Consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this
book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in
English history; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and
is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to
Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is
written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite
beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the
veriest hind, who never left his village, to be ignorant of the
existence of other countries and other civilisations and of a great
past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in
the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much
humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical
procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the
interval between the Eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses
of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as
they also are earning their payment for their work?"[14]

At the same time, I laid stress upon the necessity of placing such
instruction in lay hands; in the hope and belief, that it would thus
gradually accommodate itself to the coming changes of opinion; that
the theology and the legend would drop more and more out of sight,
while the perennially interesting historical, literary, and ethical
contents would come more and more into view.

I may add yet another claim of the Bible to the respect and the
attention of a democratic age. Throughout the history of the western
world, the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great
instigators of revolt against the worst forms of clerical and
political despotism. The Bible has been the _Magna Charta_ of the poor
and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a
constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken
into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges,
of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in
Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that
the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness
of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly, the Bible talks no
trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of
duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is
somewhat different from struggling for "rights"; on the fraternity of