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"When I was a boy, not yet 15, I read in Self-Culture, a volume by Prof. John Stuart Blackie of Edinburgh, that Job in the Old Testament was the greatest book in all literature. I determined to read it for myself, and can remember to this day the Sunday afternoon when I lay on the floor in my father's house and read the book of Job through to the end. There was much that was beyond me, and that a second and third reading failed to clear up. Someone told me that what I needed was a commentary. So I went to Leary's second hand bookstore and bought Lange's learned Commentary on Job. But I had not read very far in it before I came against words from the Hebrew with which of course I could not nothing. Undismayed I sought help from the neighboring Lutheran minister. This man admitted taht that he had lost all the Hebrew he had ever had, but loaned me his grammar, lexicon and Old Testament in Hebrew. With these tools I set to work to find out what was in the book of Job, that made the great Edinburgh proefssor characterize it as the greatest literary production of ages. Strange that I should have begun my study of the Bible at Job instead of Genesis, but so it happened! Well, I kept at it, studying Hebrew by myself while I was preparing for college, and by the time I was ready to enter, I knew as much of Hebrew as of Latin and Greek-and I might add that I received the prize for the best entrance paper in Latin.
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