laid away in the earth in hope of eternal life. All that is sweetest,
purest, finest, noblest in personal, domestic, social and civic life, has
been fed perennially from these books. The Bible is woven into our very
being. To tear it from our lives would be to unravel the fair tapestry of
civilization--to run out its golden threads and crumble its beautiful
pictures into chaos.

* * * * *

Yet we are threatened to-day with no less a loss than this. The Bible is
certainly not read as of old. It is not merely the distraction of our
busier lives, or the multiplicity of books upon our shelves, that turns
men and women away from these classics of our fathers. Men and women no
longer regard these books as did their fathers. They can no longer use
them as their parents did; they see no other way to use them, and so they
leave them unopened on their tables.

An intelligent lady said to me some time since: "My children don't know
anything about the Bible. I cannot read it to them, for I do not know what
to say when they ask me questions. I no longer believe as I was taught
about it: what, then, can I teach them?"

A confession which, if all parents were as frank, would have to be made in
many other households. Where it is still used in home readings, it is, in
hosts of houses, with the pain which mothers know when their children's
honest questions cannot be as honestly answered.

Such a state of things is sad and dangerous. Unless some way be found to
read these books without equivocation, they will gradually cease to be
used in home instruction, and the coming generations will grow up without