When Charles William Eliot assembled The Harvard Classics—more commonly known as The Five-Foot Shelf and later the Shelf of Fiction—he gathered this epic collection of key works which he thought would best represent “the progress of man… from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century.” God reveals himself through history and literature—through the thoughts of philosophers, the characters of great fiction, and the cadences of poetic verse. These classics are vital tools for study and ministry, because they cultivate the life of the mind and reveal the intricacies of human nature.
