ng, and mend
where we have broken." And the preacher's voice now takes the tender
tone of entreaty. "Let us creep to Christ and with trembling heart often
call upon Him, and deserve His mercy; and let us love God, and obey His
laws, and fulfil what we promised when we received baptism; or what
those promised who were our sponsors at baptism. And let us rightly
order word and work, and earnestly cleanse the thoughts of our hearts,
and carefully keep oath and pledge and have honesty among us without
weakness, and let us often understand the great judgement which we all
must meet, and earnestly protect ourselves against the burning fire of
the punishment of hell, and earn for ourselves the glories and the joys
which God has prepared for them that do His will in the world. God help
us. Amen."

CHAPTER XIII

Love of books is love of part of God's world. In books we commune with
the spirit of their writers. The Church the mother of all art and
all literature. Catholic literature saturated with Holy Scripture.

A man who made many a man and woman love literature and helped them to
study it, the late Professor Henry Morley, has said that one who thinks
that a bookroom is not a part of the world; one who thinks that, in
leaving his books and going forth to commune with nature he is, as it
were, passing from death to life, is one who has not yet learned to
read. The good Professor saw that books have souls in them, so to speak,
and that to love a book really and truly is to hold communion with that
which is living and is a part of the great, beautiful scheme of God's
great, beautiful world. To love one part of what Our Father has given us
should never lead us to despise, or even undervalue, other parts. And we
must remember, too, must we not? how one thing helps us to understand
another; how great painters and great poets help us to understand the
beauty of nature as we might not have understood it without them, just
as they help us also to know men and women, and help us to know better
some of the fair things in our great and glorious religion; things which
God can and does teach without their help when He chooses, though He
graciously and lovingly often uses their help--the help He has given
them the power of giving--to teach others of His children. Our Father,
being _Our_ Father, not just _your_ Father and _my_ Father and _his_
Father and _her_ Father, but _Our_ Father, the Father of us all as one
big family