230 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 



can discover in a literature which, in some respects, has no 

 superior, nothing but a subject for scoffing and an occasion for 

 the display of his conceited ignorance of the debt he owes to 

 former generations." 



The plea advanced many years before (cf. p. 102) for 

 the use of the Bible in schools is repeated, and stress is 

 laid,". . . upon the necessity of placing such instruction 

 in lay hands." Finally the part played by the Bible in 

 history is eloquently set forth : — 



" I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and 

 the attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of 

 the western world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have 

 been the great instigators against the worst forms of clerical and 

 political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of 

 the poor and of the oppressed ; down to modern times, no State 

 has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so 

 largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more 

 than the privileges, of rulers, are insisted upon, as that drawn up 

 for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus ; nowhere is the 

 fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, 

 depends on the uprightness of the citizen, so strongly laid down. 

 Assuredly, the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man ; 

 but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring 

 about that righteousness which is somewhat different from 

 struggling for ' rights ' ; on the fraternity of taking thought for 

 one's neighbour as for one's self. 



" So far as such equality, liberty, and fraternity, are included 

 under the democratic principles which assume the same names, 

 the Bible is the most democratic book in the world. As such it 

 began, through the heretical sects, to undermine the clerico- 

 political despotism of the Middle Ages, almost as soon as it was 

 formed, in the eleventh century ; pope and king had as much as 

 they could do to put down the Albigenses and the Waldenses in 

 the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; the Lollards and the 

 Hussites gave them still more trouble in the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth ; from the sixteenth century onward, the Protestant 

 sects have favoured political freedom in proportion to the degree 

 in which they have refused to acknowledge any ultimate authority 

 save that of the Bible. 



