Professor Huxley on the Bible

Feilding Star, Volume VII, Issue 22, 1 August 1885, Page 2

Professor Huxley on the Bible

i — * The following quotation from the works of Professor Huxley was made by Mr W. D. Stewart during the debate on the Bible Beading in Schools Bill in the House on the 16th inst.:— "Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors ; eliminate, as a sensible teacher would do if left to himself, all that is not desirable for children te occupy themselves with, and there still remains in this old literature avast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great hisio i al fact that for thiee centuries this book has been woven iut* the life ot.all that is best and nob! cat; in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple from John o' Groat's House to Land's End* as Dante and Tasso were once 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 farthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. Bv the study of what other book could children be so much harm* onized, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two eternities, and earns the blessing er the curse of all time, according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work?" -