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- 141 # AN ANCIENT COURTSHIP
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145 DO not believe there is a storybook printed which has in it more stories loved by children than the Bible. I once knew a little girl who divided all her time between the Book of Revelation and the *Arabian Nights*. Both were equally real to her, and in what a happy world of imagination did she live! She was just twelve years old, the age when boys and girls begin to read poetry and to dream of the wonderful. She is older and wiser now. She knows that the stories of the *Arabian Nights* are only stories, and that the strange things told in the Book of Revelation are not actually to happen, but like a cloak they hide the truth until the time of the prophecy’s fulfilment. But the stories in the other books of the Bible are not like these of Revelation, for the other
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148 books tell of real persons who lived long ago and of what they did. The Book of Genesis tells of the time the furthest back of all, yet the people it speaks of seem as lifelike and act as naturally as our next-door neighbors.
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150 Now, you who are studying Greek or Roman history know what absurd tales the Greeks and Romans told of the founders of their nations and the first builders of their cities. They thought they proved themselves greater than the rest of mankind by making their forefathers appear more than human. The Greeks and Romans forgot that time would keep going on, and on, and on, and that other nations would come after them. For the result is that they provoke us who now live, and we say, “How can we tell anything of the beginnings of Greece and Rome, when all we have of their early days is a collection of silly stories?”
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152 We have the same vexation with the older peoples who lived before the Greeks and Romans. When some wise man digs
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154 MEETING OF ISAAC AND REBRKAH
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158 out of the ground the stones, or the bricks, or whatever other material these nations wrote on (for they had not paper as we have), and translates the writing for us, we often have to rub our heads before we can make out what is meant. These nations seem to have loved to speak of themselves in such a high-flown, pompous way that we can hardly understand at times what they wrote, even when turned into English.
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160 This is not so with the Jews. Their early history is clearly written, and they are the only ancient people of whom this can be said. If you will open your Bibles to the twenty-fourth chapter of Genesis, in which we are told of the meeting of Isaac and Rebekah, you will know what I mean by clear and simple writing. It is a beautiful story, and how sweetly told! I have always loved Isaac. He seems so gentle.
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162 We never speak of Isaac without thinking of his father, Abraham, and his son, Jacob. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; how
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