On The Art of Reading

by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Sure ye're always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!

VI

But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children did, in our time, read the Bible a great deal, if perforce we were taught to read it in sundry bad ways: of which perhaps the worst was that our elders hammered in all the books, all the parts of it, as equally inspired and therefore equivalent. Of course this meant among other things that they hammered it all in literally: but let us not sentimentalise over that. It really did no child any harm to believe that the universe was created in a working week of six days, and that God sat down and looked at it on Sunday, and behold it was very good. A week is quite a long while to a child, yet a definite division rounding off a square job. The bath-taps at home usually, for some unexplained reason, went wrong during the week-end: the plumber came in on Monday and carried out his tools on Saturday at mid-day. These little analogies really do (I believe) help the infant mind, and not at all to its later detriment. Nor shall I ask you to sentimentalise overmuch upon the harm done to a child by teaching him that the bloodthirsty jealous Jehovah of the Book of Joshua is as venerable (being one and the same unalterably, 'with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning') as the Father 'the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy,' revealed to us in the Gospel, invoked for us at the Eucharist. I do most seriously hold it to be fatal if we grow up and are fossilised in any such belief. (Where have we better proof than in the invocations which the family of the Hohenzollerns have been putting up, any time since August 1914—and for years before—to this bloody identification of the Christian man's God with Joshua's?) My simple advice is that you not only read the Bible early but read it again and again: and if on the third or fifth reading it leave you just where the first left you—if you still get from it no historical sense of a race developing its concept of God—well then, the point of the advice is lost, and there is no more to be said. But over this business of teaching the Book of Joshua to children I am in some doubt. A few years ago an Education Committee, of which I happened to be Chairman, sent ministers of religion about, two by two, to test the religious instruction given in Elementary Schools. Of the two who worked around my immediate neighbourhood, one was a young priest of the Church of England, a medievalist with an ardent passion for ritual; the other a gentle Congregational minister, a mere holy and humble man of heart. They became great friends in the course of these expeditions, and they brought back this report—'It is positively wicked to let these children grow up being taught that there is no difference in value between Joshua and St Matthew: that the God of the Lord's Prayer is the same who commanded the massacre of Ai.' Well, perhaps it is. Seeing how bloodthirsty old men can be in these days, one is tempted to think that they can hardly be caught too young and taught decency, if not mansuetude. But I do not remember, as a child, feeling any horror about it, or any difficulty in reconciling the two concepts. Children are a bit bloodthirsty, and I observe that two volumes of the late Captain Mayne Reid—"The Rifle Rangers," and "The Scalp Hunters"—have just found their way into The World's Classics and are advertised alongside of Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" and the "De Imitatione Christi." I leave you to think this out; adding but this for a suggestion: that as the Hebrew outgrew his primitive tribal beliefs, so the bettering mind of man casts off the old clouts of primitive doctrine, he being in fact better than his religion. You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob was a better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, I hope, rejected every such explanation. Esau was a gentleman: Jacob was not. The instinct of a young man meets that wall, and there is no passing it. Later, the mind of the youth perceives that the writer of Jacob's history has a tribal mind and supposes throughout that for the advancement of his tribe many things are permissible and even admirable which a later and urbaner mind rejects as detestably sharp practice. And the story of Jacob becomes the more valuable to us historically as we realise what a hero he is to the bland chronicler.

VII

But of another thing, Gentlemen, I am certain: that we were badly taught in that these books, while preached to us as equivalent, were kept in separate compartments. We were taught the books of Kings and Chronicles as history. The prophets were the Prophets, inspired men predicting the future which they only did by chance, as every inspired man does. Isaiah was never put into relation with his time at all; which means everything to our understanding of Isaiah, whether of Jerusalem or of Babylon. We ploughed through Kings and Chronicles, and made out lists of rulers, with dates and capital events. Isaiah was all fine writing about nothing at all, and historically we were concerned with him only to verify some far-fetched reference to the Messiah in this or that Evangelist. But there is not, never has been, really fine literature—like Isaiah—composed about nothing at all: and in the mere matter of prognostication I doubt if such experts as Zadkiel and Old Moore have anything to fear from any School of Writing we can build up in Cambridge. But if we had only been taught to read Isaiah concurrently with the Books of the Kings, what a fire it would have kindled among the dry bones of our studies!

Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field.

Scholars, of course, know the political significance of that famous meeting. But if we had only known it; if we had only been taught what Assyria was—with its successive monarchs Tiglath- pileser, Shalmaneser, Sargon, Sennacherib; and why Syria and Israel and Egypt were trying to cajole or force Judah into alliance; what a difference (I say) this passage would have meant to us!

VIII

I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well and what then? He will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban: the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn: the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rispah beneath the gibbet: Sisera bowing in weariness: Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:

All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart.