, 15th,
19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for
all personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th, have in them the law
and the prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of
natural science is anticipated in the 104th.

51. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group
of historic and didactic literature has a range comparable with it.
There are--

I. The stories of the Fall and of the Flood, the grandest human
traditions founded on a true horror of sin.

II. The story of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is
visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races.

III. The story of Moses, with the results of that tradition in the
moral law of all the civilized world.

IV. The story of the Kings--virtually that of all Kinghood, in David,
and of all Philosophy, in Solomon: culminating in the Psalms and
Proverbs, with the still more close and practical wisdom of
Ecclesiasticus and the Son of Sirach.

V. The story of the Prophets--virtually that of the deepest mystery,
tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence.

VI. The story of Christ.

VII. The moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its
fulfilment.

Think, if you can match that table of contents in any other--I do not
say 'book' but 'literature.' Think, so far as it is possible for any
of us--either adversary or defender of the faith--to extricate his
intelligence from the habit and the association of moral sentiment
based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or
fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained
unravaged, and every teacher's truest words had been written down?

52. I am no despiser of profane literature. So far from it that I
believe no interpretations of Greek religion have ever been so
affectionate, none of Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be
found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire
body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the symbols
of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early
youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written
by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards
made many passages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious
reader, deeply grave to me. How far my mind has been paralysed by the
faults and sorrow of life,--how far short its kn