INTRODUCTION

In the year 1913 the Pennsylvania legislature passed an act requiring in every public school the daily reading of at least ten verses from the Holy Bible and imposing upon school directors the duty of dismissing every teacher who fails to comply with this legislation. While this legislation was pending, it was predicted outside of the State that its enactment into law would be followed by riots and bloodshed. The prediction has not been fulfilled. The history of Pennsylvania has never been stained by the burning of witches nor by any other form of religious persecution. The teachers have shown themselves to be law-abiding citizens, and the people although professing many and various creeds, have shown a most commendable spirit of religious toleration as well as a most remarkable appreciation of the value of daily Bible reading.

It was of course not the aim of the legislature to introduce religious teaching into the public schools. The duty of teaching religion belongs to the home, to the Sunday school, and to the church with its various agencies. Teachers in high schools and colleges have sometimes been known to go out of their way for the purpose of throwing doubt upon the religious faith of the pupil or the pupil's parents. A worse service can not be rendered by those who are engaged in education. Destroy the sense of obligation to a supreme being and you have robbed the child of one of the strongest incentives to an upright life.

In eight or nine of the States the Bible has been excluded from the public schools either by decisions of the supreme court of the State, or by opinions of its attorney general, or by rulings of the state superintendent of schools. It does not follow that such exclusion necessarily makes the schools godless. The schools become god

less when put in charge of godless teachers. As long as the fear of God and the love of righteousness abide in the teacher's heart, so long can it be assumed and asserted that the schools are not godless. Nevertheless, the child loses much if it grows up without the molding influence of the daily reading of the Book of books. Abraham Lincoln had access to few books in his early life. But the marvelous English of King James's version permeated his thinking and molded his diction. A letter from his pen written to a mother who had lost five sons in the Civil War, is treasured at Oxford University as the finest specimen of letter writing in the English language. His Gettysburg speech has been read and studied as a masterpiece of English in thousands of our public schools and bears unmistakable testimony to the molding influence of the literary style of the English Bible. When Kossuth was preparing to visit England and America, he studied three books, Johnson's dictionary, the writings of Shakespeare, and the King James version of the Bible. His eloquent command of English gave him unrivaled power over the audiences which he addressed in the United States. Father Faber who renounced Protestantism and joined the Catholic Church, says, of our English Bible: "Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvelous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert scarcely knows how he can forego. Its felicities seem often to be almost things rather than words. It is part of a national mind and the author of the national seriousness. Nay, it is worshiped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. It is the representative of a man's best moments; all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing which doubt never dimmed and controversy never soiled, and in the length and breadth of

the land there is not one Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."

Of course everything depends upon the spirit and the way in which the Bible is read. I have seen it read amid so much noise and irreverence that the reading had better been omitted. The Old Testament may be studied for the sake of finding questionable cases of morality in the lives of David and Solomon and the Patriarchs. Such study may be harmful to youths in the adolescent period. The inhabitants of India study the English Bible in order that they may understand Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" and other English classics. Surely such study of biblical literature is justifiable. Teachers of pedagogy sometimes use the Bible to show the wisdom in the methods of the greatest teacher of all the ages. Such use is very helpful to teachers. But the legislation which prescribes the daily reading of the Bible in the public schools has undoubtedly a different aim. The Bible is the loftiest code of ethics which the human race possesses. It should be read and studied for purposes of moral instruction and devotional uplift.

The parent or the teacher who expects the daily reading of ten verses from the sacred Scriptures to solve the problem of moral training will of course be disappointed. The Bible may be abused. A pious father, when his son was bad, made him learn ten Bible verses by heart, and when the boy was very bad, he had to memorize and recite one hundred verses. He grew up hating the Bible as an instrument of punishment, and his adult years have been very unsatisfactory from the ethical point of view. Moreover, much biblical knowledge does not touch the heart out of which are the issues of life. For instance, the fact that the books of the Bible were originally not divided into chapters and verses, that the division into chapters was made in the early part of the thirteenth century, and that the division of the chapters into verses was made after the art of printing had been invented (about the middle of the sixteenth century) by a printer on horseback fleeing from Paris to Switzerland to

escape persecution, this is interesting information, but it does not shape the life and conduct of the individual nor lift him to higher planes of effort and aspiration. Moreover, for ethical purposes biblical literature should be supplemented by other instruction. The Bible does not tell the reader to brush his teeth or to avoid the cigarette habit, and yet these are, for the youth, duties as imperative as going to church or saying his prayers. The secular literature which the ages have produced contains much which we can not afford to despise or neglect in the ethical training of the young. This admission does not detract one iota from the importance of daily reading of the sacred Scriptures.

The Protestant Reformation is based upon two cardinal principles: 1. Man is justified by faith. 2. The Bible is the only rule of religious faith and practice. If the Bible is to be a guide to faith and conduct, it must be read and studied and understood. Herein lay the prime motives for the establishment of schools for the common people. Schmid's Encyclopædia is authority for the statement that as early as 1640 it was impossible in Sweden to find any one above the age of ten who was unable to read and write. In the court records of Upland (now Chester) where the Swedes first settled on the Delaware River, there is given the action of a teacher who recovered pay from a father who had agreed to pay two hundred guilders if his children were taught to read the Scriptures in a specified number of months. Facts like these show the stress that was laid by the early settlers upon the knowledge of the Bible. And that stress is being renewed through the attention which the twentieth century is concentrating upon the Old and New Testaments.

The ensuing treatise on the literature of the Old Testament is evidence of the revival of interest in the books of the Bible. A lecturer at a teachers' institute spoke of the beautiful story of Ruth, a teacher of English in the high school who had graduated from a university, asked the name of the publisher; she did not even know the names of the books of the Old Testament. How teachers can manage to teach English literature where the Bible has been excluded from the school, is a