The Greatest English Classic Part 11

Forty years ago Mr. Huxley, in his essay on "The School Boards: What They Can Do, and What They May Do," laid a broad foundation for thinking at this point, and his words bear quoting at some length: "I have always been strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense of education without theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible.

The pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the n.o.ble stoic, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay teacher would do if left to himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this Book has been woven into the life of all that is best and n.o.blest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to n.o.ble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Ta.s.so once were to the Italians; that it is written in the n.o.blest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary s.p.a.ce in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work? On the whole, then, I am in favor of reading the Bible, with such grammatical, geographical, and historical explanations by a lay teacher as may be needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than that contained in the Bible itself." Mr. Huxley is an Englishman, though, as Professor Moulton says, "We divide him between England and America."

But Professor Moulton himself is very urgent in this same matter. If the cla.s.sics of Greece and Rome are in the nature of ancestral literature, an equal position belongs to the literature of the Bible. "If our intellect and imagination have been formed by Greece, have we not in similar fas.h.i.+on drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought?" It is one of the curiosities of our civilization that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which morally are at opposite poles from ourselves; literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. "It is surely good that our youth during the formative period should have displayed to them, in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature, a people dominated by an utter pa.s.sion for righteousness, a people whose ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of moral evil, moved to a poetic pa.s.sion as fervid and speech as musical as when Sappho sang of love or Eschylus thundered his deep notes of destiny."[58]

But there is a leading American voice which will speak in that behalf, in President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University. In his address as President of the National Educational a.s.sociation, President Butler makes strong plea for the reading of the Bible even in public schools.

"His reason had no connection with religion. It was based on altogether different ground. He regarded an acquaintance with the Bible as absolutely indispensable to the proper understanding of English literature." It is unfortunate in the extreme, he thought, that so many young men are growing up without that knowledge of the Bible which every one must have if he means to be capable of the greatest literary pleasure and appreciation of the literature of his own people. Not only the allusions, but the whole tone and bias of many English authors will become to one who is ignorant of the Bible most difficult and even impossible of comprehension.

The difficulties of calling public schools to this task appear at once. It would be monstrous if they should be sectarian or proselytizing. But the Bible is not a sectarian Book. It is the Book of greatest literature. It is the Book of mightiest morals. It is governing history. It is affecting literature as nothing else has done. A thousand pities that any petty squabbling or differences of opinion should prevent the young people in the schools from realizing the grandeur and beauty of it!

But the final and most important agency which will magnify the influence of the Bible must necessarily be the home. It will gather up all its traits, religious, moral, and literary. Here is the fundamental opportunity and the fundamental obligation. Robert Burns was right in finding the secret of Scotia's power in such scenes as those of "The Cottar's Sat.u.r.day Night." One can almost see Carlyle going back to his old home at Ecclefechan and standing outside to hear his old mother making a prayer in his behalf. A newspaper editorial of recent date says this decay of literary allusion is traceable in part to the gradual abandonment of family prayers. Answering President Butler, it is urged that it is not so important that the Bible be in the public schools as that it get back again into the homes. "Thorough acquaintance with the Bible is desirable; it should be fostered. The person who will have to foster it, though,"

says this writer, "is not the teacher, but the parent. The parent is the person whom Dr. Butler should try to convert." Well, while there may be differences about the school, there can be none about the place of the Bible in the home. It needs to be bound up with the earliest impressions and intertwined with those impressions as they deepen and extend.

So, by the Church, which will accent its religious value; by the press, which will accent its moral power; by the school, which will spread its literary influence; and by the home, which will realize all three and make it seem a vital concern from the beginning of life, the Bible will be put and held in the place of power to-day which it has had in the years that are gone, and will steadily gain greater power.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] Jefferson, _Things Fundamental_, p. 90.

[53] _New International Encyclopedia_, art. on English Literature.

[54] _Current Events_, January 12, 1912.

[55] _Autobiography_, p. 252.

[56] Speer, _Light of the World_, iv.

[57] _Autobiography_, vol. ii, p. 570.

[58] _Literary Study of the Bible_, pa.s.sim.

THE END