King James was brilliant. He was the greatest king who ever sat on the British throne. Who else among royalty, in his time, would have had the giant talent to write Shakespeare's works? It was he who poetically fixed the Bible - which in itself and in its present King James version enslaved the world.

Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Once in a while, though, he went on binges. He would sneak into bookstores or libraries, lurk around the racks where the little magazines were kept; sometimes he'd buy one. Dead poets were his business, living ones his vice. Much of the stuff he read was crap and he knew it; still, it gave him an odd lift. Then there would be the occasional real poem, and he would catch his breath. Nothing else could drop him through space like that, then catch him; nothing else could peel him open.

It's old light, and there's not much of it. But it is enough to see by.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary —the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch

It's literature. It's all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it's a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that's all I ask. Make me believe.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

The Word of God isn't for one particular season. It's for every season. But in its specific application, it's best read from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

Take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.

My fellow believers, it is time to return to the Book. It is time to look to the one source that holds the answers for how our country should operate, the Bible.