Books by John Bliss

Sam Peterson is your average high school student?until he falls through a portal in time and space and lands in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci. This is worse than algebra! Da Vinci was a futurist. He imagined the airplane, the helicopter, submarine, and more-long before anyone else. Who better to design a time machine to get Sam home? Our time-traveler gets hooked on art and science as he gets to know Leonardo. Meanwhile, da Vinci is fascinated by the common items of 21st century life. Yellow highlighters are a revelation! There's plenty of intrigue along the way. Leonardo da Vinci's patron wants to keep the boy from the future, with all his knowledge, right in his court. And since time travel depends on being at the right place at the right moment, a breathless dash ensues with soldiers in hot pursuit.Sam would like to stay with his new friend, and Leonardo would like to see the future. But the artist and man of science knows that each of us must make our world our own.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1841. Excerpt: ... LETTER I. JiNUART 1, 1840. To my Numerous Christian Friends and acquaintance: The recurrence of a new year's day reminds us of time past, the rapidity of its flight, our rapid approach to the judgment, and that whatever we do for the prosperity of Zion must be done soon. A subject has rested with great weight upon my mind, during three or four years past, which, to me, appears to be of great importance. Taking one side of the question involved, tends, in my view, to continue and increase divisions among Christians, to divide arid weaken their influence, to establish more firmly sectarian jars, with all its horrors, to increase and foment divisions in the cause of benevolence, at home and abroad, and thus to be instrumental in the ruin of souls, and greatly to retard the millenial day. But taking the right side of the question, to me seems necessary, in order to unite the influence of Christians in those noble objects, to remove divisions, to stop the mouth of gainsayers and infidels; and to "prepare the way of the Lord." It is now about two hundred years since Christian Baptism, a positive ordinance of Jesus Christ, was actually cashiered and pushed away by a whole kingdom, m ecclesiastical council, at Westminister, and something substituted in its place, of mere human invention. The circumstances, I am sure, are not generally understood. A portion of Christendom still honestly and conscientiously cleave to Christian baptism as an ordinance of Christ, and can not, dare not, exchange it for a mere human invention. They feel that thus to alter the laws of Christ by human legislation, would be hightreason against Heaven; that to alter the laws of Christ in' the least, is to establish a principle which would admit of unlimited alterations; that to discard one...