were not, as I think it is, consonant with political reason and
justice, and with a desire to act in the spirit of the education
measure, I am disposed to think it might still be well to read that
book in the elementary schools.

I have always been strongly in favour of secular education, in the
sense of education without theology; but I must confess I have been
no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the
religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to
be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these
matters, without the use of the Bible. The Pagan moralists lack life
and colour, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high
and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the
severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings
and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if
left to himself, all that it is not desirable for children to occupy
themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast
residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great
historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven
into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history;
that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to
noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante
and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest
and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary
form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left
his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and
other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the
furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of
what other book could children be so much humanized and made to
feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills,