Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/628

558 to be a school-book. A school-book, as the terra is now and has always been understood, is one specially prepared for the uses and needs of the school, and containing nothing that is not required for purposes of instruction. This is not the case with the Bible, which was not written or put together with any such view, and much the larger part of which is quite unsuited to school use. In the second place, parents know that the Bible is not a book which the first comer can interpret; certainly they are not prepared that the first comer should interpret it to their children. In large part it is a repertory of mysteries which the ordinary certificated teacher has no recognized fitness for handling. If we take even those teachings of the sacred volume which might be considered of the greatest practical importance for purposes of moral instruction, we find that they are far from being viewed in the same light by all professedly Christian parents. Take, for example, the subject of future punishment: the views which one parent might think salutary another would exceedingly object to having placed before his child. We know of a case in which a clergyman of Dean Carmichael's communion was called in to visit a dying man who had previously been visited by a Methodist minister. He found the man's mind greatly disturbed by what the Methodist had told him of the nature of sin and the necessity of conversion, and had much difficulty in relieving him from the excessive fears—excessive from his point of view—which this teaching had awakened. Finally, he told the man that what the Methodist had said was all stuff, and that, if he was sorry for his sins, that was enough; he need have no anxiety. We mention this to illustrate the radically different views which different sects hold, not on minor but on major and most practical questions of biblical doctrine. If on these there are divergent views, what anomaly is there in the general disposition of Christian parents to acquiesce in the disuse of the Bible as a public-school text-book, and to look for its proper interpretation and application to their own chosen and specially-trained spiritual pastors?

But these are not the only reasons. The fact can not be ignored that there is much in the Bible which, from a scientific and historical point of view, does not harmonize with the general character of modern education. Take the several branches of so-called "secular education," and we find that each bears in the strongest manner the impress of the "positive" spirit. If there is any idea that is excluded more rigorously than any other from the whole compass of ordinary scholastic studies it is the idea of the supernatural. No secular history would be read in our schools to-day, or in the schools of any enlightened community, in which the fortunes of nations were represented as controlled by special divine intervention. The time has passed when plagues, earthquakes, and famines could be historically interpreted as expressions of divine displeasure; and the time has almost passed for any useful introduction of the doctrine of design in connection with the study of Nature, The spirit of the inductive philosophy has penetrated everywhere: we should not seek in vain for its signs even in the kindergarten. How, then, we are compelled to ask, can the Bible, which deals in miracle from the first page to the last, be employed as a regular text-book in the Schools without either suffering in its influence from the prevalent tone of the other school studies, or marring more or less the effect of those studies by its constant championship of the