Worthy Of Study
I know that young doctors, young lawyers, young accountants, young mechanics, young merchants, have but little time for general reading. If so, then spend more of that time at the fountain of divine truth from which nearly all the books have been dipped that are worth anything.
I will undertake to say that every great book, that has been published since the first printing press was lifted, has directly or indirectly derived much of its power from the sacred oracles.
Goethe, the admired of all skeptics, had the wall of his home at Wiemar covered with religious maps and pictures. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is part of the Bible in blank verse.
Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered” is borrowed from the Bible. Spencer’s writings are imitations of the parables. John Bunyan saw in a dream only what St. John had seen before in Apocalyptic vision. Macaulay crowns his most gigantic sentences with Scripture quotations.
Through Addison’s “Spectator” there glances in and out the stream that broke from beneath the throne of God, clear as crystal. Walter Scott’s characters are Bible men and women under different names. Meg Merribes, the witch of Endor.
Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth was Jezebel. Hobbes stole from this “Castle of Truth” the weapons with which he afterward assaulted it. Lord Byron caught the ruggedness and majesty of his style from the prophecies.
The writings of Pope are saturated with Isaiah, and he finds his most successful theme in the Messiah. The poets Thompson and Johnson, dipped their pens in the style of the inspired orientals.
Thomas Carlyle is only a splendid distortion of Ezekiel; and wandering through the lanes and parks of this imperial domain of Bible truth, I find all the great American, English, German, Spanish, Italian poets, painters, orators, and rhetoricians.
Now if this be so, and the young man has but little time to read, why not go to the great fountain of all truth and inspiration, from which these other books dip their life.---TALMAGE.
