The Bible as a Factor in Education

eleven answered one, and three "flunked" completely. "Most of these persons, I have no doubt, were brought up in Christian homes," remarks the experimenter, "and had enjoyed such instruction as the average Sunday School and pulpit of our day afford." We believe it to be a fact that a good deal more of the Bible is read aloud at public worship in the non-liturgical churches of the country nowadays than at any previous time. This is certainly the case in the Congregational churches of New England. But we fear it is also a fact that in New England and in other parts of the country boys and girls are growing up without that intimate, firsthand knowledge of the Bible that was possessed by their grandfathers and grandmothers. It is a great pity; there must be a great fault somewhere. The Bible ought always to be, as it once was, the corner-stone of the American child's education. Leaving the religious side entirely out of the account, the study of no other literature is so intellectually stimulating to the child, nor can he anywhere else find such a model of sturdy, sinewy English as between the covers of the old King James' version. The greatest orators of England and of this country have been assiduous students of this wonderful model. Rufus Choate's case was in no wise exceptional, and of him his nephew has just told us in a commemorative discourse: This book, so early absorbed and never forgotten, saturated his mind and spirit more than any other, more than all other books combined. It was at his tongue's end, at his finger's end—always close at hand until those last languid hours at Halifax, when it solaced his dying meditations. You can hardly find speech, argument or lecture of his from first to last that is not sprinkled and studded with Biblical ideas and pictures, and Biblical words and phrases. To him the book of Job was a sublime poem; he knew the Psalms by heart, and dearly loved the prophets, and above all Isaiah, upon whose gorgeous imagery he made copious drafts. He pondered every word, read with most subtle keenness, and applied with happiest effect. One day coming into the Crawford House, cold and shivering—and you remember how he could shiver—he caught sight of the blaze in the great fireplace, and was instantly warm before the rays could reach him, exclaiming, "Do you remember that verse in Isaiah, 'Aha! I am warm. I have seen the fire'?" And so his daily conversation was marked.

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It is not merely Christian men who feel that English or American childhood growing up without a knowledge of the Bible is defrauded of its birthright. Professor Huxley was not a Christian man, in the accepted sense of the words. He was classed as an agnostic. His controversial tilts with Mr. Gladstone are well-remembered. To the average orthodox Briton he was a veritable bogey man. But he is said to have brought up his own children on the Bible, nevertheless, and he prescribed it as the best mental diet for all English children. Twenty-eight years ago in the Contemporary Review, Thomas Henry Huxley wrote: 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 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 that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from Johno'-Goat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in 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 furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanized 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 blessings or 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?

A STORY OF EDISON, THE INVENTOR. stories of the early life of Thomas A. Edison, the great American inventor, are very numerous and always interesting, but we have seen nothing that for humxor surpasses the following, told recently by himself to a friend, who, when a boy, had followed the same occupation as that in which Edison may be said to have started in life. Edison was a train boy, that is, he sold papers, fruit and candies on a division of the Grand Trunk Line running out of Port Huron. ''Curious how these things come back to you," said the now great inventor. "1 remember a funny thing that occurred on one of the old three-car trains. In my day, you know, they used to run trains made up of three coaches—a baggage car, a smoking car and what we called the ladies' car. The ladies' car was always last in the string. Well, one day I was carrying my basket of nuts and apples through the ladies' car—I hadn't sold a thing so far—when I noticed two young fellows sitting near the rear end of the car. They were dandies, what might be called dudes now, but we called them 'stiffies' in those days. They were young southerners up north on a lark, as I found out afterward. Behind them sat a negro valet, who had a large, iron-bound box beside him on the seat. Probably he was an old family slave. He was dressed in as many colors as an English flunky. ''The young men were complaining of the dullness of things. They stopped when they saw me. I came along wabbling my basket from side to side as I asked each passenger if he wanted