The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1896-02-29
LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE.

THERE is one thing that those who
are organizing the new crusade
against the Koran and Islamism
would do we'll to remember, namely,
that the Turk believes in and rever-
ences, after his fashion, the Koran,
and that in realistic way that puts
to shame the half-heartednesss and
lukewarmness of many Christians.
The Turk carefully picks up a piece
of paper in the street lest it may
have the word Allah or verse of the
Koran printed on it, fearing that he
may commit a sacrilege by trampling
it in the mud and dust. In every
Mohammedan school the Koran
is the chief book studied. What
ever else may have to be omitted
the Koran must be read and studied.
For is it not the word of life, the rev.
citation of Allah's will, and the only
guide to Paradise? Therefore the
Turk reverences it and, as he under
stands it, obeys its precepts.
Contrast this with the general at
titude of the people toward the Bible
in Christian lands. Owing to the
great division of Christians into
Catholics and Protestants, and the
subdivision of the latter into num-
berless sects, added to the Jewish
element in our American population,
it is not strange that, unlike the
Turk in regard to the Koran, the
Bible is, as rule, excluded from
our public schools. In Chicago, for
instance, it seems impossible to have
even selections from the Bible, COM
piled expressly with view to being
acceptable to Catholic, Protestant
and Jew, introduced into our schools.
In our colleges students spend years
reading the Greek and Latin classics
which familiarize the student with
the most poetic and alluring phases
of paganism, but the Bible is sternly
excluded as volume not adapted
for religious, moral, or literary train
ing. 1t is true, as Professor Richard
Green Moulton in his book on "The
Literary Study of the Bible" just
published says:
1t is one of the curiosities of our civ
ilization 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 Qualification of intox-
ication; while in mature life we are &C.
cupied 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 cannot be appreciat
ed without bloodthirsty Joy in killing.
| We seek to form character in which
delicacy and reserve shall be supreme
and at the same time are training our
taste in literatures which, if published
in English books, would be seized by
the police"
Professor Moulton would be the
last one to deny the great value of
the classics in forming literary taste
and that, despite his arraignment of
their ethical and religious opposite
ness to our modern civilization, their
great value in a liberal education.
But he pleads not for the exclusion
of the classics, but for the inclusion
of the greatest classic of all,-the
English Bible,-in the curricula OF
our schools and colleges and his elo-
quent plea at least demands careful
attention of all people and especially
of all educators. We cannot do bet
ter than let him state it in his own
words:
"It is surely good that our youth,
during the formative period, should
have displayed to them, in literary
dress as brilliant as that of Greek
literature i'm lyrics which Pindar can
not surpass, in rhetoric as forcible as
that of Demosthenes, or contemplate
i've prose not inferior to Plato's-a
people dominated by an utter passion
for righteousness; people whom
ideas of purity, of infinite good, of
universal order, of faith in the ire
sistible downfall of all moral evil,
moved to a poetic fashion as fervid,
and speech as musical, as when
Sappho sang of love or Eschylus
Numbered 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 time table that would be involved