Moreover, a competent knowledge of Biblical erudition would, under the new conditions of the Holy Books, be no longer so costly or onerous as at present. Truly, this is a great desideratum. The mass of reading now required to peruse Scripture with due edification and interest is altogether beyond the leisure of the busy, or the means of the less affluent: and to be doomed to hopeless ignorance of so much enlightenment as is symbolized in the goodly tomes that meet the eye on every side, devoted to the elucidation of Holy Writ, is by no means satisfactory. With this partial distribution of spiritual advantages, the Christian Church seems drifting away from its fundamental basis of universality, and,—in the very spirit and wake of heathenism,—abetting and consecrating the principle of an esoteric and exoteric school—a pet and a common class of disciples—the one furnished with all the erudition—the prime secrets and witcheries of knowledge—the other abandoned to the merest generalities, a sorry heap of prejudices, or at best a dubious and insufficient light. But however this be, certain it is there is now available a vast amount of Biblical lore of no mean value, and which no good Christian would willingly forego, that is all but sealed to the bulk of the Christian world. [30] The publication of Scripture on the principles we advocate would go far to remedy the evil. The beautiful emendations of the Sacred text that are now scattered over a wide waste of territory, and all but lost, would be garnered up, and made available for common use. The occasional criticisms of Archbishop Whately, for instance, and the specific emendations of the late Professor Scholefield, would become alike the property of the esoterics and the exoterics: they would be treasured up and embalmed in our own Bibles. In a word, we should succeed to a large inheritance of the labours of others. There would be still much left, of course, to reward industry and sagacity, and succeeding times might fairly expect to have the benefit of all future discoveries in this important field. The immediate benefit would be to relieve the unlettered from dependence on the Commentary to the extent they now are. They who run might read. [31]
We may further be entitled to expect some abatement of our present unchristian differences, which are fostered to some extent, as we think, by the difficulties inherent in the Book rather as a translation than as an original. To some extent it gives a less certain sound, as it is obliged to avail itself of human organs. By repairing the instrument, we may find a great impediment to our common understanding and accord removed, while the union thus formed will be all the more valuable as it will be real, not simulated—uniform, not patched up for the occasion to defeat a common enemy. It will grow out of the only bond of union—sympathy, namely, of belief—that promises to be permanent and available in the hour of trial. Divers forms of worship, and many varying shades of opinion, may co-exist with this unity. Charity thinketh no evil, is not easily provoked. If this happy purpose could be secured by imparting a clearer light to the firmament of Christian truth, as the result of the measure we advocate, it would not be easy to overrate the boon in the removal of the scandal that belongs to the present divided state of Christendom, and in the service it would render to the church in carrying out her many offices of healing and comfort to the world.
Still further: Popular Education, to the extent to which it is identified with the Bible, would be subserved by an improved translation. In many parts of the kingdom the Bible, as is well known, is the only organ of education available—the only apparatus by which any ray of intellectual light finds entrance into men’s minds. This may be accounted for from the fact that, in addition to knowledge, Scripture brings with it the soul’s health; otherwise, in the rude state in which it finds a large portion of the population, it would have small chance of fulfilling this incidental office of educating the masses. In this light Scripture, where, as in Protestant countries, it is freely diffused, must be regarded as a most precious boon to a nation—as a guarantee, in fact, that the people shall be in some sort educated, and invested with the attributes of rational and responsible beings. Nor is the benefit of Scripture, as a help to education, confined to the poor: in early youth it smooths the entrance on the path of knowledge, not less effectually to the rich than to the indigent. There is, moreover, to be considered the part that Scripture plays in the education of the land, in the actual occupancy it enjoys in almost every family as a HOUSEHOLD BOOK, available as the Urim and Thummim of the ancient economy, and actually doing that service which the “lares and lemures” of heathen households were vainly invoked to perform. It is in vain to exclaim against this state of things, from whatever motive, sceptical or superstitious: the fact is as we have stated it, and, with the absence of such means of education, the country, to a large extent, must necessarily be uneducated.
Thus obviously is the Bible the recognized organ of popular education in this country, and in this view it is most important that its efficiency should be complete. But this inference derives its chief force from considerations affecting the character of the education it supplies. In this aspect of it there is nothing that should make us regret the actual occupancy it enjoys in this regard. On the contrary, it is admirably adapted by its own peculiar power over men’s souls to create—not a learned, but an intelligent people; and if intelligent, then free, independent, powerful,—a match for tyranny in every shape, and at every turn. Nor are the ruling powers themselves less benefited in thus being able to lay deep the foundation of their authority in the fixedness of principle, just appreciation of good as distinct from its counterfeit, and sober and well-advised aims of the people so trained and nurtured.
Closely connected with education, or such an education as we have now been considering, is public morality, and with it the strength and prosperity of a Nation. The condition of England in her various phases—civil, military, political, and religious—has naturally arrested the attention of intelligent foreigners, as presenting a marked superiority in these respects, or in some of them, to their own country. They have inquired the cause of this distinction with little success, and are as much at fault in being able to trace no symptoms of decay or flagging vitality in the system, cruelly tried as it not unfrequently is, prognosticating its ruin. Perhaps there is a solution of the enigma here. Perhaps the use of Scripture as the prime material of our early education has generated a better morality among us, and precluded the admission of certain forms of evil, little consonant to national greatness or national welfare, from which we see other countries, differently schooled, are not exempt. On this head, while avoiding undue pretension, we would not choose to say less than truth permits. With all the deductions to be allowed in disparagement of our claim to a high place in the scale of morals absolutely, we have yet, as compared with other countries,—a conscience, a sense namely of right and wrong, pervading the bulk of the people, and leavening the land with a wholesome morality,—we are not habituated to treat suicide as a virtue, [34]—our functionaries, as a body, are not venal,—we are not dangerous to the State when we meet in numbers beyond two or three,—and we are not incapable of self-government. M. de Montalembert, in his late work on the Future of England, while generously doing homage to the greatness of this country, the destinies of which he undertakes to decide, has not adverted to this high moral and religious training as supplying any explanation of the phenomenon: perhaps deeming his own country to be not less amply supplied with the means of religious culture. On this point we are at issue with him, if such is his opinion. In France, as in Catholic countries generally,—and it must be confessed in some Protestant countries too,—it is not so decidedly a religious or moral, as an ecclesiastical and conventual training, that is accorded; one, that is, which, while it overlays the memory with dogmas, and deals in technical and artificial requirements, leaves the conscience all but uninformed, and morality, as a pervading, practical, germinating principle, almost a non-entity. [35]
Paullo majora canamus. The time is come when countries, as such, need to be educated no less really than smaller bodies and isolated individuals. Countries are brought now almost into as close contact with one another as individual members of the same commonwealth; and the identical principle that inculcates the education of individuals—that, namely, of mutual self-defence and reciprocal advantage—applies to the aggregation of individuals in a nation. The times of ignorance picture to us man as a savage, a terror to his neighbours, and everywhere an object of rightful destruction. Education became a necessity, if he would be safe from violence, or reap advantage from the society of his fellow. The picture presented by the history of nations in relation to one another is substantially the same. There has been little improvement in this respect yet visible. Nor has the necessity for it seemed urgent, while the nations were separated by the natural obstacles of their position, and their means of mutual annoyance in a corresponding degree circumscribed. Science has now removed these obstacles, and the nations are brought into immediate contiguity and contact, while their means of mutual annoyance have been enormously and frightfully multiplied. Startling it is to think of the growing power of nations for evil, and inflicting evil upon one another, in the present temper and morale of the nations. Surely we may say the time has come for providing a remedy appropriate to so fearful a crisis. There is none that occurs to us so sure as a system of instruction that recognizes as its basis a sanctity in the relations of state with state, and lodges deep in the consciences of the several people those great principles of justice, truth, and benevolence, in which God has indissolubly bound up all human happiness, whether of nations or of individuals. Unhappily there is so much to unlearn on the subject of the relative duties of nations to one another before this good work can be proceeded in. The sacred records have not been supposed to furnish any lessons on this branch of human duty, and none have been sought for. But—
“In them is plainest taught and easiest learn’d
What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so.”Paradise Regained.
Embued with the conviction that we have the means adequate to the high ends here proposed in these very records—well understood and properly carried out—we have ventured upon these high themes in disregard of the imputation to which we may be subjected, with some plausibility, of overstating our cause. We say with some plausibility, only as merging our feelings for the moment in the superficial view ordinarily taken of the real character of the religious element—a view altogether ignored by the history of our race, and the peculiar phenomena of the times. We may add, it is unmistakably at variance with the consciousness of almost every individual in Christendom, to whom it is no secret that religious questions—unless the interest has been neutralized by long neglect, or quashed by desperate violence—exert a strange and engrossing power over his soul. In whatever way we look at it, it is a power, and in this view may even be perverted to evil.
“Suppose ye,” says Christ, “that I am come to send peace upon earth? I tell you, Nay, but rather division.” [37a] In deep sympathy with these words, and in corroboration of the prophetic spirit by which they are marked, are the following observations of Stanley, when summing up his reminiscences of the Lake of Galilee—the toiling all night and catching nothing—the great multitude of fishes, so that the net broke—the casting a hook for the first fish that came up—the net cast into the sea, and gathering of every kind: “all these,” says he, “are images which could occur nowhere else in Palestine but in this one spot, and which, from that one spot, have now passed into the religious language of the civilized world, and in their remotest applications, or even misapplications, have converted the nations, and shaken the thrones of Europe.” [37b]
Thus demonstrative it is that Religion is no weak, idle, evanescent figment of man’s imagination, but a real, substantial, controlling power, shaping his thoughts, it may be unconsciously, and blending itself with the solid structure of society and nations. Greece and Rome, it has been well said, have attracted here and there a visitor, but only the Holy Land has provoked a crusade. Nor is the evidence of its power to be fetched wholly from the records of the past; we think we see in it in our own days a germinating principle more potent than anything else now in operation to work great changes, and rival, at least, if it does not throw into the shade, all that history has yet unfolded. That this power may be based in knowledge, and directed to a righteous end, unlike the character oftentimes it bears on the page of the past, it may deserve some consideration as a means to this end, whether we may not yet read our lesson to greater advantage, and educe from the sacred page a fuller amount of good than in its present state it is calculated to afford. And we have the more confidence in urging our present suit, because we are persuaded that the boon we invoke will not long be unattended with other forms of active beneficence conducing to the same high ends. The church will almost simultaneously rouse herself to new exertion. A yet more effective order of Religious Teaching than we can yet boast of—from the pulpit and the press, will probably be elicited. And thus we shall evoke, not an isolated power waging dubious war against fearful odds, but a CONFEDERATE force, equal, we will hope, to the crisis;—a crisis such as, no one is so obtuse as not to see, demands something vastly in advance of the elements at present available for neutralizing the fearful evils now festering at our core, or looming in the no distant horizon.