Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION III. THE LITERATURE FUNCTION. That expansion of the system of the Church which will render it as useful as the present state of society will enable it to become demands, still further, the development of its literature function. The pulpit, as a medium for the diffusion of religious information, can be brought to bear only at stated periods, with intervals of greater or less extent; and even if it could be employed more continuously, its appropriate topics are susceptible of other modes of profitable treatment, and, though of the first importance, are necessarily so limited as to leave unoccupied many fields of knowledge essential to the Church's prosperity. . The results of usefulness which a religious literature may be made to achieve, are many and most valuable. Religious truth, in whatever form, if circulated under the sanction of the Church, and, consequently, as an instrumentality for the maintenance and diffusion of Christianity, must, in virtue of God's own economy, be attended by favorable consequences. It is bread cast upon the waters, which may yet be found after many days. But when that truth is embodied in the form of literature, and is so ample as to embrace every department of Christian knowledge, and as to adapt itself to every variety of moral condition?when, indeed, it is so various as to go forth in this permanent form, addressing every class of men, exhibiting under every aspect the wide contents of Christian revelation, and presenting every variety of information, of motive, and appeal, which the moral relations of men in their diversified conditions require.and so circulated as to spread itself in every section and among every family, then, indeed, does it become an auxiliary in the great work of human salvation and elevation, of the hi...