To one familiar only with the habits, dress and customs of American life, the every-day events recorded in the book seem fabulous. We do not dress as the book says that people dressed in those far-away years and far-away lands; we do not eat as they did; our houses are not like theirs; we do not measure time as they did; we do not speak their language; our seasons do not answer to the seasons that marked their year. It is difficult, knowing only our modern American life, to _think_ ourselves into the conditions under which this book says that people lived and thought in those long-ago ages. Their wedding feasts and funeral services differed utterly from ours. They lived and died in another atmosphere, under a government that no longer exists; made war upon nations that are powerless to-day as the sleeping dead in a national cemetery; and the things which we read concerning them seem strange enough to us. In the changes which have taken place through all these centuries, it would be an easy thing, under some circumstances, for men to deny that the people of the book ever lived, that the cities of the book were ever built, that the events of the book ever transpired. And, if its historic foundation were destroyed, the superstructure of truth, the doctrinal and ethical teachings resting upon it, might in like manner be swept away. This old Book--the Bible, a divine product, wrought into the texture of human history and literature with the gradually unfolding ages--is the old Book we study to-day on this side the sea. It is a "Book of books,"--the Book out-shining all other books in the literary firmament, as the sun out-splendors the planets that move in their orbits around him. It is a book that deals with man as an immortal soul; making known the beginnings of the race; going back of the beginning to God, who is from "everlasting to everlasting," and who "in the beginning created the heaven and the earth"; revealing the creative purpose and loving grace of God; tracing the fall and deterioration of man, the divine interposition in human history, the preparation of a family, a race, a nation, and a world at large, for the coming of the Redeemer; revealing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; showing how the Christ came, what he did, what he said, what he resisted, what he endured, what he suffered, what he achieved; telling in simple way the story of the early church, from the little meeting of the bereaved disciples in the upper room to the magnificent consummation of Christ's coming, as seen in the prophetic visions of St. John on the Isle of Patmos. It is a book full of history, of geography, of archæology, of prophecy, of poetry, of doctrine, of "exceeding great and precious promises."