The Scripture documents may be viewed from several standpoints;--historical, exegetical, theological and literary. One may, for example, study the book of Job to find out the actual basis of fact that underlies it, or for the purpose of ascertaining and systematizing its doctrines, or he may read it as a great dramatic poem, and criticize it by the rules that would apply to any other dramatic poem. He may go through the Apocalypse, grammar and lexicon in hand, or he may study its flashing imagery as he would that of any other magnificent work of genius. He may read the Psalms as he would the odes of Horace. In these pages the Scriptures are considered simply as Literature. The question of inspiration or authority does not enter. Doctrinal inquiries are set aside. "To understand," says Matthew Arnold, "that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, literary, is the first step towards a right understanding of the Bible." The literary character of the Bible is admirably set forth in the following paragraph from a recent critic: "As a particular book, the Bible is an unequaled source of literary inspiration. As a book of religious truth, it is supreme; but religious truth, without any impairment of its value or obscurity of its meaning, may be studied from the literary standpoint; in fact, in the light of literary criticism, or tested by the usual canons of the scholar, it will appear more sacred, more beautiful, more divine. Never forgetting that it is our manual of religion, it is also the vehicle of the most wonderful literature in human annals, and precedes in importance all others. There is no book so composite in character and yet so harmonious in plan, so multiplex in styles and yet so educational in rhetoric and logic, so varied in contents and yet so progressive in its philosophy and religion, as the Bible. Taken as a whole, it is massive, comprehensive, a revelation of the Infinite. Studied in its parts, it stimulates single faculties while it ministers nourishment to the whole frame. Its histories are more compact than those of Herodotus, Gibbon or Macaulay; its poetry, whose key is a mystery, quiets Homer, Shakespeare and Tennyson; its prophecies are unique climaxes of wisdom, both in drapery and substance; its biographies excel those of Plutarch, Irving, Carlyle and Boswell; its chronicles of wars are superior to those of Julius Caesar, Wellington, Napoleon, and Ulysses Grant; its epistles eclipse those of Pliny, Madame Sevigne and Francis Bacon; its laws, in their ethical and spiritual import, are quite beyond Justinian, Blackstone and the English Parliament. Every phasis of literature, every norm of wisdom, is in the Bible. It ministers to all tastes and arouses the slumbering intellects of all who can comprehend the difference between reality and fiction, and who incline to virtue rather than vice.