Elementary Schools 193 



exceptionally tender stomachs. Hence, when the great mass 

 of the English people declare that they want to have the child- 

 ren in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and when it 

 is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and out of 

 Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of the 

 Vice-President of the Council that it was intended that such 

 Bible-teaching should be permitted, unless good cause for pro- 

 hibiting it could be shewn, I do not see what reason there is 

 for opposing that wish." 



He went on to explain that, although he had always 

 been strongly in favour of secular education, by that 

 term he meant only education without theology, and 

 he praised the English Bible in language as noble as 

 has ever been applied to it by the most ardent of 

 theologians. 



"The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the 

 noble Stoic, Marcus 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 centu- 

 ries, 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 

 Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, 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 coun- 

 tries 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 his- 

 torical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space 

 13 



