The girls valued their blank books highly, and exhibited them with satisfaction. The teacher did not seem especially proud of the books, but exceedingly pleased that the class had grown familiar with so many of the verses. She had a right to feel gratified with her work, for she was helping them to become acquainted with the Book, just as I help my girls in their teens in school to become familiar with the encyclopædia—by sending them to it repeatedly, until they form the habit of consulting it. That many girls in their teens are steadied and helped through hard experiences by the words of comfort and encouragement which they find in the Bible any teacher of experience in Sunday-school work knows. I am looking now at the picture of the sweet, strong face of a girl of seventeen. She is hard at work helping support the family. The father has tried many times to reform and let drink alone, and as many times failed. The girl can hardly endure the life at home, yet for the sake of the younger children she must stay. Recently, when I told her how much I admired her, she said, “It has seemed this year as if I couldn’t keep on. I can’t tell you how much two verses on my calendar have helped me. I keep saying them over and over, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,’ and ‘Fear not, I will help thee.’” Another girl, struggling to overcome the habit of exaggeration which has been a characteristic of her family for generations, said to me one day, “I think so often of that verse, ‘With God all things are possible.’ If it weren’t for that I would give up, for just as I think I am improving I fail again, and it seems as if I never could tell things as they are.” I have found many girls in their teens lonely, discouraged, misunderstood, or in the presence of great sorrow, turning to the words of the Book, and really finding help and comfort. If, then, the girl in her teens can be taught something of the history of the Bible,—the languages in which it has been written, the methods by which it was compiled and translated, and finally printed,—so that she will not half believe that in some mysterious way it dropped down from heaven, or else never even ask where it came from; if she can be taught that its men and women were real and lived under real conditions in a real world; if she can know something of their struggles, defeats and victories, and learn to love their psalms and poems; if she can be led to see something of their growth and development as they waited for the Christ to come, then the Bible will be to her a real book, not a fetish to be worshiped afar off. And if she can be led to seek in the Gospels and letters of the New Testament help and inspiration to live honestly and sincerely, then the Bible will become a tremendous force for righteousness in her daily life.