PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON BIBLE READING.

Kumara Times, Issue 913, 3 September 1879, Page 4

PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON BIBLE READING.

Professor Huxley, writing in the Contemporary Review some years ago, said : "I have always been strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense of education without theology ; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed 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 color, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is to 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 noblest and best in English history ; that it has become the national epic in 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 a merely 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 civilisiations, 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 conld children be so much humanised, and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like a momentary space in the inverval between two eternities; and earns the blessings and 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 ? And if Bible reading is not accompanied by restraint and solemnity, as if it were a sacramental operation, I do not believe there is anything in which children take more pleasure. At least I know that some of the pleasanteat recollections of my childhood are connected with the voluntary study of an ancient Bible which belonged to my grandmother. There were splendid pictures in it to be sure, but I recollect little or nothing about them, save a portrait of the High Priest in his vestments. "What comes vividly back to my mind are remembrances of my delight in the histories of Joseph and of David; and of my keen appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealings with Lot. Like a sudden flash there returns back upon me my utter scorn of the pettifogging meanness of Jacob, and my sympathetic grief over the heartbreaking lamentation of the cheated Esua. " Hast thou not a blessing for me also, 0 my father ?" And I see as in a cloud, pictures of the grand phantasmagoria of the Book of Revela tions. 1 enumerate, as they issue, the childish impressions which come crowding out of the pigeonholes of my brain, in which they have lain almost undisturbed for forty years. I prize them as an evidence that a child of five or six years old, left to his own devices, may be deeply interested in the Bible, aud draw sound moral sustenance from it."