The Newtown bee., 1908-08-21
GUNN MEMORIAL LIBRARY.
ADDRESS BY REV W. R. RICH
 ARDS D. D.
At the Dedication Exercises at Wash
 ington on May 29.
THE BOOK AND THE MAN.

It might be hard to 5ay which IS the greatest of human inventions, but surely among the greatest IS the strange art of writing. the art by which a man can make his speech visi, ble. and fix it in permanent record, SC that every thought or emotion shall be not "like the baseless fabric of some vision, faded and leaving not wrack behind" but permanent treasure add ed to the steadily increasing treasures of human knowledge. Indeed. the progress of human thought, beyond its very earliest stages, was conditioned upon the ability to write it down. An ancient thinker of the Hebrew race had been so deeply impressed with this fact that he even ventured to say, in a text that we often quote without ap- preciating the full range of it's mean ing, that "all scripture" it does not say Holy Scripture-"all scripture, even the very art of writing. itself, was given to man by the inspiration of God" That same ancient race, which produced this remarkable saying, also showed itself most sympathetic toward the desire of every inquisitive human mind.to read what has been written down. "I wept much," says the Seer of the Apocalypse, "because the Look was sealed and no man was worthy to open It." a. ... T
 Now it is this same sympathy with the desire of the human mind for knowledge, especially for the treasure of knowledge stored in books, which has led to the founding of all the great schools and colleges of the world. One thinks of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and other like seats of learning, founded in what we allow ourselves to call the dark ages. and where eager students used to gather from all parts of Europe by thousands and tens of thousands to sit at the feet of some especially trust ed teacher. Or a little later, that thrilling chapter in the history of the war of Dutch indedendence, when, in the midst of the agony, of the fight, when the siege of Leyden had just been raised, that heroic people, before there had been time to satisfy their own bodily hunger, determined upon the founding of university as the worthi- est memorial of the deliverance. Or that other chapter, telling of another heroic people on this side of the ocean, and how, before they had got their own houses well roofed in over their heads, they set about the founding of Harvard College. And you all know that other story, from the records of the New Haven Colony, of how few of those penniless parsons came to- gether one day, each with his pitiful little pile of books, for the starting of Yale. So we always recognize the schools and colleges of America as among the noblest products of our Christian civilization. There is noth- ing which gives us firmer assurance that our civilization. with all its faults, deserves to be called in some sense Christian, than these same institutions of Christian learning. It may be some great university gathering it's students by thousands from every part of the land; or it might be some little com pany of learners, gathered on some quiet hillside up in the country, under some wise master who knows how to open to them the books of knowledge and teach them to read.
 But with the school there had to come also another institution of learn ing, and that is the library; for in or der to match the developing taste and power to read, as represented in the school, there must be somewhere a supply of the books that are best worth reading. This gives another chapter m the long history of the progress of human thought. From very early ages we have traditions of that great library at Alexandria in Egypt; and who of us have not mourned the senseless folly which permitted its destruction, with all the priceless treasures of the liter ature and learning of the past and a little later, coming down once more to the ages that have been called dark, but which prove to be radiant with so many beautiful gleams of light, which find voice in the poetry of Dante, and whose aspiration lifted itself through the great cathedrals-in those same ages we find the monsSteries, each with it's little collection of treas ured and painfully copied manuscripts. preserving to us through ali the tur- moil of the time not only the writings of Christian saints and fathers, but also most of what we possess of the re- mains of classical literature. Conspic- uous among the greater of these an-