The indebtedness of English literature to the Bible is immeasurable. The Bible has inspired the highest and most ennobling books in the English language. No other book has been so universally read or so carefully studied. The Bible has been an active force in English literature for over twelve hundred years, and during that whole period it has been moulding the diction of representative English thinkers and literary men. The Bible is “the book upon which they have been brought up,” says Thomas Carlyle (1795‒1881), Nor has its influence on men of action been less marked. Englishmen picture Sir Henry Havelock (1795‒1857) sustaining himself upon the promises of the Bible through the darkest hours of the Mutiny; Charles George (Chinese) Gordon (1833‒1885) writing with his Bible in front of him at Khartoum; and David Livingstone (1813‒1873) in the loneliness of Central Africa reading it four times through from beginning to end, drawing from it patience, fortitude and perseverance. One of the mightiest moral forces of the last century in England, John Ruskin (1819‒1900), acknowledges his great indebtedness to the Bible. “In religion,” he says, “which with me pervaded all the hours of life, I had been moved by the Jewish ideal, and as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me they seemed finally to agree in the old article of Jewish faith that things done delightfully and rightfully were always done by the help and spirit of God.” “I have before me one of those great old folios in black letter in which the pages, worn by horny fingers, have been patched together,” writes Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828‒1893), in his _Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise_ (Paris, 1863‒4).¹... “Hence have sprung much of the English language and half of the English manners. To this day the country is Biblical; it was these big books which had transformed Shakespeare’s England. To understand this great change, try to picture these yeomen, these shopkeepers, who in the evening placed this Bible on their table and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read one of its chapters. Think that they had no other books, that theirs was a virgin mind, that every impression would make a furrow, that they opened this book not for amusement but to discover in it their doom of life and death.” ¹ _History of English Literature_, by H. A. Taine. Translated by H. Van Laun,... Edinburgh:... 1871.... (2 vols.). “The Bible stands for so much in England: it is the foundation of our laws,” said Sir Lewis Tonna Dibdin, “for when you get back behind judicial decisions and Acts of Parliament you come at the bottom to the moral laws, of which the Ten Commandments were the first written summary.” “The Bible,” says Thomas Henry Huxley (1825‒1895), in his _Essays on Controverted Questions_, “has been the ‘Magna Charta’ of the poor and the oppressed.”