BOYS OF THE BIBLE. 23

think what a wonderful influence on the whole life, the books
we read in our early days exert. The authors whose books
entranced us in the morning of life may not have been great
masters of literature, but they hold us still in unbroken
magic bonds. The first hymns, and poems, and recitations
we learned, may not have been of the very highest order of
poetry or prose, but once committed to the stewardship of
our memory, they remain. And while we go on, learning
and forgetting, learning and forgetting, in later years, the
things we learned in early youth are remembered without
an effort.

This of course is easily accounted for. In youth the
mind is, to a large extent, free and unburdened. Memory
is more retentive, because less engrossed with larger cares;
and the impressions made upon the mind are deeper, and
become fixed and permanent. The things that go in one
ear do not rush out at the other, because the brain is not
too busy to entertain them. The books a boy reads, he
reads often, without skipping a single line.

We do not quite know how the books a Boe reads
help or harm. The influence of a book is wonderful, never-
theless) We do not know how food, and air, and water,
enter into our being and become part of us, making bone,
and tissue, and blood; but they do. The rose of the garden,
or the flowers of the wildwood, could not tell you how the
sun and the rain and the wonderful chemistry of the earth
all unite to create their perfume and their beauty; but they
do. And just as truly the life of a book—for every book
has a life good or bad—enters into the thinking life of a
reader and helps or harms him.

With all our heart, without a moment’s hesitation, we
commend the Bible as the best of all books for boys. We