em food for our own spirits, but
it is a part of our business in seeking a knowledge of mankind to know
the thoughts and thought-forms that men have found of most worth. It is
not to be supposed that we shall prize all these books equally; some of
them will never be more to us than great monuments which, for some
reason peculiar to our temperaments, do not appeal to us; but among
their number we shall find some that will throw open to our souls the
very gates of heaven--books that will raise our natures forevermore to a
higher power, as if from two-dimensional Flatland creatures we had
suddenly been advanced to three dimensions, or, in our own humdrum world
of length, breadth, and thickness, we had received the liberty of the
mysterious fourth dimension.

Let us now take a brief inventory of our heritage. We can glance at only
the most precious of these treasures, the crown jewels of the world's
literature, which are all ours, whether we choose to wear them or not.
But first let me make it plain that I am not assuming that all the great
monuments of human genius are literary. I am not forgetful of the fact
that literature is only one of the fine arts, that the Strassburg
Cathedral, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Rembrandt's School of Anatomy,
Michelangelo's Moses are all products of man's creative genius, records
of the life of God in the soul of man. But I do insist that literature
is the most inclusive and the most definite of all the arts, and that
therefore books unlock to us a vaster world than obeys the spell of any
other art. One man's soul may attain its transfiguration through
architecture or music or painting or sculpture as another does through
poetry; the great thing is to attain the transfiguration; and let us be
thankful for the many ways in which God fulfills himself to man. I am
not trying to make out a case for literature, but literature is my
subject, and what I say of it must be taken as equally friendly to all
the other great forms of human expression and often as equally
applicable to them.

We will not talk of a five-foot or a three-foot shelf, or one of any
other exact dimension, though I suspect that no very long range of space
would be required to hold all the supremely great books for whose
contents we should have room in our souls. The limitation will prove to
be in us rather than in the material of literature. The Bible, while
containing supremely great literature, has still higher claims, and