Recently a young brother, seeking admittance into a certain university, when detailing the work he had done elsewhere, enumerated five years' work in the Bible. "We do not count that," replied his examiner. "But I have done as hard work on that as I possibly could have done on any other branch," protested the young brother. "We can give you no credit on that," was the answer. The young brother knew that beforehand; but to get the full expression from that educational representative, he let the point come up.

      The absurdity of the situation becomes apparent when [128] we consider what the Bible is, and what, on the other hand, it is that really is counted as "work" by those who do not recognize the Bible as being of any account in the curriculum. Barring the inspiration of the Bible and considering it simply as a common book, even then there is a liberal education in it. Morals, ethics, philosophy, poetry, literature, history; the human interest that, because it constituted the chief excellence of the heathen classics, gave them, in sum, the name of "humanity"; finally, in its English form, the purity and beauty of its language--where, even as an uninspired book, does the Bible find its equal along its chosen lines? In what other book is there so much that is worth while? But, to those who believe, the Bible means immeasurably more. Not only literature and human learning is it to them, but a revelation of God and of man and of the unseen world; in it they learn, not language and philosophy so much as eternal principles of righteousness, faith, hope, love, that will enable them to cope with the problems of life as nothing else can. That is education indeed--to know God and Christ, to be made fit for this life and for another, an eternal life to come. And this is comprised wholly and alone in the book that counts for nothing in the world's curriculum.

      But what have they in our schools that counts so solidly? Here I will not myself speak, but quote from a gentleman of undisputed scholarship and of international note--Richard G. Moulton, M. A., Ph.D., the pioneer and apostle of the literary study of the Bible who in his book on this subject, in the preface, calls attention to the strange inconsistency between our educational aims and standards. He says:

      "It has come by now to be generally recognized that the classics of Greece and Rome stand to us in position of an ancestral literature--the inspiration of our great [129] masters, the bond of common associations between our poets and their readers. But does not such a position belong equally to the literature of the Bible? If our intellect and imagination have been formed by the Greek have we not in similar fashion drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought? Whence then the neglect of the Bible in our higher schools and colleges? It is one of the curiosities of our civilization that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves--literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of intoxication; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law to the remotest corner of the universe, we go at school for literary impulse to the poetry that dramatizes the burden of hopeless fate. Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace; our first poetic lessons are in an Iliad that can not be appreciated without a bloodthirsty joy in killing. We seek to form a character in which delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are training our taste in literature which, if published as English books, would be seized by the police. I recall these paradoxes, not to make objection, but to suggest the reasonableness of the claim that the one side of our liberal education should have another side to balance it. Prudish fears may be unwise, but there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely good that our youth, during the formative period, should have displayed to them in a literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature--in lyrics which Pindar can not surpass, in rhetoric as forcible as that of Demosthenes, or contemplative prose not inferior to Plato's--a people dominated by an [130] utter passion for righteousness; a people whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of all moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid and speech as musical as when Sappho sung of love or Æschylus thundered his deep notes of destiny. When it is added that the familiarity of the English Bible renders all this possible without the demand upon the timetable that would be involved in the learning of another language, it seems clear that our school and college curricula will not have shaken off their mediæval narrowness and renaissance paganism until classical and biblical literature stand side by side as sources of our highest culture."

[TAG 128-131]