xIV . INTRODUCTION.

OT OE EE OS NIT BO

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the printing press first set up on the banks of the Rhine. An egg is laid, and the barn-
yard resounds with cackle; an acorn drops silently into the earth, and a thousand years |
after a monarch oak, sprung from it, spreads its branches to the heavens, in which the —
fowls of the air make their nests, awhile generations of men find shelter in their shade.

The children of Europe and America to-day glow, thrill or tremble at the stories told |
by Scheherezade, in the ‘‘Arabian Nights,’ ages ago, to save her life, and all agree |
that she was entitled to it, as through many centuries she has been a nursing mother of |
the imagination, in the west as well as in the east.

A blind man sang his verses in city after city, and for five hundred years his scholars |
continued the chant, when the pen took them from the memory, and the eye received |
them as well as the ear. Those verses, called the Iliad and Odyssey, wrought with a |
silent, irresistible force in the lives of men, made Attica, Sparta, Ionia what they became,
and crowned the Macedonian Alexander with the diadem of the world. Other books
have come and dispossessed these of their regal power over life and character, but even
at this late day and in this new world they hold sway over the imagination, and all cul-
tured men and women owe an immeasurable debt to Homer.

Nearly three thousand years ago a shepherd boy, ruddy of cheek and fair to look upon,
tuned his harp and voice while watching his flocks. He became a hero, then an outlaw
and afterwards a victorious king, founder of a mighty empire. His land has been des- |
olate for centuries and his kingdom remains only as a mournful memory ; but the songs |
which he sang by the sheepfold at the cave of Adullam, among the rocky wastes of En-
geddi, and in his royal City of the Four Hills, move the souls and tongues of men to-day,
with even a deeper and grander power than when they fell fresh from his lips, and as long
as the heavy-laden and sorrowful need pity and consolation, as long as the soul, struggling
against darkness, sin and terror, asks for cheer, guidance and light, as long as the re-
deemed and exultant heart pours itself in thankfulness and praise, the Psalms of David
can never die. i

The adopted son of a princess, bred in the palace, learned in all’ “the wisdom of his
time, for a patriotic deed became a fugitive and a herdsman, and through forty years, L
for the most part spent in solitary communion with nature’s sternest and sublimest forms :
and in life’s hnmblest duties, was in the end not only the heroic deliverer of his people,
but the author of five short books, making one, which moulded his people into rock-like
solidity against which the stormy billows of time have beaten in vain, and which the
changes and chances of the world could not destroy. The Pentateuch—the five books
of Moses—is to-day translated into all languages, and is as priceless and sacred to the
Christian as to the Jew, and not only carries the mind back to the fore-world, but up to
Him who made it, and is a School-master in the Halls of Science, in the Courts of Law
and History, in the Groves of Poetry, by the Fountains of Health, an exhaustless mine

  

   

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