Article August 17, 1899 Issue

The World's Noblest Book

The Bible as Literature and as a Religious and Ethical Guide.

Henry Rose

St. Louis Globe-Democrat

In an address at Union College a few years since the late Charles A. Dana, veteran editor of the New York Sun, gave this advice to the students: "As to what books you should read, the most indispensable, useful, and effective is the Bible. There is no book whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, none from which you can learn more directly that sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest event with solemnity, but without sentimentality or affectation: none which you open with such confidence and lay down with such reverence; there is no book like the Bible."

Often is it spoken of as "the noblest book in the world," and with reason. Considered simply as literature, it is easily above all other writings. Look at its style. Where can you find its superior? Where its equal? Take the diction. Even in the English translation, how simple, accurate, and beautiful! In the original Hebrew and Greek, how rich and melodious! What majesty of conception and utterance in that psalm where the psalmist considers the heavens the work of God's fingers! What sylvan music ripples through that open which sings of God as a shepherd and of green pastures and still waters, symbolic of tranquillity and satisfaction, as His ultimate gift to man. Catch the pure melody that streams from Paul's chant to love! Look upon that grand word picture of the new earth which is to come out of the struggles and tears and prayers of the ages, where there is to be no sorrow, no pain, no clashing, no fear, but love and joy and peace and spiritual triumphs.

Run through the Bible in this way, pausing before these and numerous passages of similar loveliness and power, and you cannot deny that this grand old book contains some of the noblest poems of the world, and has a style unsurpassed in literature.

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