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 the way. Its very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race; and this, too, in exact proportion as it is more or less generally known and studied. Of those nations which in the highest degree enjoy its influences it is not too much to affirm that the differences, public and private, physical, moral, and intellectual, are only less than what might have been expected from a diversity of species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument of Humanity.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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