Charles A. Dana was a great editor and thinker. This is his fine
tribute to a book that has influenced the life and destiny of more men
than any other literature:
There is perhaps no book whose style is more suggestive and more
instructive, from which you learn more directly that sublime
simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest
event with solemnity, of course, 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. When
you get into a controversy and want exactly the right answer,
when you are looking for an expression, what is there that
closes a dispute like a verse from the Bible? What is it that
sets up the right principle for you, which pleads for a policy,
for a cause, so much as the right passage of Holy Scripture?
(214)
See DIRECTIONS; LETTER OF GOD; WAY, DIRECTION OF; WORD THE, A
HAMMER.
=Bible a Book of Directions=--See DIRECTIONS.
=Bible a Book of Life=--See HIGHER CRITICISM.
=Bible Adaptation=--See ADAPTING THE BIBLE.