They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the
Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to
them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.

What is the Bible? It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
of promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training their
intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human responsibility
and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and
the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the
Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few peoples
many age. For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and emotion,
the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables, exaltations,
consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the spirit of man is
always longing. It might have been, in warning examples and commands,
all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on earth and
reach a better country; but it would have been a very different book to
mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its
wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better
country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better
country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life. For,
apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so
written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies,
promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as
certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is
higher than the want of facts or knowledge.

The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this
is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households,
the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh
laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and
Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few ple