The Bible's Secret by Henry Van Dyke

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 30, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 21.

The Bible's Secret

By Henry Van Dyke

THE literary influence of the Bible appears the more wonderful when we consider that it is the work of a race not otherwise famous or potent in literature. We do not know, of course, what other books may have come from the Jewish nation and vanished with whatever power or beauty they possessed; but in those that remain there is little of exceptional force or charm for readers outside of the Hebrew race. They have no broad human appeal, no universal significance, nor even any signal excellence of form or imagery. Josephus is a fairly good historian, sometimes entertaining, but not comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon. The Talmuds are vast storehouses of things new and old, where a careful searcher may now and then find a legendary gem or a quaint fragment of moral tapestry. In histories of medieval literature, Ibn Ezra of Toledo and Rashi of Lunel are spoken of with respect. In modern letters, works as far apart as the philosophical treatises of Spinoza and the lyrics of Heinrich Heine have distinction in their kind. No one thinks that the Hebrews are lacking in great and varied talents; but how is it that in world literature their only contribution that counts is the Bible? And how is it that it counts so immensely?

The fountainhead of the power of the Bible in literature lies in its nearness to the very springs and sources of human life—life taken seriously, earnestly, intensely; life in its broadest meaning, including the inward as well as the outward life; life interpreted in its relation to universal laws and eternal values. It is this vital quality in the narratives, the poems, the allegories, the meditations, the discourses, the letters, gathered in this Book, that give it first place among the books of the world not only for currency, but also for greatness.—Henry Van Dyke.