And passing now from great plays and great novels and romances, we come to the still more difficult problem of great philosophical and critical works. Take Gulliver's Travels—an intense, dark, stirring criticism of life and social order—and the Dialogues of Plato, full of light and inspiration. In these latter we might quarry for beautiful passages for our Canon, but I do not think we could take them in as wholes, and if we do not take them in as complete books, then I think that Semitic parallel to these Greek dialogues, The Book of Job, must stand not in our Canon, but in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha.
And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world. There again I am for exclusion. This Bible we are considering must be universally available. If it is too bulky for universal use it loses its primary function of a moral cement. We cannot include the Iliad, the Norse Sagas, the Æneid or Paradise Lost in our Canon. Let them swell the great sack of our Apocrypha, and let the children read them if they will.
When one glances in this fashion over the accumulated literary resources of mankind it becomes plain that our canonical books of literature in this modern Bible of ours can be little more than an Anthology or a group of Anthologies. Perhaps they might be gathered under separate heads, as the 'Book of Freedom,' the 'Book of Justice,' the 'Book of Charity.' And now having done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to accept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of thing that I imagine would best serve the purpose of our Bible and that should certainly be included.
Here are words that every American knows by heart already—I would like every man in the world to know them by heart and to repeat them. It is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and I will not spare you a word of it:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
And here is something that might perhaps make another short chapter in the same Book of Freedom—but it deals with Freedom of a different sort:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of Chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this Place of wrath and tears,
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the Menace of the years
Finds and shall find me Unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the Master of my Fate,
I am the Captain of my Soul.
That, as you know, was Henley's, and as I turned up his volume of poems to copy out that poem I came again on these familiar lines:
The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet,
From camp and church, the fireside and the street,
She beckons forth—and strife and song have been.