perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In
the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from
classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the
Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of
the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much
easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child
whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Caesar will be better
prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose
delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our
elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand,
with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and
he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate
given him. But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in
general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and
that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life
and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such
method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."

There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of
his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and
late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of
power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of
the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the
single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary
school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course
of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in
a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how
much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as
part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured
that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to
extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."

The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy
Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School.
"The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its
literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the
manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of
the Bible were exposed the moment tha