When Theodore Roosevelt began his political life in New York City, he joined a Republican club. name was proposed for membership, and some persons determined to blackball the candidate because he was a Jew. Mr. Roosevelt heard of the threat and rebuked those who had made it in the most stinging words and cried out, "Shame on you! Shame on you to allow your prejudice against the man's religion to so blind you to his excellent character! This man proposed I know. I know him to be an honest man and a gentleman, and if he is to be blackballed because he is a Jew I should feel very much like resigning from the club right away." The opposition was ended and the man was elected to membership by a unanimous vote and became a most vigorous, useful and honored member of the circle. That was the Roosevelt of our country and the Roosevelt of the world, who loved all denominations which were trying to do the Lord's work, and was idolized by them all. Jason, who led the forty-nine most brilliant young men of Greece on the journey to secure the Golden Fleece and his crown, is reputed in the stories of the Greek gods to have accomplished miracles by divine direction. He was ordered by the gods to take the piece of a limb from the oak of Dodona and have it turned into the face of a woman. This he nailed to the bow of his ship. He consulted it continually, and it was said to have told him where to go and what to do. Theodore Roosevelt, in accomplishing the miracles of his lifetime, had a crucified and risen Savior before his eyes, whom he consulted at every step of life, who told him where to go, what to say, and what to do-to bless his fellowmen and secure his crown. I' CHAPTER XXII ROOSEVELT AND THE BIBLE IN 1903 I said to President Roosevelt: "I should like to have from you, for a book I am writing, something that expresses your religious faith, which is so strong and which I know from your sayings, actions and sentiments is the basis of your character and contains your ideas of individual and public morality." He said to me: "I will gladly do so. I think the address I delivered before the Long Island Bible Society in the Presbyterian church at Oyster Bay in 1901 is just the thing you want." I found it was exactly the thing I wanted, and this is what he Isaid in the address about the Bible: "There are certain truths which are so very true that we call them truisms; and yet I think we often half forget them in practice. 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 resolution, strive to raise ourselves. Almost every man who has by his life-work added to the sum of human achievement of which the race is proud, of which our people are proud, almost every such man has based his life-work largely upon the teachings of the Bible. Sometimes it was done unconsciously, more often consciously, and among the very greatest men a disproportionately large number have been diligent and close students of the Bible at first hand. 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 as 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 just closed. "In this country we rightly pride ourselves upon our systems of widespread popular education. We most emphatically do right to pride ourselves upon it. It is not merely of inestimable advantage to us; it lies at the root of our power of self-government. But it is not sufficient in itself. We must cultivate the mind; but it is not enough only to cultivate the mind. With education of mind must go the spiritual teaching which will make us turn the trained intellect to good account. 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 |