Think, if you can match that table of contents in any other--I do not say 'book' but 'literature.' Think, so far as it is possible for any of us--either adversary or defender of the faith--to extricate his intelligence from the habit and the association of moral sentiment based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained unravaged, and every teacher's truest words had been written down? 52. I am no despiser of profane literature. So far from it that I believe no interpretations of Greek religion have ever been so affectionate, none of Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the symbols of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many passages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply grave to me. How far my mind has been paralysed by the faults and sorrow of life,--how far short its knowledge may be of what I might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my own pleasure or self-proclaiming, I have been guarded, as men who so write always will be, from errors dangerous to others; and the fragmentary expressions of feeling or statements of doctrine, which from time to time I have been able to give, will be found now by an attentive reader to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of Sacred literature,--both classic and Christian, which will enable him without injustice to sympathize in the faiths of candid and generous souls, of every age and every clime. 53. That there _is_ a Sacred classic literature, running parallel with that of the Hebrews, and coalescing in the symbolic legends of mediaeval Christendom, is shown in the most tender and impressive way by the independent, yet similar, influence of Virgil upon Dante, and upon Bishop Gawaine Douglas. At earlier dates, the teaching of every master trained in the Eastern schools was necessarily grafted on the wisdom of the Greek mythology; and thus the story of the Nemean Lion, with the aid of Athena in its conquest, is the real root-stock of the legend of St. Jerome's companion, conquered by the healing gentleness of the Spirit of Life.