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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74
The Bible in Itself no Panacea
The Bible in Itself no Panacea.
The remedy usually prescribed is that the Bible shall be read or taught in the schools by the ordinary staff as part of the regular work, and to this we are to look for the cure the hardness, irreverence, and other anamiable failings of colonial children. If the proper parts of the Bible could be properly taught I grant that great results might reasonably be expected, but to suppose that promiscuous teaching of the Bible unqualified teachers is going to do good and not harm seems to me a great delusion. The notion that the mere presence of the Book in our schools is going to drive away immorality and irreverence, is camphor drives moths from a wardrobe, arises from that fetish-worship of the Book which has done incalculable harm in the past, and has not yet run its course. To teach the Bible is not necessarily to teach religion. Carlyle has finely said that
the Mind grows not like a vegetable (by having its roots Uttered with etymological compost), but like a spirit, by mysterious contact of Spirit: Thought kindling itself at the fire of living thought.
As for the Bible, which children are usually employed in to exercise and improve their talent in reading, I think the promiscuous reading of it, though by chapters as they lie in order, is so far from being of advantage to children, either for the perfecting their reading or principling their religion, that perhaps a worse could not be found. For what pleasure or encouragement can it be to a child to exercise himself in reading those parts of a book where he understands nothing ? . . . . . . And what an odd jumble of thoughts must a child have in his head—if he have any at all, such as he should have—concerning religion, who in his tender age reads all the parts of the Bible indifferently, as the Word of God, without any other distinction ! I am apt to think that this, in some men, has been the reason why they never had clear and distinct thoughts of it all their lifetime.