Every preacher should at least read Blackstone: if possible, he should take the full law course, not alone to know the principles of common law, but also and especially for style’s sake; to know how to state things exactly, economically. Verbiage is expensive. It burdens speed. It weakens force. It is the mark of a mind untrained. Bible Greek helps the preacher just at this point. Let him master the language and he will unconsciously think in the very channels along which the tides of Greek thought, feeling, emotion, and sentiment glide, never overflowing their banks into the flat and boundless marshes of nowhereness. FASCINATIONS OF THE JOURNEY. 1. _The Bible Greek student is continually helped in his studies by the fascinations of his journey._ On every side arise new friends to call him blessed. It is no arid desert which invites his footsteps. The land flows with milk and honey. No wild beasts are there: no enemy. It is God’s land: his Eden where he walks and talks with the true Adam. Here, for example, is a grand plane of literary observation and loftiness. The air is bracing, a tonic to weak chests surfeited with library hot house forcings and environments. Then too the moral upliftings which one gets! The sense of presences invisible to eye, unheard, untouched: presences recent from heaven. Oh how one’s littlenesses and inferiorities, one’s shortcomings and dwarfedness feel the rebuke of loftier spirits, speechless, but loftier. Here are theologic forests and drives through green carpeted woods that smell of myrrh and balsam, even as though his footsteps and his garments had just passed. Yonder is an apocalyptic plateau, an island of the sky, from whose top all heaven is visible. Are not these things helps? to preacher? teacher? scholar? Hear just one word from Paul. It puts us on that plateau yonder. He tells the Romans (i:20), “For the invisible things of him, since the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through the _things that are made_, even his everlasting power and divinity.” He tells the Ephesians (ii:10), “For we are his _workmanship_, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” In these two passages the italicized words are the same. They are not found elsewhere in all the Bible. The word is _poiema_. From its plateau we discover the harmonies and the unity of the uni-verse of God—the oneness of Deity with us dirt. God is discovered, _un_-covered in the _poiema_—the poem of Nature: so that the heathen are excuseless. We are God’s _poiema_—the poem of Grace recreated in Jesus Christ. Ah, to find that one word, to stand upon its apocalyptic summit and to see, is worth four years’ climbing, though it should be harder than up Katahdin’s gorges, steeper than the icy sides horrific of Mt. Blanc.