said, we treasure Scripture because it provided the foundation for the scientific and rational approaches which have brought much good into our world. If you wish to discover how influential the Bible is on Western thought, listen carefully to what people write and say. Scriptural allusions abound in our great writers like Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Steinbeck, and Updike. Public figures commonly employ biblical themes. Think of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address or Martin Luther King,