The Life of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, as Good Reading

THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST, IN THE NEW TESTAMENT, AS GOOD READING* By Dr. Adam S. Bennion, Superintendent of Church Schools. If you have caught the message of this hour as I have done, you are stirred to an appreciation of the fact that Jesus lived, you have caught the inspiration of the thought that he was in very deed the Son of God and therefore divine. I take it our problem now is to address ourselves to the task, "What shall we do about it?" In other words, if I can catch the assignment in my address, it is to raise with you the issue, "How may you go forward and make sure that the young men under your leadership shall come to know this man Jesus, that they may live in his presence and catch the power that has been exhibited during this convention. I therefore am asked to address myself to the topic, the reading of the New Testament. I do not hesitate at all to say that to suggest to the young men of the Church or the young men of any community to read the gospel of Jesus Christ is to ask them to read the rarest bit of reading in all the world. "To every man there opcneth a way. and ways and a way. And the high soul climbs the high way. and the low soul gropes the low While in between, on the misty flats, the rest drift to and fro. But to every man there openeth a high way and a low And every man decideth the way his soul shall go." It were a wonderful thing if we could decide in this hour that the young men of this Church would go the high way, following the trail marked out by the Master of men. "For every man," says Jessie Lee Bennett, "every man, woman, and child, there exist one or two books so illuminating that once read life will never be quite the same to them again," I come to you with the conviction that no person can really read and understand one or all of the gospels and remain the same, having read them. Mr. Wigham, in his new book, The Decalogue of Science, in in- troducing what he calls the new sixth commandment, gives expression to these notable words: "Our Puritan forbears lived on parched corn, but they talked about God ; they shot Indians through the porthole with one eye and taught the Bible to their children with the other, and there was produced in New England a group of men and women who have been the marvel of modern civilization." I am asked to call your attention to the merits of a great book, ♦Delivered at the June M. I. A. Jubilee Conference, 192 5. In this connection we call our young men's attention to page 1008, August Era, "Special Recognition for Reading the Four Gospels."

THE LIFE OF CHRIST 1085 the greatest book in the possession of the human race today, namely the Bible, and more particularly the second half of it, called the New Testament. And I am going to address myself, in the few minutes that are mine, to the query, Why should we read it? Why encourage young men to read it? All the time the three former speakers* have been addressing you I have been moved with the thought: What if the Master could come in this morning? If we could transplant ourselves through time and space, and be over in Palestine and drop back 1900 years, it were a wonderful opportunity to have listened to him. Now, barring the fact that you cannot see him and feel the tremendous impress that comes out of personality, it is the privilege of every one here today and during the rest of his life, to come into the presence of the Master and be instructed of him. And that is why that book becomes the greatest book known to man — because that privilege is there. I say your task is a task of salesmanship; and if you would go out and promote the use of this book among young men, how shall you begin? I am going to offer you three homely suggestions, which I think will help to make the book popular with anybody. They have helped to heighten my own appreciation of it. I have learned that whenever a man faces a task it is a good thing to come into the presence of strong men and women to get their judgment. If I would invest in stocks, then I want the judg- ment of a financier. If I would go away to school, then I want the judgment of a school man, who knows institutions. If I would buy a farm, then I want the judgment of a man who has farmed, who knows the soil, and knows the problems of farming. If you would read, as you select the things you would read, I believe it good policy to ask the opinion of men whose judgment is worth while. I am going to call your attention very briefly to a dozen men who are entitled to a voice on this problem as they are on many others: The first, Daniel Webster. He said with reference to this book, about which we are now talking, "I remember the time when at my mother's knee or on my father's knee I learned to lisp the verses of the sacred scripture that have since been my daily staff and vigilant contemplation. If there is anything in my style to be commended, the credit is due to my parents in instilling into my early life the sacred scripture." The second man of that dozen is one of the most eminent critics that England has ever produced, John Ruskin: "Whatever I have been in my life has simply been due to the fact that when I was a child my mother read daily with me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart; and truly, though I have picked up a little further knowledge in mathematics, in meteorology, and the like in after life, and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this motherly instillation of my mind in that property of the chapters I count very confidential the most precious and on the whole, the one essential part of my education." *For their addresses, see August, 1925, Era, pp. 981-90.

1086 IMPROVEMENT ERA Benjamin Franklin said, "The reading of one good book made me what I am. Buy good books," he said, "instead of good clothes." And the fourth, Coleridge, that eminent English man of letters: "To give a man full knowledge of morality I should need to send him to no other book than the Bible." Andrew Jackson said, " That book, sir, is the book upon which our Republic rests." U. S. Grant — and I am glad to be able to come into the presence of these men, fighting men, with this message of peace. — U. S. Grant said, "Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet anchor in your liberties; write its precepts upon your heart and practice them in your lives. To the influence of this book we are indebted for the progress made in true civilization, and to this book we must look as our guide in the future." And the seventh, Abraham Lincoln: "The Bible is the best book God has given to man." • The eighth, Viscount James Bryce, of England, said when he was here in 1914, "It is with great regret that one sees, in these days, that knowledge of the Bible seems declining in all classes of the community. I was struck with the same thing in the United States. Looking at it from the educational side only, the loss of a knowledge of the Bible and all that the Bible means would be incalculable to the life of the country. It would be a great mis- fortune if generation of children grew up who did not know their Bibles." Ninth, Marshall Foch, who declared that the Bible is certainly the best preparation you can give to an American soldier going into battle to sustain his magnificent ideal and faith. Let Theodore Roosevelt be our tenth spokesman. He declared, "The immense moral influence of the Bible, though, of course, infinitely the most important, is not the only factor it has for good. In addition there is the increasing influence it exerts on the side of good taste, of good literature, of proper sense of proportion, of simple straightforward writing and speaking and thinking. No man can afford to be ignorant of the Bible." Next, President Wilson said, "A man has deprived himself of the best there is in the world who has deprived himself of an intimate knowledge of the Bible. I ask of every man and woman in this audience that from this night on they will realize that part of the destiny of America lies in their daily perusal of this great book of revelation." And men, there is a challenge to you and to all: "In the daily perusal of that great book," independent of its divine origin, it con- tains more important history and finer strains of eloquence than can be acquired from all other books in whatsoever language they may he written.

THE LIFE OF CHRIST 1087 And I conclude with a testimony of H. G. Wells, of whom Anatole France said, "He is the most stimulating man in the world today, has provoked more thought and is stirring more men to an appreciation of the finer values of life," and he says: "The Bible is the book that has held together the fabric of western civilization. It is the great handbook of life." I have not time to dwell on further judgments of men. I quote you these dozen specimens from the great men of the modern world who say that this book occupies first place among the list of books that can be put into the hands of young men or old men. I said I wanted to bring you three arguments as salesmen. That is my first one. The second one is the place that book has taken in the popular mind and has held against all other competitors. I always am of the opinion that whenever a book becomes one of the world's great best sellers there must be something in it that will hold the fancy of men and women. Much as we quarrel with Main Street, the fact that it came to be one of the most popular books in the United States ought to make us a little bit skeptical about throwing it out as having no consequence. When The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse came out of the war, it came to be one of the greatest best sellers, and it deserved the attention of men and women. Now I bring to you the idea, as a matter of salesmanship, that the Bible, the New Testament, claims distinction, because in all these years it has been and continues to be the leading best seller on the market. That thought in itself alone is a stupendous one, when I think that in 1922 thirty million copies of the Bible were made and dis- tributed in America. More copies of the Bible in that year were sold than of any other book on the market. The book has been trans- lated into 770 languages and dialects. It is quoted more than its next rival, Shakespeare, at a ratio of more than seven to one — and that is in the literature of the day. It continues to be the first seller in the American market, in spite of he fact that billions of copies have al- ready been put into American homes. It is quoted in popular fiction, in standard fiction, in popular magazines, in the standard magazines, in newspaper editorials. In a little study that I carried forward three years ago, I discovered that through the period of time covered in that little study there were 468 references to the Bible in popular fiction. It is almost astounding the number of times that it bobs up even in the most popular of novels. It was used 515 times in non-fiction of the popular variety, 2,527 times in popular magazines, 1,940 times in the standard magazines for the period covered, 1,142 in newspaper editorials. The interesting thing is that though most of the parts of the Bible have been used, the parts that have been used predominantly are the life and the teachings of Jesus Christ. His life, from his baptism to his crucifixion, and the Sermon on the Mount lead all others. Those facts, from a literary point of view,