Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/264

250 incomprehensible: your "sacred history " can be learned in no other way than by rote, while by the Bible it presents itself to a child as a living and majestic picture which he will never forget. Why, for example, is it always omitted from all "sacred histories" that when there was nothing, the Spirit of God moved over the void, that God at the Creation looked at His work and saw that it was good, and that the morning and the evening made up the day? Why is it omitted that God breathed the soul into Adam's nostrils, that having taken out a rib He replaced it with flesh, and so forth. All you have to do is to read the Bible to unspoiled children to realize how essential and true all these details are. Maybe one ought not to put the Bible into the hands of depraved young ladies, but in reading it to peasant children I have never altered or omitted a single word. And not a child ever giggled behind his neighbor's back, and all listened with awe and with genuine reverence. The story of Lot and his daughters, the story of Judah, arouse horror, not ridicule.

How clear and comprehensible, especially for a child, and at the same time how dignified and solemn! … I cannot imagine how education could be carried on if it were not for this boon. But it seems when one has learned these stories only in childhood and afterward partly forgotten them, what good are they to us? Would it not be just the same as if we did not know them at all?

So it seems to you until, beginning to teach, you detect in other children all the elements of your own education. Theoretically, it is possible to teach children to write, to read, to give them an idea of history, geography, and the phenomena of nature without the Bible, and before the Bible: and yet this is never done. Everywhere, first of all, the child knows the Bible, its stories, and extracts from it. The first relation of the teacher and the taught is based on this book. A phenomenon so universal is not a mere matter of chance. My perfectly free relations to my pupils at the beginning of the Yasno-polyana school helped me to explain this phenomenon.