Enough to Damn it Utterly

as a manual tor the young. Though the references in Luke i. are perhaps the worst of the kind, there must be a score of others in the extracts from Genesis alone. Not every grossness is mechanically repeated. Thus, the story of Noah's drunkenness and the curse upon Canaan is omitted altogether, but quite enough of that of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is given to do the mischief; and allusion after allusion of a kind which, if appearing in a book printed today, we should pronounce indecent, is reproduced without modification. Immeasurably more harm must be done by the thoughts which these passages will suggest to the young than the mechanical inculcation of the better parts of the book by unqualified teachers can possibly compensate for.

The notes supplied by the compiler are of a varied character. Sometimes they are perfectly safe and harmless, as when we are told that quails are "a kind of bird or fowl less than a pigeon"; sometimes they are utterly beyond the pupils' comprehension, and useless even for the teacher's exposition; often they endeavour to hold the balance between Protestant and Catholic interpretation, but on the infant mind can only have the effect of suggesting and emphasising differences of which it had better know nothing—e.g., in Luke iii, 3, as to "repentance" versus "penance"; sometimes they are absolutely immoral, as when the account of how Jacob cheated Laban out of his sheep is suppressed, and a note substituted ascribing the fruits of this supreme act of knavery to "the favour of God upon Jacob." A note of considerable length on the word "concubine" cannot be called page 7 Immoral in its essence, the aim being to gloze the matter over, but its effect can only be to advertise what a competent editor would have studiously suppressed altogether from a text book-for the young.