tolen your
watch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good from
evil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even this is a
dangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are not choosing:
we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call the evil out of
a child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch it to full human
stature when it is ten years old, you will simply pull it into two
pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this morally, which is what
parents and schoolmasters are doing every day, you ought to be hanged;
and some day, when we take a sensible view of the matter, you will be;
and serve you right. The child does not stand between a good and a
bad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normal
healthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without
killing itself in the process, which is a dangerous one.

Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more than there
is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too good for
the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as the Bible has
driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been
allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The practical moral is
that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever
songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We shall not like
those which have nothing to say to us; and though everyone has a right
to bias our choice, no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us
from any work of art or any work of art from us.

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular
English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education)
is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates half
a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;
some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some
kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; none
suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it
be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and
has never been put into practice by any State before or since. But the
Bible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental
race; and the imposition of this literature, on whatever false
pretences, on our child