ren left them more literate than if they knew
no literature at all, which was the practical alternative. And as our
Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better
than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It is
at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible as
some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the blank
represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.

The Bible

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is the
whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation
of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the
Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasure
we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a
bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of
God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations
as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There
is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth
symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to
a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is,
except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter
Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of
the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young;
so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally;
for there will come to all of them that period between dawning
adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art
will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become
morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified
otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it
must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary
purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young
people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only
a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for
Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan
as a present for a swain or lass.