Young Folks' Bible in Words of Easy Reading. Josephine Pollard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the water of life; and the artists whose genius has been laid under such effective contribution by the liberality of the publisher, will help the little ones to gather the leaves and pluck the fruit of that tree.

      Every home in the land blessed by the presence of boys and girls will be illumined and enriched by this volume; every mother who strives to train her children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" will be signally helped by its ministry.

      The letter-press will quicken the understanding and attune the ear, and the treasures of art contained in these pages will arouse the imagination and stimulate the memory of the young to lay hold upon and receive all that is contained in "the one Book—" "Oldest Choral melody as of the heart of mankind; soft and great as the summer midnight, as the world with the seas and stars."

      No man's education can be complete, no human life can have its full store of flowers and fruits, which is not begun, continued and ended in the ever deepening study and love of the articulate word of God.

      I cannot better close this introduction than with this remarkable passage, modified to suit my purpose. "Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the household Bible is not the stronghold and safeguard of the literary taste and culture of this country as well as its character. It lives like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the reader hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped into its phrases. The power of all the man's griefs and trials are hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. It has been to him all along as the silent, yet oh, how intelligible! voice of his guardian angel, and in the length and breadth of the land there is not a Christian, with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual Biography is not in his Saxon Bible."

      Washington, April, 1889.

The Child and the Bible.

       Table of Contents

      By Prof. David Swing.

      THAT reading and study are very imperfect which do not bring to all our young people a knowledge of the general contents of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the best moral and religious thought and belief of two important epochs in man's history—the Hebrew and Christian periods. It contains the history, the wisdom, the morality, the piety and the hope of that part of the human race that made religion the chief aim of the nation and the individual. The Hebrew people was set apart for the special task of carrying forward the idea of God. That race gradually separated the real Creator from the many false divinities of the barbarian tribes and slowly built up that conception of Deity which is seen set forth in the Book of Job and in the twenty-third and nineteenth Psalms. The Book of Job and the Psalms of David are the grand autumnal fruitage of that vineyard of worship in which Enoch and Abraham were toilers in the early springtime of our world.

      No such advance toward the true God would have taken place had the Mosaic race moved out of Egypt only to found a State which might build elsewhere duplicates of the pyramids of the Nile, or a State which, like Babylonia, might live only for luxury, or which, like Greece, might live only for the fine arts, or which, like Rome, might find a reason of being in wars of conquest. Divinely led, the Hebrew people migrated from Egypt that beyond the Red Sea and the Jordan they might found a republic or empire for the study and founding of the true religion. Israel stands as the wonder of the past, the only nation in all history that elected God for its king and went up into a high mountain so as to deduce its laws from the thunder and storm and from the sunlight and peace of His presence. With what success it achieved its task may be learned from reading the meditations in Job and the Psalms, and from the lofty rhapsodies of Isaiah and Malachi. When to the sacred records of that long day and night of toil and progress are added the coming of the divine Christ and the moral phenomena of the first Christian century, a book is composed at which to scoff is a proof of a weak or a wicked mind, and in which to read often and thoughtfully is evidence of a willingness to seek after the living God and to find the best answers to the many problems of life and death.

      Much that is valuable in these two testaments is recorded in events or in parables, and for all young minds and for nearly all older intellects, the doctrines, the alarms, the benedictions, the promises, the hopes are treasured up in incidents which might be thrown upon canvas or carved out of marble. Faith is seen in the picture of Abraham; patriotism, courage, honor, piety in Moses; justice in the story of Lot's wife; eternal friendship in Ruth; reckless ambition in Absalom; resignation in Job; faithfulness in Daniel; while in the New Testament the pictures offered in the Christ, the Marys, the Johns and St. Paul have been too many and too great for art to equal.

      These incidents and persons of the Bible form in the mind of the one who knows them a perfect treasure-house filled with the gems of true religion. When that gifted writer who composed the hymn "Nearer my God to Thee" sat down to her task, what an imperfection would have marked her poem had she not known of Jacob's stony pillow and beautiful dream!

      Though like a wanderer,

       The sun gone down,

       Darkness be over me,

       My rest a stone.

      And the two following stanzas would have been wanting; nor is it probable that the writer, although a woman most gifted, could have found in all literature any compensation for her loss and our loss. In the "Battle-Hymn of the Republic," the eloquent writer shows in her first line her memory of Simeon, and through his eyes she looked and said: "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," and in the last verse, back comes one of the most beautiful incidents in the New Testament: "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea."

      Thus have thousands of years, in all, acted as the great time-space for attaching the Hebrew and Christian mind and heart to the persons and incidents found in the Holy Scriptures. Not to know all these Heaven-sent emblems of virtue, wisdom, piety and salvation is not only not to be a Christian, but it is to stand afar off from the honor of even a common education and the most needful culture.

      For the youth of our country Josephine Pollard, a wonderful friend of all those who are living their early years, and as good a writer as she is a friend, has detached from the Bible this volume of historic incidents, and while they make a continuous record of the old and the new dispensations, they are separated from that which is too abstract to detain and impress the youngest readers. To these interesting events she has made the engraver add his art, and the picture of the pencil comes to help the picture more hidden in the words. While Christ is speaking of the "lost sheep" the picture reveals the lonely mountains and the lamb missed from the flock. While the great Teacher is speaking of the foolish virgins, the picture appears of the thoughtless ones attempting in vain to find oil for their lamps. Thus the pictures of history combine with the suggestive sketches of the artist and engraver, to make, indeed, a Bible for Young People. The authoress came to her task with rare fitness, and while the young folks are reading her volume they will find not only the religious truths they all need, but they will also find the simplicity and power of their own English language.

An Address to Children.

       Table of Contents

      By John H. Barrows, D.D.

СКАЧАТЬ