Preface

There are people who love to look upon a landscape, but love better its pictured reproduction on canvas; which does not mean that they admire the counterfeit rather than the original; but that, fully appreciating the fact that the original is a Divine Masterpiece, and therefore beyond the skill and powers of human artistry, they love the original through their interest in what best shows its beauties to the wider admiration and for the greater pleasure of men.

There are people who love the trees and the grass and the flowers growing in wild profusion, but who love better to see them trained and grouped and graded through artistic labor, not because a gardener improves on nature, but rather because his skill sets off and makes more enjoyable the beauties that only nature can produce.

So there are people who love the Great Book of inspired and divine artistry, who yet prefer to read it in the simple form of the reproduction of its greatest and most interesting passages, and to catch ordered glimpses of its beauties so arranged as to win for them new lovers by awakening new loves.

Many a man and woman learned the more fully to appreciate the glory of the sunset that he or she had seen over and over again without a thought of the marvel of it, by once seeing it with heeding eyes in the counterfeit presentation of the painter’s brush. Many a man and woman learned to love roses by first seeing a rosebush standing alone on the carpet of a green lawn, and set off by the darker background of semi-distant beds of rhododendron.

The author of this little book of Bible Stories knew these things; and, because she knew them, and because she loved the divine handiwork of the Book of books, she set out to make her garden—which in its own way is also a picture—that many, who might never have awakened to the miracle of beauty in this literature of Heaven, might open the gates of their eyes to it and let it make triumphant entrance into their hearts.

And because gardens are the delight of children, even as children are always an added delight to gardens, the author has arranged her selections—transplanted from the luxuriant forest and plains of that poetry which is prophecy, and that prophecy which is the aurora of the Light of the World—so that children may be attracted to play amongst them, and thus to know and to love them, and through this knowledge and love to know and love the Great God, whose gardens are the uncounted planets.

It is not wise then to say that we are too wise for the reading of this little book. Bossuet says: “Unhappy is the knowledge that does not turn into love.” It is better then to pray that we may be as wise and happy as the many children who have already learned to love it; for if it is prepared for children, it is prepared for us all; and if it is good for children, it has a double message for us who must become “even as children,” if we are to wander some day in the Eternal Garden of our Father’s house of many mansions.