It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled.

In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible." [194] It would, indeed, be difficult to overestimate the influence which the lives of the great and good have exercised upon the elevation of human character.

"The best biography," says Isaac Disraeli, "is a reunion with human existence in its most excellent state." Indeed, it is impossible for one to read the lives of good men, much less inspired men, without being unconsciously lighted and lifted up in them, and growing insensibly nearer to what they thought and did.

And even the lives of humbler persons, of men of faithful and honest spirit, who have done their duty in life well, are not without an elevating influence upon the character of those who come after them.
History itself is best studied in biography.

Indeed, history is biography--collective humanity as influenced and governed by individual men.