At the head of all biographies stands the Great Biography, the
Book of Books. And what is the Bible, the most sacred and
impressive of all books--the educator of youth, the guide of
manhood, and the consoler of age--but a series of biographies of
great heroes and patriarchs, prophets, kings, and judges,
culminating in the greatest biography of all, the Life embodied in
the New Testament? How much have the great examples there set
forth done for mankind! How many have drawn from them their
truest strength, their highest wisdom, their best nurture and
admonition! Truly does a great Roman Catholic writer describe the
Bible as a book whose words "live in the ear like a music that can
never be forgotten--like the sound of church bells which the
convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem
to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the
national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory
of the dead passes into it, The potent traditions of childhood are
stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials
of man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of
his best moments, and all that has been about him of soft, and
gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever
out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt
has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length
and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one
spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography
is not in his Saxon Bible." (4)

It would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the influence which
the lives of the great and good have exercised upon the elevation
of human character. "The best biography," says Isaac Disraeli,
"is a reunion with human existence in its most excellent state."