The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-11-23
THE FRIENDSHIP OF BOOKS
FINE SERMON BY THE REF. MR.
 FERRIS LAST SUNDAY.

l b"PsASs NhuFcn-" hat Ah1i
 Be Learned Through Book Reading
 Tho Book Is the Friend of Man.
 Last Sunday evening in the Calvary
 Baptist church the Rev. George H. Fer
 ris delivered the second of a series of
 sermons. The subject of the sermon
 Sunday was "The Friendship of
 Books" and it proved a very interest
 ing one. The text was taken from
 Prov. 4:13 and the preacher spoke as | follows:
 Prov. 4: 13
 ! Aur topic tonight is "The Friend
 ship of Books" I would speak word
 for those tried and ancient friends, who
 teach us without f1ogglng us; talk to us without tiring us; rebuke us without insulting us; board with us without boring us Think of it, for the price of single days outing, or the cost of
 new suit of clothes, we can wander
 through the shadowy lands of antiqui-
 ty with that fine old traveller Herodo-
 thus; can eavesdrop at the emperor's
 chamber in the palace of Marcus Aure-
 Illus; can laugh over the merry wisdom
 which Jean Paul finds in the follies of
 mankind; or can soar over the snow
 clad summits of the Alps with the
 stormy soul of Byron. And these are
 not chance acquaintances, the epheme-
 ra of an hour of pleasure. Long years
 ago they brought heir gifts to the
 great temple of Time, and the wise old
 goddess said. T will wait! will read
 them over carefully, I will give you
 my judgment bye and bye"' A centu-
 ry passed, and out of a hundred thou
 sand books she picked out one, saying,
 This you may reprint, for I have
 found it worthy to live" From these
 tried souls, who have passed the awful
 scrutiny and the fearful ordeal that
 burns up the millions on the altar of time, I select a few hundred, and bring
 them into my house, and there they stand patiently on the shelves saying, We have waited for you five centu- ries. We have the secrets of two thou sand years to tell you. We long to pour forth our souls, and unburden our hearts of the awful mysteries of life and time, but we dare not open our lips until first you come to us" Where can find better friends than these? If my clothes are poor they do not snub me; if l make mistakes, they do not laugh at me; if I call upon them, they are never out; if I miss their meaning, they are never peevish. Had I lived in days of old, and travelled from land to land, I could never have known the great men of the past one-half as inti- mately and pleasantly as l know them now. l cannot say, from the little l know of the habits of Socrates that I really think I should have enjoyed walk with him on the streets of Athens, trying to avoid too close contact with his unwashed person, and endeavoring to keep him from thrust ing his upturned nose into all my pr- vate affairs; but I can sit back in my Morris chair, on a quiet evening. and be lifted far away from the world of care by the inspiration of Xenophon's ''Memora bilia," or Plato's Apology" Had I received letter of introduction to Swift, I might have spent good sized fortune following him around with Sir William Temple, or journeying from England to Ireland, before I could present it, only to find him in one of his spells of gloom and misanthropy, without rift in the mental clouds that the stars of his thought; but now, for nothing, by just walking down to the Public Library, I can get '"The Tale of a Tub" or "Gullivers Travels and can laugh heartily at the grotesque situations and strange conceits that lay bare the heart of English life in the early eighteenth century. Had I walked with Shakespeare on the banks of the Avon he might have talked of nothing more important than the latest | 'umor of sheep stealing, or have grown . angry with me because he could not ' persuade me to enter some tavern where the sack was unusually powerf- f Full, and I might have caught not one word of that flashing genius that flow cred in the soliloquy of Hamlet, or that spectre of a moral midnight, Iago. Had I wandered with Wordsworth over he hills of Cumberland he might have been a little more reticent and bashful han usual, wishing l were off some- where in Siberia, and have talked about he weather, or have said commonplace hings about he Holy Alliance or the of Algiers and never for an instant have drawn aside the veil to hat mystic realm whence issued the Excursion" and the "Ode to Immor- ality.' Even to their bosom compan- ons these men were of necessity re- erved, hidden, inaccessible, busy, enced in by custom, limited by time, leld off by habit; but to me, a friend ar down the ages they give their lar rest learning, their purest passion heir ripest wsdof, their loft fest dreams nd the winnowed harvest of their gen. us.
 For book Abraham Lincoln walked orty miles when a boy. For book Theodore Parker picked huckleberries n the pasture and carried them from lexington to Boston to market For ook Thurlow Weed waded through now two miles, with his feet tied up n rags that he might get something 0 read by the light of the sap-bush re. To read books James Freeman 'larke climbed up into the branches of n old chestnut tree, and hid himself in he foliage. To read books Horace 'reeley would lie stretched out on the ard floor nearly all night long, piling inc knots on the backlog of the fire