which has called forth the pens of friends and foes-which has supplied the pulpit with its weekly themes for now these eighteen centuries-which has been the subject of professorial prelections and the theme of many poems and an innumerable number of prose compositions, such a book could not fail to have enriched our literature with some of its choicest performances. What scholarship, for instance, is more masculine than that which has been devoted to a defense of the Divine origin and inspiration of the sacred volume, when the subtilties of a Hume, the coarse vituperations of a Paine, the flippant satire of a Voltaire, the polished insinuations of a Gibbon, the sonorous levity and assumptious disparagement of a Shaftesbury, the rambling yet lively declamations of a Bolingbroke, the cowardly sneers of a Collins, the low ridicule and vulgar contempt of a Woolston, the more temperate plausibilities of a Tindal, and the mathematics of a La Place, called forth the pens of a Clarke, a Watson, a West, a Leland, a Leslie, a Campbell, a Hall, and a Chalmers? Or what erudition is more ripe and multifarious than that which has been consecrated to the exegesis of the text and the elucidation of the doctrines of the Bible? Or what specimens of eloquence will surpass some of those which have been written to enforce its sublime and pure morality? Take from our literature those portions of which the Bible itself has been the subject, and what a gap would be made!

We should miss some

of the finest productions of the ablest and most accomplished writers of which our country can boast. Nor have we any right to assume that their rare and peculiar talents would have been drawn out so shiningly by any other subject.

(5.) The direct influence of the Scriptures on our religious, and their indirect influence on our profane literature.

With regard to our religious literature, it is almost superfluous to say that to the Bible it owes, not merely its fullness, its strength, its beauty, and impressiveness, but also its very existence. But for this perennial fountain, which seems only to increase the oftener it is drawn from, the streams of our sacred literature could not have so copiously flowed. But now how rich and varied are these streams to instruct the ignorant, to cheer the disconsolate, to gladden the solitary, to comfort the sick and the dying. Surely they have earned a claim to our warmest gratitude, those gifted authors who, by the consecration of their talents to such purposes as these, have proved themselves the true benefactors of their kind. If not theirs to shine the brightest in the temple of fame, yet doth not philosophy nor science weave a chaplet of so hallowed a renown for the brows of their most illustrious. To have produced works which have been a light in the dwelling, and as wells of water in the desert

to a thirsty soul-which have shortened life's road to the way worn pilgrim, and smoothed the pillows of the dying-this is a praise which the greatest philosopher might covet. But how much higher praise, then, is due to that book whose light these authors have borrowed and but faintly reflect! As planets in the spiritual firmament we hail their beams, and are grateful. Yet are they not its polestar, much less its sun. Round it, yet at how great a distance, they shine, the satellites only of the central orb-that Book of books which is the fontal source of all wisdom, the quenchless altar of devoutest thoughts, the fullest, fairest, divinest image of truth, purity, and goodness.

With regard to our profane literature, I will not deny that a large portion of it is trifling and immoral; but the Bible is not answerable for this. Even if the authors of these vile productions have borrowed from it beauties which give a seductiveness to their writings and render them more dangerous, it is not to be blamed, but only they who have had the audacity to profane its purity to their own impure purposes. The hemlock distils the sunbeams into a virulent poison; but there is no poison in the sun.

But even in the case of immoral literature, the restraining influence of the Bible, though, of course, not confessed, is plainly to be seen. For writers who, had they lived in pagan lands, would have been undisguisedly obscene, are fain to drop a

vail-though often it may be too thin-over their obscenities; for in these lands the Bible is a household book, and vice dares not appear entirely nude in the presence of celestial virtue.

CHAPTER VII.

THE BIBLE THE RESTORER OF LETTERS AND THE
ARTS-WHEN EUROPE HAD FALLEN BACK
INTO MILITARY BARBARISM.

THE decline and fall of Roman literature and art forms a curious chapter in the history of the human mind. For while the Romans were diffusing a taste for letters and the arts of civilized life over the distant provinces, those letters and those arts were rapidly verging to decline within the confines of Italy, and even within the walls of the capital. Of the causes which led to this decline our subject would not have required us to speak, were it not that certain historians have included among them the introduction into Italy of the new religion, or Christianity.

We are free to confess that, on its first entrance into the seats of classic literature and art, Christianity did not assist to foster them. Nor, in the nature of things, could it have been expected to do So. For if we compare, or rather contrast the two religions, we find the old, with its gods many, its innumerable idols, its fabulous mythologies, its gorgeous temples, its sacerdotal hierarchy; while, on the contrary, the new religion taught the existence