CHAPTER XV

HIS OPINION OF THE BIBLE

"If a man is not familiar with the Bible he has suffered a loss which he had better make all possible haste to correct."-Theodore Roosevelt.

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All Scripture is . . profitable for teaching, for reproof, for amendment, for moral discipline, to make the man of God proficient and equip him for good work of every kind. -2 Tim. 3. 16, 17 (Moffatt's translation).

W

HEN he was forty-two years of age, or

twenty-one years after his graduation from Harvard, Mr. Roosevelt was inaugurated Vice-President of the United States. On that occasion the Harvard Republican Club presented him with an appropriately inscribed copy of the Bible. After his death Mrs. Roosevelt sent the American Bible Society a photograph of that Bible with the comment that it was the one book which Mr. Roosevelt always "kept at his hand on the reading stand in the north room at Sagamore Hill." Mrs. Roosevelt further added in the letter to the Society: "I should like the world to know how large a part his deep knowledge of the Bible played in my husband's life."

Mrs. Robinson told me about the "pigskin" library which Mr. Roosevelt carried to Africa, saying:

When my brother decided to make the African trip I requested the privilege of furnishing a pigskin bound li

brary for him to take along. The first book selected for this library was the Bible; he could not do without that book. He read it a great deal. He counted it a literary masterpiece. He also read it for inspiration and consolation.

In 1901 Mr. Roosevelt entertained the Long Island Bible Society at his home in Oyster Bay and delivered an address on "The Influence of the Bible." It is so characteristically compact and so valuable that it is repeated here quite fully:

Every thinking man, when he thinks, realizes what a very large number of people tend to forget, that the teachings of the Bible are so interwoven and entwined with our whole civic and social life that it would be literally-I do not mean figuratively, I mean literally-impossible for us to figure to ourselves what that life would be if these teachings were removed. We would lose almost all the standards by which we now judge both public and private morals; all the standards toward which we, with more or less of resolution, strive to raise ourselves. Almost every man who has by his lifework added to the sum of human achievement of which the race is proud, has based his lifework largely upon the teachings of the Bible. . . . Among the greatest men a disproportionately large number have been diligent and close students of the Bible at first hand.

He refers to Lincoln's study of and indebtedness to the Bible, and his industry in reading it until he became a "man of one book":

Lincoln, sad, patient, kindly Lincoln, who after bearing upon his weary shoulders for four years a greater burden than that borne by any other man of the nineteenth century, laid down his life for the people whom living he had served

so well, built up his entire reading upon his early study of the Bible. He had mastered it absolutely; mastered it as later he mastered only one or two other books, notably Shakespeare; mastered it so that he became almost "a man of one book," who knew that book, and who instinctively put into practice what he had been taught therein; and he left his life as part of the crowning work of the century that has now passed.

He insists that intellectual training alone is not sufficient:

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A man whose intellect has been educated, while at the same time his moral education has been neglected, is only the more dangerous to the community because of the exceptional additional power which he has acquired. . . . It is a good thing to be clever, to be able and smart, but it is a better thing to have the qualities that find their expression in the Decalogue and the Golden Rule. It is a good and necessary thing to be intelligent; it is a better thing to be straight and decent and fearless.

He declared that the Bible enforces a personal obligation which is measured by one's ability:

You may look through the Bible from cover to cover, and nowhere will you find a line that can be construed into an apology for the man of brains who sins against the light. On the contrary, in the Bible, taking that as a guide, you will find that because much has been given you, much will be expected from you; and a heavier condemnation is visited upon the able man who goes wrong than upon his weaker brother who cannot do the harm that the other does because it is not in him to do it.

He then quotes a description of the Bible given by Huxley, who describes it as a literary gem, a civilizer,

a giver of world visions, an insurance for freedom and a teacher of responsibility:

One of the highest tributes of modern times to the worth of the Bible came from the great scientist Huxley, who said: "Consider the great historical fact that for three centuries the Book has been woven into the life of all that is noblest and best in our history, and that it has become the national epic of our race; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and finally that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilization and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between the eternities? The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed. Down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. Nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the state, in the long run, depends upon the righteousness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Bible is the most democratic book in the world.

The

Mr. Roosevelt affirms that the Bible aids good taste in reading, which aid he opines is greatly needed when the level of literary taste was so noticeably low:

There is the unceasing influence it exerts on the side of good taste, of good literature, of proper sense of proportion, of simple and straightforward writing and thinking. This

is not a small matter in an age when there is a tendency to read much that, even if not actually harmful on moral grounds, is yet injurious, because it presents slipshod, slovenly thought and work; not the kind of serious thought, of serious expression, which we like to see in anything that goes into the fiber of our character.

He pleads for a closer study of a book that will spur one to strong endeavor to make the world better:

If we read the Bible aright, we read a book which teaches us to go forth and do the work of the Lord; to do the work of the Lord in the world as we find it; to try to make things better in this world, even if only a little better because we have lived in it. . . . We plead for a closer and wider and deeper study of the Bible, so that our people may be in fact as well as in theory, "doers of the word and not hearers only."

He exhibited real skill in studying and teaching the Bible, which will be seen from the outline prepared. with his own hand and appearing herewith. (See page 310.)

It will be interesting to read the verses and see how sturdy and stimulating they are as well as alive with exhortation.

The Rev. W. I. Bowman, while pastor of the Methodist Church at Oyster Bay, had invited Mr. Roosevelt to address his brotherhood. He promptly agreed to do so and, of course, the church was crowded, as was the space outside. The President arrived on time and brought his own Bible with him. He read as a Scripture lesson 1 Cor. 13, the chapter which Henry Drummond used as the basis for his book, The Greatest Thing in the World, which deals with