s daily read in all of our
schools, there is in them a uniform standard of morals. Schools, that
neglect or suppress the daily reading of the Bible, do not keep the
vision of those attending them on the christian ideal, or develop the
christian motive in them, during the most impressionable period of their
lives.

The Bible is the light of the intellect, the fore runner of
civilization, the charter of true liberty and secret of national
greatness. The Bible is the one, all-important book for the Freedmen and
their children. Its weekly use, in the church and Sunday school, is to
be appreciated and promoted; but the home and the public school are the
golden places, where its daily use should be required, and the
opportunity be magnified.

American patriotism relies on the public school, conducted with moral
and social aims, as the one pre-eminent, assimilating agency to bind
together the older and newer elements of our population, in a common
devotion to our common country. It has been "America's greatest civil
glory and chief civil hope." The enthusiasm, that led to its
establishment, was well nigh sacred. It needs to day the support of a
public spirit, that will insist on the restoration of the daily reading
of the Bible, as the basis of moral instruction in it.

Concerning its educational value President Woodrow Wilson has recently
very truthfully said, "The educational value of the Bible is, that it
both awakens the spirit to its finest and only true action, and
acquaints the student with the noblest body of literature in existence;
a body of literature, having in it more mental and imaginative stimulus,
than any other body of writings. A man has deprived himself of the best
there is in the world, who has deprived himself of the Bible."

How true to day is Paul's description of the people that were living
without the Bible in his day. He describes them as "filled with all
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness;
full of envy, murder, deceit, haters of God, despiteful, proud,
boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without
understanding, unmerciful."[4]

Our own and every heathen land furnishes abundant proofs, that whenever
the gracious promises of the Bible are gratefully received, the proud
become humble, the disobedient dutiful, the drunkard sober, the
dishonest, honorable; the profligate, prudent; and the miserable become
happy. Nothing else has ever done thi