A woman in Louisa, Kentucky, prayed for ten years for a Bible and the power to read it. She was presented with one by her sons, but it was in the days before the illiteracy crusade and they did not think of teaching her to read it. She learned, however, by having a neighbor’s children teach her the letters on box cars switched off on a railway siding near her milk-gap. She lived to enjoy her Bible for ten years after it had become to her an open book and she marked the passages which comforted her most. These were read at her funeral where this story of her triumph over illiteracy was publicly told. Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood prayer was not for wealth or fame or the high position of Chief Executive. It was, God help mother, help father, help sister, Help everybody. _Teach me to read and write._ Watch over Honey and make him a good dog; And keep us all from getting lost in the wilderness. Amen. How many illiterates are praying today, “Teach me to read and write?” How many hunger and thirst after knowledge but know not how to secure it? “_Give me knowledge or I shall die_, has been the prayer of countless millions,” says David Swing, the great American divine. CHAPTER XV THE CALL OF THE ILLITERATES Plato said, “I believe that every immortal soul is the offspring of a divine thought, of a divine purpose, and that God has in His mind a picture like unto which He would have everyone of us to become.” It cannot be that God so just, so merciful, ever had it in His mind that any human being should be ultimately and forever illiterate. It is not the will of our Heavenly Father that millions remain in ignorance or that thousands have filled illiterate graves, that Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll, nor is it by the will of the illiterates themselves but through the shortsightedness and selfishness of educated men.