It would seem likewise that a Book written so long ago would fail of the element of timeliness. That an old volume should keep its place in a new century is in itself an anomaly. The last of the Bible was penned hundreds of years since. Accepting the most radical views as to dates, its youngest book was produced quite more than a millennium and a half ago. Meanwhile the world has been making amazing progress. We boast of our achievements in transportation and communication. All ancient things seem to be outgrown, save only the Bible. The books that were written as contemporaries of parts of the great Book have either slipped into oblivion or are known to-day only by the intellectually elect. The classics are studied by a small circle of scholars. The average man knows nothing of Virgil, or Cicero, or Homer, by any direct contact with the works of those authors. But the Bible, which is out of date by the calendar, is not out of date by its own meaning. It is singularly contemporaneous. Its different portions were called forth by passing events and the Book itself is clearly touched by its own times. For all that, eternity appears to have lodged itself in its contemporaneousness. The twentieth century, eager and thrilling as it is, accepts a Guide Book from the distant years. Roman Law and Greek Art are filtered to the new age through modern channels. The Bible itself comes to us more simple and more powerful than any modern interpretations of its messages. There is a sense in which it declines to apply to itself its own figure of speech about the new wine in the old bottles. The Bible defies geographical distance as well as calendar distance. For the most part its record relates to what happened in a small and remote section of the earth. It reaches its climax in an obscure province which was smaller than many a modern county. The customs of which it tells are mostly gone. Sandals and tents and camels and parchments are curiosities in the new lands and new times. Much of the setting of biblical events is wholly unknown to our day, and so must be reproduced for our children in pictures and for our adults in descriptions. An Oriental Book is the chief literature of an Occidental world. In spite of its small size, its great age, its cramped geography, its vivid Orientalism, the Bible keeps its mastery. What is the explanation?