It is the Magna Charta of our liberties; the revered companion and master of the Pilgrims who sailed the wintry seas, and, on Plymouth Rock, building wiser than they knew, founded a nation covenanting freedom of conscience unto all men; a nation on whose Bell of Independence runs the Bible legend, "Proclaim liberty to the inhabitants thereof." Wherever society is found to-day in travail with a new and higher order, the conception can be traced to the seminal words of the Bible. The institutions and manners of progressive civilization are what they are because in the heart of that civilization has lain the Bible. My brothers, were these books nothing more to us than such ancient writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness of liberalism, falsely so called. What if in these ancient writings there are ancient errors, the marvels which a child age exaggerated into miracles, stories of savage cruelty and brutal lust in rude, rough times, acts of superstition dark and dreadful, utterances which to us are blasphemous ascribed to the Eternal and Holy One? Such faults are inevitable in the literature that records a nation's growth from barbarism. Were a man in the name of Liberty or in the name of Truth to hunt through Homer, to rake together all the errors and superstitions embalmed in these immortal sagas, to haul up from the obscurity where sensible people leave them the lewdnesses suggested or described, and then to fling these blemishes at the book in which the children of Greece and England and America have read with tingling blood the tales which stirred their souls, by what name would we call him? By that name let him stand forth impaled upon the scorn of an age that has not lost the grace of reverence, who, mindless of majestic age, the dignity of letters, an influence unrivalled and benign, associations tender and most holy, upon these venerable and sacred books spits his shallow scepticism, spumes his spleenful sarcasm, and smuts them with his own sensuality. Let Irreverence stay her ribald tongue before these illustrious writings, and Indecency vomit her own nastiness elsewhere than on our Bible. II. The Bible lays a yet deeper claim upon our reverence These books constitute the literature of a people whose genius was religion, whose mission was its evolution into universal forms, whose writings express the moods and tenses of that development; whose history is the organic growth which flowered in the life of Him who freed religion from every swathing band, and gave the world its pure essential spirit; after Whom all races are being drawn as one flock under one Shepherd. 1. _Israel's specialty in history was religion._