To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?
I have found words [in the Bible] for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness.
For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.