Volumes could be written in praise of the Holy Bible without using one word too many. President Woodrow Wilson once said that the Bible is a book of such importance that no one unacquainted with it can be said to be an educated man, and one who is familiar with it can be said to be uneducated. Sir Walter Scott, when he was dying, called for ?the book.? A servant inquired which of his thousands of volumes he meant, and the great man replied, ?The Bible, of course. For a dying man there can be no other book.? Even the skeptic, George Bernard Shaw, during the last years of his life, kept a Bible near him and never traveled without carrying a copy along with him. We should all have several Bibles: a well-bound reference Bible for study and a large-print, plain-text Bible for devotional reading. That many at least. And if we can afford it (and we can if we will cut down somewhere else), we should have a good modern translation or two. There are dozens of them. Their chief value is to stimulate interest by affording a change of style and to throw sidelights upon the test of the familiar King James Version.
Money invested in Bibles is money well spent. Time spent in reading the Bible is not likely to be time wasted. The Bible is the supreme gift for friends and loved ones. Words spoken in favor of the Bible are good words and, if they should fall upon the right ears, might prove to be ?apples of gold in pictures of silver.?
