red and impressive of
all books--the educator of youth, the guide of manhood, and the
consoler of age--but a series of biographies of great heroes and
patriarchs, prophets, kings and judges, culminating in the greatest
biography of all--the Life embodied in the New Testament? How much
have the great examples there set forth done for mankind! How many
have drawn from them their best strength, their highest wisdom,
their best nurture and admonition! Truly does a great and deeply
pious writer describe the Bible as a book whose words "live in the
ear like a music that never can be forgotten--like the sound of
church-bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its
felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It
is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national
seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent
traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of
all the griefs and trials of man is hidden beneath its words. It is
the representative of his best moments; and all that has been about
him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to
him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which
doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length
and breadth of the land there is not an individual with one spark of
religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his
Saxon Bible."

History itself is best studied in biography. Indeed, history is
biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by
individual men. "What is all history," says Emerson, "but the work
of ideas, a record of the incomparable energy which his infinite
aspirations infuse into man? In its pages it is always persons we
see more than principles. Historical events are interesting to us
mainly in connection with the feelings, the sufferings, and
interests of those by whom they are accomplished. In history we are
surrounded by men long dead, but whose speech and whose deeds
survive. We almost catch the sound of their voices; and what they
did constitutes the interest of history. We never feel personally
interested in masses of men; but we feel and sympathize with the
individual actors, whose biographies afford the finest and most real
touches in all great historical dramas."

As in portraiture, so in biography--there must be light and shade.
The portrait-painter does not pose his sitter so as to bring out his
deformities