THE BIBLE IN CHICAGO.
IT is a good hearing that the stiff secularism of the Chicago school system is giving way, and that the people of that .eager commercial city are beginning to feel that their children want something more, even in their day-schools, than the kind of teaching which will prepare them for earning their liveli- hood, and enable them to read the newspaper and under- stand, or half-understand, the gossip of the day. The school managers have introduced, we are told, into their schools a book of selections from the Bible, which opens with two pas- sages from the latter part of St. Mark's Gospel, then goes on with the Proverbs and the Book of Job, and contains also the story of Joseph and his Brethren, in a series of sections, a few psalms greatly compressed,—but including apparently the whole of the short twenty-third Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,"—and brief specimens of several of the other books of the Bible. We conclude from the account given us that the object of the selections has been, in the first instance, simplicity and brevity,—the verses from St. Mark with which the volume opens are those in which Christ lays down the two great commandments of love to God and love to one's neighbour,—and in the next place, the most sententious specimens of worldly wisdom and the most sublime expressions of the bewilderment and humility of man in confronting the great problem as to the justice of God. The important place given to the Books of Proverbs and of Job, and of these two side by side, is very curious. Two more different products of the moral imagination of the East can scarcely be imagined, —the one, a series of panegyrics on industry, frugality, sobriety, reticence, and prudence, with brief and contemptuous pictures of the dissipation, the license, the effrontery, the intrigues, the shamelessness of Eastern passion; the other, a sublime picture of the astounding providences of God, and the helplessness, the frank bewilderment, and the reluctant submissiveness and humility of man. We suppose that the idea has been to reconcile the shrewdness of American mother-wit to the Bible by presenting it with the best worldly wisdom side by side with the most magnificent poetry. But the strangest feature in the collection seems to be the great indifference shown to the devout emotion and pathos of the Psalms, as compared with the predilection for the Proverbs. We should have thought that i. keen-witted Anglo-Saxon race might have wisely retrenched its selections from the Book of Proverbs, and taken infinite pains to give the passionate outpourings of faith and love to God found nowhere in such intensity as in the Book of Psalms and some of the Apostolic Epistles. But we imagine that the acute American spirit was not content without illustrating the close resemblance between the wisdom of the East and the wisdom of Dr. Franklin, between the sententiousness of Solomon and the sententiousness of "Poor Richard." The former is very great in his brief delineation of the snares and gestures with which the licentious man or woman beech.; the inexperience of youth. "A naughty person, a wicked man walketh with a froward mouth. He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth with his fingers." And again, "He that winketh with the eye causeth sorrow, but a prating fool shall fall." "Poor Richard" in- structs us in very much the same fashion as that. Indeed, when treating of practical wisdom, the Proverbs of the West insist on early rising and prudent forethought in a fashion very similar,—though somewhat less sententious and more familiar,—tc that of the proverbs of the East. The Eastern mind seems to have found a certain satisfaction in the finality, as we may call it, of its practical wisdom, the sharp snap with which it shuts down the judgment on a fool or a sensualist. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; con- sider her ways and be wise," is the style which the senten- tiousness of the East prefers. But it does not seem to us to be really suitable to the child's attitude of mind. We doubt if sententiousness, which is apt to characterise the wisdom of the aged, is suited to children's education. They either accept it and repeat it with unction, and it makes them prigs, or they resent it, and it makes them upstarts and rebels. What they need most, is some touch to kindle their emotions which may give them an ideal impulse and start them on an up- ward path likely to affect the whole of their lives. We should have hesitated to select either the Book of Job or the Book of Proverbs as specially well suited to children's educa- tion. The one opens a wide and most perplexing problem in language of the most noble poetry, a problem which it hardly even pretends to solve ; and the other lays down maxims in a somewhat hard and rather cut-and-dried fashion maxims rather in advance of children's experience and not well adapted to appeal to their eager forecasts of life. WE should have said that no portion of the Bible would be so well adapted to impress and move children's minds as the devotional Psalms, especially those which are marked by the pathetic poetry of a pastoral age. The true value of a religious education is to supply children with that faith in the destiny of man for a spiritual life, which nothing but a belief that the universe is under the guidance of an infinitely powerful and divine spirit, can possibly give them. Without that belief man drops into a utilitarian secularist, and unless made of a grain so fine that his beliefs cannot lower the indomit- able idealism of his aspirations, he accommodates himself to his circumstances, instead of accommodating his circumstances to his aspirations. What we want, therefore, to use specially in education, are all such passages in the Bible as display the highest qualities of human character as it grows under the influence of a pure faith, and especially those which sow in it the seeds of spiritual heroism and of a passionate devotion. We cannot think that the Proverbs are in any adequate degree suited to these conditions. They are the thoughts of a shrewd man of the world, not indeed irreligious or without faith in God, but still one who is even an acuter judge of the agreeable and disagreeable moral consequences of action, than of the true nobility of human aims and motives. The child will learn the wisdom contained in the Book of Proverbs much better from life than he will from any series of maxims however vividly expressed. But he can never learn from mere observation what the passionate devotion of a pure spirit, and the noble poetry of a great prophet, can teach
him, for it is only in the words that flow from them when their heart and imagination are stirred to their very depths, that their inward vision of divine things, their inward cravings for divine help, gain any outward expression at all. The child who had heard repeatedly the nineteenth Psalm could not help catching the psalmist's feeling of the close con- nection beween the penetrating light and warmth diffused by the sun, and the penetrating light and warmth of its creator's mind ; and no child who had heard repeatedly the one hundred and third Psalm could help catching the psalmist's belief in the universal range of the divine kingdom, whether its laws are enforced by the angelic hosts who act as God's ministers and do his pleasure, or are recognised and obeyed only in the secrecy and solitude of the singer's own soul. But such books as the Book of Proverbs or the Book of Leviticus, or the Book of Nehemiah, might easily be read and read again without taking hold of the child's heart and mind at all, unless it happened that some of the quaint images of the Eastern sage caught his fancy by their simplicity or grotesqueness, though they could not in any sense kindle his enthusiasm. What you want in selec- tions from the Bible are those passages which live in a child's memory,—the passages which relate the unquestioning piety of Abraham, or the pathetic home-sickness of Joseph, or the awe- struck fear of Samuel, or the heroic courage of David, or the bold reproof of Nathan, or the despotic folly of Rehoboam, or the thrilling visions of Isaiah,—or again, those in which the love and pity of Christ are delineated for all time ; and amongst all these perhaps the most fascinating to children are those in which the exile bursts into patriotic lamentations, or the Apostle describes the emptiness of all zeal and knowledge, without the heart of charity. These are the passages which contain the highest living force of the Bible for children, and not those in which either the deeper problems of life are attacked by the poet, or the keenest wisdom of the world is embodied in the language of a half-reluctant but half-cynical sage.
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