THE MAN 39 



even if the reading of the Bible were not, as I think 

 it is, consonant with political reason and justice, and 

 with a desire to act in the spirit of the education 

 measure, I am disposed to think it might still be well 

 to read that book in the elementary schools. 



•J^-have always been strongly in favor of secular 

 education, in the sense of education without the- 

 ology ; but I must confess I have been no less 

 seriously perplexed to know by what practical meas- 

 ures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis 

 of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly 

 chaotic state of opinion, without the use of the Bible. 

 The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even 

 the noble Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, is too high and re- 

 fined 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 chil- 

 dren to occupy themselves with ; and there still re- 

 mains 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 ex- 

 quisite beauties of mere literary form ; and, finally, 

 that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his vil- 

 lage 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 historical proces- 



