"Bible Study for College Men."

Mr. Henry B. Wright, Yale '98, spoke at the Christian Association meeting last night on "Bible Study for College Men."

A few years ago, the speaker said, an effort was made at Yale to interest a group of Japanese students in devotional Bible study. These men, after consideration, declared they were willing to go into study of religious subjects, but wanted to know whether it was worth while to take up a book written two thousand years ago. The objection raised by these students lingers with other men today. Is Bible study adaptable and helpful to men of the present?--they ask, and sometimes answer "No."

Yet through the centuries great men in the world's history have based their beliefs on the Bible and its study--Hildebrand and Augustine in the early times, Huss and Luther and Calvin in the later centuries, Washington and Lincoln and Gladstone in our own day. To such men the Bible was a source of strength and the chances are that it will so prove to college men of today. General appreciation of the Bible is growing stronger; men regard it with increasing respect and re-awakening interest.

Simply from a literary point of view the Bible is a book of almost unrivalled beauty. "Let men who wish to perfect their literary style study the Bible"--the committee on entrance examinations to colleges has recommended. The highest oratory of our time and of the centuries before has been full of direct or indirect quotations and similes from the Bible.

Of course, the final and highest end of Bible study is, however, neither literary, critical, nor historical, but frankly devotional. The best use a man can make of his Bible is to study its teachings in the light of his own temptations, to study its biographies that he may learn to know more human nature; for in the Bible are written with marvelous force and clearness the lives of men of every character as well as of the Man whose character combined every trait of strength and nobility.

The best way to study the Bible is to combine conference in classes with private reading, because the combined thought of men studying together will discover in the Bible the subtler and more beautiful truths which often escape an individual.