Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/267

Rh Pedagogy serves as a verification of many, many vital phenomena, of social and abstract questions.

Materialism will have the right to proclaim itself as victorious only when the bible of materialism shall have been written, and childhood shall have been educated according to this bible. Owen's experiment cannot be regarded as a proof of such a possibility, any more than the growth of a lemon tree in a Moscow greenhouse is proof that it could grow without the open sky and the sun.

I repeat it, my conviction, drawn perhaps from a one-sided experiment, is that the development of a child and a man is as unthinkable without the Bible as it would have been in Greek society without Homer. The Bible is the only book for the elementary education of the young. The Bible, both in its form and in its content, ought to serve as the model for all children's manuals and reading books. A simple popular translation of the Bible would be the most popular of all books. The appearance of such a translation in our day would make an epoch in the history of the Russian people.

Now, in regard to the method of teaching sacred history, I consider all the short treatises on this subject in Russian doubly criminal against sanctity and against poesy. All these transcriptions, purporting to render easier the reading of sacred history, make it more difficult. The Bible is read as a delight at home, the reader sitting with his head resting on his hands; the history books are learnt by heart as a task. Besides being stupid and incomprehensible, these history books spoil the child's capacity of enjoying the poetry of the Bible. More than once I have noticed how their bad, obscure style has prevented understanding the inner thought of the Bible. Obsolete and incomprehensible words take their place in the memory alongside with events, distract the pupils' attention by reason of their novelty, and serve them as way-marks whereby they guide themselves through the story.

Very often a pupil will speak merely for the sake of using some word which pleases him, and he is not yet