THAT reading and study are very imperfect which do not bring to all our young people a knowledge of the general contents of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the best moral and religious thought and belief of two important epochs in man's history--the Hebrew and Christian periods. It contains the history, the wisdom, the morality, the piety and the hope of that part of the human race that made religion the chief aim of the nation and the individual. The Hebrew people was set apart for the special task of carrying forward the idea of God. That race gradually separated the real Creator from the many false divinities of the barbarian tribes and slowly built up that conception of Deity which is seen set forth in the Book of Job and in the twenty-third and nineteenth Psalms. The Book of Job and the Psalms of David are the grand autumnal fruitage of that vineyard of worship in which Enoch and Abraham were toilers in the early springtime of our world. No such advance toward the true God would have taken place had the Mosaic race moved out of Egypt only to found a State which might build elsewhere duplicates of the pyramids of the Nile, or a State which, like Babylonia, might live only for luxury, or which, like Greece, might live only for the fine arts, or which, like Rome, might find a reason of being in wars of conquest. Divinely led, the Hebrew people migrated from Egypt that beyond the Red Sea and the Jordan they might found a republic or empire for the study and founding of the true religion. Israel stands as the wonder of the past, the only nation in all history that elected God for its king and went up into a high mountain so as to deduce its laws from the thunder and storm and from the sunlight and peace of His presence. With what success it achieved its task may be learned from reading the meditations in Job and the Psalms, and from the lofty rhapsodies of Isaiah and Malachi. When to the sacred records of that long day and night of toil and progress are added the coming of the divine Christ and the moral phenomena of the first Christian century, a book is composed at which to scoff is a proof of a weak or a wicked mind, and in which to read often and thoughtfully is evidence of a willingness to seek after the living God and to find the best answers to the many problems of life and death.