INTRODUCTION. xy

‘of truth, where millions have worked to their profit, and where millions will continue to
work with yet greater profit till time shall be no more. There is a simple, unpretend-
ing little book which tells the story of a man whose hands grew hard in making tents of
goats’ hair, whose arms and legs bore marks of prison chains, and his body of stones
‘which had been thrown to kill him, and of cruel rods and scourges with which he was
lashed over and over again. With this book there have come down to us a number of
his letters, and from the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul the best and
noblest men and women have gained instruction, inspiration, life.

Four plain, unlettered men composed short biographies of One whom they knew and
loved, telling of his birth, works, deeds, sufferings and death, and those brief records
combined into one have changed the face of the world, telling, as they do, ‘‘of the
holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, who lifted with his pierced
hand empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and
still governs the ages.”’

Napoleon, when at St. Helena, once said, ‘‘The Gospel is no mere book, but a living
creature, with a vigor, a power, which conquers all that opposes it. The soul, charmed
with the beauty of the Gospel, is no longer its own; God possesses it entirely. He di-
rects its thoughts and faculties, it is His.’? Well might Milton say: ‘‘Books are not ab-
solutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them as active as that soul whose
progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction
of that intellect that bred them. Almost as well kill a man as kill a good book; who
kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but he who destroys a good book
kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.’’ The imperishable
wealth of the world is housed in books, and every man or boy of our race may take
as much of the treasure as he can carry, without the charge of burglary.

The Indian chiefs who visit Washington see many things in the beautiful city which
awaken in them astonishment and delight; but there is one place which they cannot under-
stand—the Congressional Library. Rising storyupon story, their alcoves, with their count-
less shelves of books, are an inscrutable mystery to them ; they gape with hollow-eyed won-
der and turn away from the volumes and their readers with ill-concealed disdain. The
savage cannot conceive that those bound pages, on which are inscribed the mystic charac«
ters of print, contain the secrets and the forces which have made the white man’s life what
it is; have built the White House, the Departments, the Capitol, the Navy-Yard and
Arsenal ; that these books which he spurns have taught the pale-face to make a ferry of the
ocean, to bridle the lightning and employ it as a newsboy, to rear these stately piles in
which the civil affairs of sixty millions of people are cared for. Still less can he con-
ceive that books enable men to turn the stony leaves of nature’s volume, and read thereon
the history of the planet, to explore the heavens and learn from star and sun what they