colossal genius. Shakespeare, "with the best brain in six thousand
years," who has poured the many-colored splendors of his imagination
over all our life, wrote in his will: "I commend my soul into the hands
of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through the only
merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be made partaker of life
everlasting." Tennyson begins his In Memoriam, in the judgment of many
the superbest literary blossom of the nineteenth century, with the
invocation, "Strong Son of God, immortal Love."

Though Jesus wrote no book himself and never wrote any recorded thing
except a few words in the sand which some passing breeze or foot quickly
obliterated, yet out of him have grown vast forests of literature. It
would tear great gaps in the shelves of any library and leave the
remaining volumes spotted with blank spaces if all the books about him
and references to him were removed. A thousand books have been written
about Lincoln and eighty thousand about Napoleon, but if all the books
that were ever written about Lincoln and Washington and Napoleon and
Cæsar were piled up in one heap it would look small beside the mountain
of books that have been written about Jesus Christ. Not only have the
writers written about him above every other figure in history, but in
like degree the artists have painted him and the musicians have sung
about him. He is the most fertile theme of all literature and art, and
the gifts that genius have heaped about his feet are an incomparable
testimony to the adoration that is paid to him.

About the first use to which any notable invention is put is to spread
the gospel of Jesus. The very first book printed on a printing press was
the Bible, and this wonderful and perhaps greatest human invention has
been busier printing this book than any other to this day and multiplies
its copies by the hundred million over the world. The newspaper is a