n.] THE SCHOOL BOARDS. 51 



I have always been strongly in favour of secular 

 education, in the sense of education without theology ; 

 but I must confess I have been no less seriously per- 

 plexed 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 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 it 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 

 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 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 in 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 space in the interval between two eterni- 

 ties ; 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 ? 



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