I know very well that comparatively few out of any human generation ever become widely or deeply conversant with literature. It is but the one person out of ten, or a hundred, or out of a thousand it may be, that reads books. This I freely acknowledge. Nay, this I loudly proclaim. It is because this is so that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle exists—because this is so, and because it ought not to be so, and because there are at least a few of us that do not mean to have it continue to be so. Such, however, is undeniably at present the fact. Readers of books, take the civilized world at large, are few and far between. But no matter for that. What I have maintained is nevertheless true. Literature is a universal good. How many of you spend time in gazing heavenward at the sun? But you see by the light of the sun none the less. The sun lights the world in thousands and ten thousands of places where he does not directly shine. And literature is a sun. It blazes high in the heavens and spreads its beneficent illumination everywhere abroad among the haunts of civilized mankind. There are coverts, it is true, into which its rays can not immediately pierce. But even into such coverts its rays enter. There is such a thing as diffusion of light by refraction and reflection and transmission. In this way literature becomes a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. _A_ light, I say—for I use those sacred words with reverence. ONE is _the_ light that lighteth every man. And, by the way, let us remember that it is greatly through literature, that is, through a book, _the_ book, the Bible, that Jesus himself shines hither, across seas and continents of space and across centuries of time, to light us here as in a city in the wilderness to-day. Of the hundreds of thousands of Englishmen of the present generation that have from time to time listened to the noble eloquence of that great orator, John Bright, perhaps not one in a hundred has ever read, for example, the “Paradise Lost” of Milton. But does it therefore follow that to these of the overwhelming majority the “Paradise Lost” of Milton is nothing? Far from it. John Bright has acknowledged his vast debt to the poetry of Milton for the enrichment of his own gift of speech; and through John Bright, Milton’s poetry has thus become a real, an appreciable good to all the hundreds of thousands of men that have fed on John Bright’s eloquence, though they may never have read for themselves a line of Milton’s magnificent and inspiring verse.