56 PROLOGUE I 



a subject for scoffing and an occasion for the 

 display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he 

 owes to former generations. 



Twenty-two years ago I pleaded for the use of 

 the Bible as an instrument of popular education, 

 and I venture to repeat what I then said : 



"Consider the great historical fact that, for 

 three centuries, 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 gentle 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 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 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 the 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 ? " l 



1 " The School Boards : What they Can do and what they 

 May do," 1870. Critiques and Addresses, p. 51. 



