It underlies all good, and is the only sure
basis of progress.
For two thousand years China and Japan have been without
the Bible, and what they were then, that they are now. For
two thousand years the millions of India have been left
without God and without hope in the world, and they have
only progressed into infinite degradations. The aboriginal
inhabitants of America, left without the Bible, have only
gone down deeper and deeper into a night as black as that
which brooded over old chaos.
No Herschel counts the stars, numbers the planets,
measures the length of their years and computes the number
of their days, unless his observatory is illuminated by
the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. No Luther thunders
against priestcraft, shakes the thrones of tyrants, and
wakes the nations to a new life and a new progress, save
that Luther that finds a Bible in his cell. No Franklin
calls down electricity from the clouds to carry messages
across a continent swift as the lightning flashes through
the sky, save that Franklin whose fathers brought the
Bible with them from their native land, and prized it more
than all the gold of Ophir.
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