Charles Anderson Dana (1819-1897), was an American newspaper journalist and the editor-in-chief of the New York Sun, under whose management it grew to become one of the largest newspapers in the country. He also served as Assistant Secretary of War during the Civil War. Charles Dana wrote:

“I believe in Christianity; that it is the religion taught to men by God Himself in Person on earth. I also believe the Bible to be a Divine revelation. Christianity is not comparable with any other religion. It is the religion which came from God’s own lips, and therefore the only true religion. The incarnation is a fact, and Christianity is based on revealed truth.

“There are some books that are absolutely indispensable to the kind of education that we are contemplating, and to the profession that we are now considering; and of all these, the most indispensable, the most useful, the one whose knowledge is most effective, is the Bible.

“There is no Book from which more valuable lessons cans be learned. I am considering it now as a manual of utility, or professional preparation, and professional use for a journalist.

“There is no Book whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, from which you learn more directly that sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest event with solemnity, of course, but without sentimentality or affection, none which you open with such confidence and lay down with such reverence; there is no Book like the Bible.

“When you get into a controversy and want exactly the right answer, when you are looking for an expression, what is there that closes a dispute like a verse from the Bible? What is it that sets up the right principle for you, which pleads for a policy, for a cause, so much as the right passage of the Holy Scripture?” ¹

¹ Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, Oregon: American Heritage Ministries, 1987), p. 112-113.