ich softened down the hoar austerity
Of rugged desolation.

* * * * *

Till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old!
The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.

So long as I know what this book has been and done, so long as man's
history will not allow me to risk the interests of society with the
infidelity which has so often demoralized it, so long will I yearn to
get the Bible and its message to all men. It has been our world's best
book. With this book as inspiration and resource, William Tyndale
and Miles Coverdale were so to continue and complete the task of The
Venerable Bede and John Wyclif as to make an epoch in the history of
that language to be used by Shakespeare and Burke--an era as distinct
as that which Luther's Bible so soon should mark in the history of a
language to be such a potent instrument in the hands of Goethe and
Hegel. For this very act of heresy, Tyndale was to be called "a
full-grown Wyclif," and Luther "the redeemer of his mother-tongue."
With the Bible, Calvin was to conceive republics at Geneva, and
Holbein to paint, in spite of the iconoclasm of the Reformation, the
faces of Holy Mother and Saint, and in spite of the cruelty of the
Church, scripturally conceived satires illustrating the sale of
indulgences. With that book Gustavus Vasa was to protect and nurture
the freedom of the land of flowing splendors, while Angelo was
transcribing sacred scenes upon the Sistine vault or fixing them in
stone. Reading this book, More was to die with a smile; Latimer,
Cranmer, and Ridley to perish while illuminating with living torches,
and the Anabaptist to arouse the sympathies of Christendom by his
agonies. With this book in hand, Shakespeare was to write his plays;
Raleigh was to die, knight, discoverer, thinker, statesman, martyr;
Bacon to lay the foundation of modern scientific research--three stars
in the majestic constellation about Henry's daughter. With this Bible
open before them the English nation would behold the Spanish Armada
dashed to pieces upon the rocks, while Edmund Spenser mingled his
delicious notes with the tumult of that awful wreck.

This book was to produce the edict of Nantes, while John of Barneveld
would give new life to the command of William the Silent--"Level
the dikes; give Holland back to the ocean, if need be," thus making
preparatio