Personally, my desultory reading of the Old and the New Testaments gave me a background against which I could see the trend of the books I devoured more clearly; it added immensely to my enjoyment of them; besides, it was a moral and ethical safeguard. It was easy even for a boy to discover that the morality of the New Testament was the standard by which not only life, but literature, which is the finest expression of life, should be judged. If there are great declamations, declamations full of dramatic fire, which nearly every boy at school learns to love, in the Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Cæsar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They may not know why they delight in these documents, but it is because of their humanity. Now who can be more human than St. Paul? And the more you read his epistles, and the more you know of his life, the more human he becomes. He knew how to be angry and sin not, and the way he "takes it out" of those unreasonable people who would not accept his mission has always been a great delight to me! Under the spell of his writing, it was a pleasure to pick out the phases of his history--a history that even then seemed to be so very modern, and to a boy, with an unspoiled imagination, so very real. It seemed only natural that he should be converted by a blast of illumination from God. It is not hard for young people to accept miracles. All life is a miracle, and the rising and setting of the sun was to me no more of a miracle than the conversion of this fierce Jew, who was a Roman citizen. He seemed so very noble and yet so very humble. He could command and plead and weep and denounce; and he made you feel that he was generally right. And then he was a tentmaker who understood Greek and who could speak to the Greeks in their own language. Late in the seventies when nearly every student I knew was a disciple of Huxley and Tyndal and devoted to that higher criticism of the Bible which was Germanizing us all, I fortified myself with St. Paul, and with the belief that, if he could break the close exclusiveness of the Jews, and take in the Gentiles, if he could throw off, not contemptuously, many of the rigid ceremonies of his people, Christianity, in the modern time, could very well afford to accept the new geological interpretation of the story of Genesis without destroying in any way the faith which St. Paul preached.