PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON BIBLE READING.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3294, 12 July 1879, Page 2

PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON BIBLE READING.

Professor Hurley*! writing ia the Contemporary Review some years ago, said : —" I have always been strongly in favour of secular education, iv 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 by kept u,p, in the present utterly chaotic state of opirion on these matters, without ,the use of the Bible. The pagans nioralists lack life and colour, and. even the, noble Stoic,,. _.M|,r|JUß 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 ioi himself, all that it is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; end 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 ofallthlOs noblest and best in English histor^\^, •that-it has -become the national epic ia Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John O'GroatV house to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso were once to the i; ? that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds-: an exquisite, beauties .of a merely literary'form ; and' 'filially, l ihat it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village tobe ignorantof the existence of other counties and other civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to .the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. '■'' By the siuldy^ot 1 what other book could children be bo much humanised,' aiid-made to^feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves," but a momentary space, in the-interval between two eternities'; 'arid' 'earns the!"blessings arid the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their' payment for^tfieir 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 thdt some^df : the pleasantesfc recollections of my childhood are connected with the vol'un£a*ry study of an ancient.Bible .which, belonged to my grandmother. There were splendid pictures in it jtoTbe-sure, but I recollect little or nothing about them, save a portrait ofthe 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 ; andjO^nay keen appreciation of the chivalrous kii|dness of Abraham in ■his- rde!alings 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 heart-bre^alniig lamentation of the cheated Esau. ' *' Hast thou not a blessing'for me also, O my father ?"" And 1 see as in aclbud^ pfci ares of the grand phantasmagoria Of tfib Book of Eevelations. I enumerate, as they issue, the childish impressions which come crowding out of the pigeon-holes pt my brain, in which they have lain almott undisturbed for forty years. I prize them as an evidence that a child of fiyejOr'ls^c years old, left to his own devices, may be deeply interested in the Bible,'and''draw . sound moral sustenance from it."