ENGLISH BIBLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 May 1938, Page 9

ENGLISH BIBLE

ROLE IN’NATIONAL LIFE. Some years ago, recals the Rt Hon Mr Isaac Foot, writing in the “Listener,” an inquiry was made into the teaching of English in secondary schools, and this is a passage from the report: “At the present time the Bible is probably less widely read and less directly influential in English life and literature than it has been at any’ time since the Reformation.” Dean Inge seemed to endorse this conclusion when he said: “The Bible has been steadily and rapidly losing ground as the centre of the religious life of the English people.” Now, if these things are true, or only partly true, are wc not face to face with a grave danger? The people of this nation are at present taking upon themselves colossal burdens, and doing it with resolution, because they feel the perilous conditions of the world constitute a menace which must be met. But have we not here another menace against which we should safeguard ourselves. Without the English Bible wc should no longer be the same people. It must not be forgotten that the Bible has contributed more than any other single factor to our common education. When schools were few and education the privilege of the well-to-do, the study of the Bible kept some measure of culture alive among the common people of Britain. The peasant or the artisan who read his Bible and studied the Word from day to day became inevitably, in some degree, a man of cultivated mind. Even today the loss of the Bible would strike the heaviest blow at the foundations of real education. Britain without the Bible would in a single generation lose heavily in intellectual stature, and the whole standard of culture would suffer beyond all calculation.