BIBLICAL LIBRARIES
popular study takes most interest. There is no danger therefore that, with proper explanation, the average public library student or Sunday school scholar will not understand quite well that early libraries were different from modern libraries in many ways; that the forms of the books e.g. were different, that the quantity was less and that they naturally did not contain books which were not then written. There is much more danger that they will not understand how very like at bottom these ancient collections of records of private use, were to modern libraries, how they played precisely the same rôle up to a certain point in ancient civilization that libraries, public and private, do in the very different environment of modern civilization, and that in New Testament times the numbers even compared favorably with that of many states of the modern civilized world.
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