Culture, too, is almost universal. Every town has its library and its women's clubs; and Chautauquas in summer and courses of lectures and concerts in winter, are provided in our smallest villages. Germany has boasted of her culture, and we are proud of ours,—but it seems to have done little more than "to veneer the barbarian" in them and in us.
All of the high-sounding promises of Economic Reform have failed as utterly. Germany's fine insurance plans, England's old-age pensions, the higher wages, shorter hours and better homes of the working people, have proven but vanity. "Be happy and you will be good" is not the great slogan of redemption, after all.
Sects are vanishing, and that is well. But the great ideals of the Bible, the great Pattern of the life of Jesus Christ, these are and ever must be the inspiration of the passion for righteousness which we long to instill into our children. Science, Education, Culture, Economic Reform—these are good and necessary things,—but they are, each and all, only parts of the greater Gospel, and that is what we must teach our children, if we are to make them good citizens; for, as a community without a church goes to pieces, so does character without religion.
Familiarity with the Bible is one of the essentials to this teaching. Besides its ethical and spiritual power, its stories, its poetry and its great essays furnish so much literary culture that a man thoroughly conversant with them is essentially a cultured being.
One of our distinguished statesmen wandered into a backwoods church, where he heard a well-expressed, logical and highly spiritual discourse from a man who bore every mark in his outward appearance of having always lived in the locality. Upon inquiring where this remarkable preacher gained his knowledge, he found that he had always lived in an obscure hamlet and that his library consisted simply of his Bible and his hymn-book.
Abraham Lincoln obtained his wonderful literary style largely from his study of the King James Bible. Webster recommended it as a model of condensed, dignified and vivid expression. Thousands of our best writers and orators are indebted to it for the high quality of their style, and many have so testified.
The work of these writers, such as Shakespeare, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Sidney Lanier, are full of allusions and figures which cannot be understood by our young people unless they are familiar with the Bible. All of our greatest modern literature is permeated with its language and its spirit. Every child should know its stories, should be made to learn some of its grand poetry, and should have its ethics and its spiritual lessons deeply graven upon their hearts. We can truly say of it:
"Thou art the Voice to kingly boys
To lift them through the fight."
"The child," says President Butler of Columbia University, "is entitled to his religious as well as to his scientific, literary and æsthetic inheritance. Without any one of them he cannot become a truly cultivated man. . . . If it is true that reason and spirit rule the universe, then the highest and most enduring knowledge is of the things of the spirit. That subtle sense of the beautiful and sublime which accompanies spiritual insight and is a part of it,—this is the highest achievement of which humanity is capable. It is typified in the verse of Dante, in the prose of Thomas à Kempis, in the Sistine Madonna of Raphael and in Mozart's Requiem. To develop this sense in education is the task of art and literature; to interpret it is the work of philosophy; to nourish it is the function of religion. It is man's highest possession, and those studies which most directly appeal to it are beyond compare most valuable."
Theodore Roosevelt has recently given us a fair definition of religion. The New York Bible Society asked him to write a special message to be printed in the copies of the New Testament designed for soldiers and sailors. He sent the following: