceived the
characters which most inspire our devotional nature, without the Bible.
Take the Bible out of Adam Bede and Dinah Morris, out of Robert Falconer
and M. Myriel the blessed Bishop of D., and what would be left of them?
The vibratory quality which most thrills our souls in the strains of
Christian literature is due to the Bible material in it. The Bible holds
stored the ethical electricity on which Christendom has drawn, through
centuries, exhaustless energy.

Outside of Christendom, while there are many books which we can thankfully
and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual
motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it.
The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus
Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the
ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures. To dip into
these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul
bath, most cleansing and invigorating. The Sacred Books of the East may
well be sacred to us Westerns. A sense of grateful awe steals over me as,
looking on these volumes, I think of the generations which they have fed
with spiritual sustenance and have guided in the way of life. The light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the world shines through these
pages. The All-Father has drawn nigh to the souls of His children, through
the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It is an
inestimable privilege to have these Bibles of Humanity ranged along our
shelves, and to have their choicest words at hand upon our tables, in some
apt anthology. It would be well if their great sayings could be read in
our churches, in connection with our Old Testament lessons, as the voices
of the ethnic prophets of the Son of Man. But if we have allowed the
thought that any of these sacred books might become a substitute for our
fathers' Bible, we may correct our crude enthusiasms by the authority of
the greatest living master in Comparative Religion. In the preface to the
edition of the Sacred Books of the East that noble monument of our
generation's scholarship Max Mueller, writes:

Readers who have been led to believe that the Vedas of the ancient
Brahmans, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripitaka of the
Buddhists, the Kings of Confucius, or t