This is the age of books. And we should reverence books. Consider! except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book -- a message to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet in those little sheets of paper speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers!

We ought to reverence books, to look at them as awful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion or politics, trade or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the Maker of all things, the Teacher of all truth, which He has put into the heart of some men to speak. And at the last day, be sure of it, we shall have to render an account -- a strict account -- of the books which we have read, and of the way in which we have obeyed what we read, just as if we had had so many prophets or angels sent to us.

Village Sermons. 1849.