have no kinship with base fear, but rise whenever one tries to pierce
below the surface of things, whether they be material or spiritual."

It was in this sense that he advocated Bible-reading in
schools--simple Bible-reading, without theological gloss. On the one
hand, this was the only workable plan under existing circumstances.
True, that he would not have employed the Bible as the agency for
introducing the religious and ethical idea in a system that could
begin with a clean slate. He believed that the principle of strict
secularity in State education is sound and must ultimately prevail.
But moral instruction must not be too rudely divorced from the system
of belief current among the generality; and the Bible had been the
instrument of the clergy of all denominations, to whose efforts the
mass of half-instructed people owed such redemption from ignorance and
barbarism as they possessed. Make all needful deductions, and there
remains a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur, interwoven with
three centuries of our history. The Bible, as English literature, as
old-world history, as moral teaching, as the Magna Charta of the poor
and of the oppressed, the most democratic book in the world, could not
be spared. The mass of the people should not be deprived of the
one great literature which is open to them; not shut out from the
perception of their relations with the whole past history of civilized
mankind, nor from an unpriestly view of Judaism and Jesus of Nazareth,
purged of the accretions of centuries. Accordingly, he supported Mr.
W.H. Smith's motion for Bible-reading, even against the champions of
immediate secularization; but for Bible-reading under such regulations
as would carry out for the children the intention of Mr. W.E.
Forster, the originator of the Education Act, that "in the reading and
explanation of the Bible... no efforts will be made to cram into their
poor little minds theological dogmas which their tender age prevents