Unfit for the Young.

To the selections from the New Testament less exception can be taken. It was impossible to go far wrong here, and the general standpoint with regard to it has varied less from that of the editor than in the case of the earlier books. There is still much included to which I should strongly object, but without raising these deep matters of religious controversy—though all these questions will have to be faced and fought out, not at church synods or conferences, but in Parliament and on political platforms, before this scheme can possibly be enacted—without raising any such questions for the present, I have no hesitation it saying that the lesson with which the New Testament selections open—the first chapter of Luke—is for children the very worst introduction to the Gospel story, and, indeed, one of the worst chapters in the Bible that could possibly have been chosen. It deals with the miraculous annunciations of the births of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ; and various physiological facts in connection with their antenatal history are set out with more than the accustomed plainness and detail of Scripture (see especially verses 41 to44). We English are often accused of cant in unduly blinking these mysteries, but, so far as the Bible is concerned, we fall into an opposite species of cant, our reverence for it leading us to suppose—or at least to act as if we supposed—that all its contents must be suitable for reading to a mixed assembly or for the study of the young. Anybody who has had the slightest experience of life in a large school must know that to numbers of boys the Bible affords their first taste—I will not say of impure literature, but at least of literature which fosters impure thoughts; and it seems to me beyond the possibility of a doubt that this and similar passages in the text-book are