are and trivial book stops with what it says itself. A great book
depends now and forever upon what it makes a man say back, and if he
does not say anything, if he does not bring anything to it to say,
nothing out of his own observation, passion, experience, to be called
out by the passing words upon the page, the most living book, in its
board and paper prison, is a dead and helpless thing before a Dead Soul.
The helplessness of the Dead Soul lies upon it.

Perhaps there is no more important distinction between a great book and
a little book than this--that the great book is always a listener before
a human life, and the little book takes nothing for granted of a reader.
It does not expect anything of him. The littler it is, the less it
expects and the more it explains. Nothing that is really great and
living explains. Living is enough. If greatness does not explain by
being great, nothing smaller can explain it. God never explains. He
merely appeals to every man's first person singular. Religion is not
what He has told to men. It is what He has made men wonder about until
they have been determined to find out. The stars have never been
published with footnotes. The sun, with its huge, soft shining on
people, kept on with the shining even when the people thought it was
doing so trivial and undignified and provincial a thing as to spend its
whole time going around them, and around their little earth, that they
might have light on it perchance, and be kept warm. The moon has never
gone out of its way to prove that it is not made of green cheese. And
this present planet we are allowed the use of from year to year, which
was so little observed for thousands of generations that all the people
on it supposed it was flat, made no answer through the centuries. It
kept on burying them one by one, and waited--like a work of genius or a
masterpiece.

In proportion as a thing is beautiful, whether of man or God, it has
this heroic helplessness about it with the passing soul or generation of
souls. If people are foolish, it can but appeal from one dear, pitiful
fool to another until enough of us have died to make it time for a wise
man again. History is a series of crises like this, in which once in so
often men who say "I" have crossed the lives of mortals--have puzzled
the world enough to be remembered in it, like Socrates, or been abused
by it enough to make it love them forever, like Christ.

The greatest revelation of histor