Excerpt from Consisting of Biographical and Descriptive Sketches of the Representative and More Important Women of Old Testament and New Testament Times, as Viewed in the Light of Our Present Day Civilization

It is said the preface is the last part of the book that is written and this is usually done when the rest of the book is in type. I have word from the printer that this must be furnished at once. Why did I write this book? When I was in the midst of the work, I could easily have told, but can I now when the excitement of authorship has passed away?

When I came into the Church of which I am at present a member, there was a religious paper published which made its weekly visits, but very little book literature. But books are just as necessary as papers. They meet wants that papers cannot meet. You want them on your center table to be taken up at intervals, to be turned over when not specially busy: you want them for reading, for study, for inspiration, for the boys and girls to read on Sunday afternoons, or during the long winter evenings, when the doors are shut and the curtains down: for fathers and mothers who want to interest their children in the best of all literature, the life stories of men and women who have done their part in the world's work.

Some one has said that "what the boy reads (and it is just as true of girls) determines the fiber of the man. Ruskin, a boy of four years, lay on the floor on his stomach and read the Bible by the hour. Carlyle knew the scriptures from his mother's lips before he was able to read, and Gladstone knew the stories of Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph ere he knew the paths about his father's estate." What you want to appear in the after years of the young, must be gotten unto their minds when the avenues to knowledge are all open, and there is a keen desire for information.

Having experienced this lack in my early years, it has been my hope, as far as a busy life would allow, to furnish something for the young people who should come after me, to quicken their love of their own church and make them more efficient workers in it.

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