398 THE SCHOOL BOARDS XV 



this book has been woven into the life of all that 

 is best and noblest in English history ; that it has 

 become the national epic of Britain, and is as 

 familiar to noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's 

 House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once 

 were to the Italians ; that it is written in the 

 noblest and purest English, and abounds in ex- 

 quisite 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 civilisations, and of a 

 great past, stretching back to the furthest limits 

 of the oldest nations in the world. By the study 

 of what other book could children be so much 

 humanised and made to feel that each figure in 

 that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, 

 but a momentary space in the interval between 

 fewo 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 pay- 

 ment for their work ? 



On the whole, then, I am in favour 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. And in stating what this is, the 

 teacher would do well *not to go beyond the 

 precise words of the Bible ; for if he does, he will, 

 in the first place, undertake a task beyond his 



