this matter. Its contents are classified. We have first of all the
canonical books, which are treated as the vitally important books; they
are the books, to quote the phrase used in the English prayer book,
which are "necessary to salvation." And then we have a collection of
other books, the Apocrypha, the books set aside, books often admirable
and beautiful, but not essential, good to be read for "example of life
and instruction of manners," yet books that everyone need not read and
know. Let us take this lead and let us ask whether we can--with the
whole accumulated literature of the world as our material--select a
bookful or so of matter, of such exceptional value that it would be well
for all mankind to read it and know it. This will be our equivalent for
the canonical Books. I will return to that in a moment.
And outside this canonical Book or Books, shall we leave all the rest of
literature in a limitless Apocrypha? I am doubtful about that. I would
suggest that we make a second intermediate class between the canonical
books that everyone in our civilization ought to read and the outer
Apocrypha that you may read or not as you choose. This intermediate
class I would call the Great Books of the World. It would not be a part
of our Bible, but it would come next to our Bible. It would not be what
one must read but only what it is desirable the people should read.
Now this canonical literature we are discussing is to be the third vital
part of our modern Bible. I conceive of it as something that would go
into the hands of every man and woman in that coming great civilization
which is the dream of our race. Together with the Book of World History
and the Book of Law and Righteousness and Wisdom that I have sketched
out to you, and another Book of which I shall have something to say
later, this canonical literature will constitute the intellectual and
moral cement of the World Society, that intellectual and moral cement
for the want of which our world falls into political and social
confusion and disaster to-day. Upon such a basis, upon a common body of
ideas, a common moral teaching and the world-wide assimilation of the
same emotional and aesthetic material, it may still be possible to build
up humanity into one co-operative various and understanding community.
Now if we bear this idea of a cementing function firmly in mind, we
shall have a criterion by which to judge what shall be omitted from and
what shall be included in the Books of Literature in this modern Bible
of ours. We shall begin, of course, by levying toll upon the Old and
New Testaments. I do not think I need justify that step. I suppose that
there will be no doubt of the inclusion of many of the Psalms--but I
question if we should include them all--and of a number of splendid
passages from the Prophets. Should we include the Song of Songs? I am
inclined to think that the compilers of a new Bible would hesitate at
that. Should we include the Book of Job? That I think would be a very
difficult question indeed for our compilers. The Book of Job is a very
wonderful and beautiful discussion of the profound problem of evil in
the world. It is a tremendous exercise to read and understand, but is it
universally necessary? I am disposed to think that the Book of Job,
possibly with the illustrations of Blake, would not make a part of our
Canon but would rank among our Great Books. It is a part of a very large
literature of discussion, of which I shall have more to say in a moment.
So too I question if we should make the story of Ruth or the story of
Esther fundamental teaching for our world civilization. Daniel, again, I
imagine relegated to the Apocrypha. But to this I will return later.
The story of the Gospels would, of course, have been incorporated in our
Historical Book, but in addition as part of our first canon, each of the
four gospels--with the possible omission of the genealogies--would have
a place, for the sake of their matchless directness, simplicity and
beauty. They give a picture, they convey an atmosphere of supreme value
to us all, incommunicable in any other form or language. Again there is
a great wealth of material in the Epistles. It is, for example,
inconceivable that such a passage as that of St. Paul's Epistle to the
Corinthians--"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have
not charity I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal"--the
whole of that wonderful chapter--should ever pass out of the common
heritage of mankind.
So much from the Ancient Bible for our modern Bible, all its inspiration
and beauty and fire. And now what else?
Speaking in English to an English-speaking audience one name comes close
upon the Bible, Shakespear. What are we going to do about Shakespear? If
you were to waylay almost any Englishman or American and put this
project of a modern Bible before him, and then begin your list of
ingredients with the Bible and the whole of Shakespear, he would almost
certainly say, "Yes, Yes."
But would he be right?
On reflection he might perhaps recede and say "Not the whole of
Shakespear," but well, _Hamlet_, _The Tempest_, _Romeo and Juliet_, _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_. But even these! Are they "generally necessary
to salvation"? We run our minds through the treasures of Shakespear as
we might run our fingers through the contents of a box of very precious
and beautiful jewels--before equipping a youth for battle.
No. These things are for ornament and joy. I doubt if we could have a
single play--a single scene of Shakespear's in our Canon. He goes
altogether into the Great Books, all of him; he joins the aristocracy of
the Apocrypha. And, I believe, nearly all the great plays of the world
would have to join him there. Euripides and Sophocles, Schiller and
Ibsen. Perhaps some speeches and such-like passages might be quoted in
the Canon, but that is all.
Our Canon, remember, is to be the essential cementing stuff of our
community and nothing more. If once we admit merely beautiful and
delightful things, then I see an overwhelming inrush of jewels and
flowers. If we admit _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, then I must insist
that we also admit such lovely nonsense as
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea....
Our Canon I am afraid cannot take in such things, and with the plays we
must banish also all the novels; the greater books of such writers as
Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi, Hardy, Hamsun, that great
succession of writers--they are all good for "example of life and
instruction of manners," and to the Apocrypha they must go. And so it
is that since I would banish _Romeo and Juliet_, I would also banish the
Song of Songs, and since I must put away _Vanity Fair_ and the _Shabby
Genteel Story_, I would also put away _Esther_ and _Ruth_. And I find
myself most reluctant to exclude not any novels written in English, but
one or two great sweeping books by non-English writers. It seems to me
that Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ and Hamsun's _Growth of the Soil_ are
books on an almost Biblical scale, that they deal with life so greatly
as to come nearest to the idea of a universally inspiring and
illuminating literature which underlies the idea of our Canon. If we put
in any whole novels into the Canon I would plead for these. But I will
not plead now even for these. I do not think any novels at all can go
into our modern Bible, as whole works. The possibility of long passages
going in, is of course, quite a different matter.
And passing now from great plays and great novels and romances, we come
to the still more difficult problem of great philosophical and critical
works. Take _Gulliver's Travels_--an intense, dark, stirring criticism
of life and social order--and the _Dialogues of Plato_, full of light
and inspiration. In these latter we might quarry for beautiful passages
for our Canon, but I do not think we could take them in as wholes, and
if we do not take them in as complete books, then I think that Semitic
parallel to these Greek dialogues, The Book of Job, must stand not in
our Canon, but in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha.
And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world. There
again I am for exclusion. This Bible we are considering must be
universally available. If it is too bulky for universal use it loses its
primary function of a moral cement. We cannot include the _Iliad_, the
Norse Sagas, the _AEneid_ or _Paradise Lost_ in our Canon. Let them swell
the great sack of our Apocrypha, and let the children read them if they
will.
When one glances in this fashion over the accumulated literary resources
of mankind it becomes plain that our canonical books of literature in
this modern Bible of ours can be little more than an Anthology or a
group of Anthologies. Perhaps they might be gathered under separate
heads, as the 'Book of Freedom,' the 'Book of Justice,' the 'Book of
Charity.' And now having done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to
accept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of thing that I imagine
would best serve the purpose of our Bible and that should certainly be
included.
Here are words that every American knows by heart already--I would like
every man in the world to know them by heart and to repeat them. It is
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and I will not spare you a word of it:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in
a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot
hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full
measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall
not have died in vain--that this nation, under God, shall have a new
birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for
the people, shall not perish from the earth."
And here is something that might perhaps make another short chapter in
the same Book of Freedom--but it deals with Freedom of a different sort:
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of Chance,
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this Place of wrath and tears,
Looms but the Horror of the Shade,
And yet the Menace of the years
Finds and shall find me Unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the Master of my Fate,
I am the Captain of my Soul.
That, as you know, was Henley's, and as I turned up his volume of poems
to copy out that poem I came again on these familiar lines:
The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet,
From camp and church, the fireside and the street,
She beckons forth--and strife and song have been.
A summer's night descending cool and green,
And dark on daytime's dust and stress and heat,
The ways of Death are soothing and serene,
And all the words of Death are grave and sweet.
There seems something in that also which I could spare only very
reluctantly from a new Bible in the world. Yet I tender those lines very
doubtfully. For I am not a very cultivated and well-read person, and
note only the things that have struck upon my mind; but I quite
understand that there must be many things of the same sort, but better,
that I have never encountered, or that I have not heard or read under
circumstances that were favourable to their proper appreciation. I would
rather say about what I am quoting in this section, not positively "this
thing," but merely "this sort of thing."
And in the vein of "this sort of thing" let me quote you--again for the
Book of Freedom--a passage from Milton, defending the ancient English
tradition of free speech and free decision and praising London and
England. This London and England of which he boasts have broadened out
as the idea of Jerusalem has broadened out, to world-wide
comprehensions. Let no false modesty blind us to our great tradition;
you and I are still thinking in Milton's city; we continue, however
unworthily, the great inheritance of the world-wide responsibility and
service, of His Englishmen. Here is my passage:
"Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general
instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly
express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and
great period in His Church, even to the reforming of
reformation itself; what does He then but reveal Himself to His
servants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? I say,
as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of
His counsels, and are unworthy. Behold now this vast city, a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and
surrounded with His protection; the shop of war hath not there
more anvils and hammers working, to fashion out the plates and
instruments of armed justice in defence of beleaguered truth,
than there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious
lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas
wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty,
the approaching reformation: others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.
"What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so
prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a
towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to
make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of
worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there
need not be five weeks, had we but eyes to lift up, the fields
are white already. Where there is much desire to learn, there
of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions;
for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under
these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding,
which God hath stirred up in this city. What some lament of, we
rather should rejoice at, should rather praise this pious
forwardness among men, to reassume the ill-deputed care of
their religion into their own hands again. A little generous
prudence, a little forbearance of one another, and some grain
of charity might win all these diligencies to join and unite
into one general and brotherly search after truth; could we but
forego this prelatical tradition of crowding free consciences
and Christian liberties into canons and precepts of men. I
doubt not, if some great and worthy stranger should come among
us, wise to discern the mould and temper of a people, and how
to govern it, observing the high hopes and aims, the diligent
alacrity of our extended thoughts and reasonings in the
pursuance of truth and freedom, but that he would cry out as
Pyrrhus did, admiring the Roman docility and courage: 'If such
were my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that
could be attempted to make a church or kingdom happy.'
"Yet these are the men cried out against for schismatics and
sectaries, as if, while the temple of the Lord was building,
some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the
cedars, there should be a sort of irrational men, who could not
consider there must be many schisms and many dissections made
in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be
built. And when every stone is laid artfully together, it
cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in
this world: neither can every piece of the building be of one
form; nay, rather the perfection consists in this, that out of
many moderate varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are
not vastly disproportional, arises the goodly and the graceful
symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure."
But I will not go on turning over the pages of books and reciting prose
and poetry to you. I cannot even begin to remind you of the immense
treasure of noble and ennobling prose and verse that this world has
accumulated in the past three thousand years. Not one soul in ten
thousand that is born into this world even tastes from that store. For
most of mankind now that treasure is as if it had never been. Is it too
much to suggest that we should make some organized attempt to gather up
the quintessence of literature now, and make it accessible to the masses
of our race? Why should we not on a large scale with a certain breadth
and dignity set about compiling the Poetic Books, the Books of
Inspiration for a renewed Bible, for a Bible of Civilization? It seems
to me that such a Book made universally accessible, made a basis of
teaching everywhere could set the key of the whole world's thought.
Sec. 4 Today
There remains one other element if we are to complete the parallelism of
the old Bible and the new. The Christian Bible ends with a forecast, the
Book of Revelation; the Hebrew Bible ended also with forecasts, the
Prophets. To that the old Bible owed much of its magic power over men's
imaginations and the inspiration it gave them. It was not a dead record,
not an accumulation of things finished and of songs sung. It pointed
steadily and plainly to the Days to Come as the end and explanation of
all that went before. So too our Modern Bible, if it is to hold and rule
the imagination of men, must close I think with a _Book of Forecasts_.
We want to make our world think more than it does about the consequences
of the lives it leads and the political deeds that it does and that it
permits to be done. We want to turn the human imagination round again
towards the future which our lives create. We want a collection and
digest of forecasts and warnings to complete this modern Bible of ours.
Now here I think you will say--and I admit with perfect reason--that I
am floating away from any reasonable possibility at all. How can we have
forecasts and prophecies of things that are happening now? Well, I will
make a clean breast of it, and admit that I am asking for something that
may be impossible. Nevertheless it is something that is very necessary
if men are to remain indeed intelligent co-operating communities. In the
past you will find where there have been orderly and successful
communities the men in them had an idea of a Destiny, of some object,
something that would amount to a criterion and judgment upon their
collective conduct. Well, I believe that we have to get back to
something of that sort.
We have statesmen and politicians who profess to guide our destinies.
Whither are they guiding our destinies?
Surely they have some idea. The great American statesmen and the great
European statesmen are making To-morrow. What is the To-morrow they are
making?
They must have some idea of it. Otherwise they must be imposters. I am
loth to believe them imposters, mere adventurers who have blundered into
positions of power and honour with no idea of what they are doing to the
world. But if they have an idea of what they are doing to the world,
they foresee and intend a Future. That, I take it, is sound reasoning
and the inference is plain.
They ought to write down their ideas of this Future before us. It would
be helpful to all of us. It might be a very helpful exercise for them.
It is, I think, reasonable for Americans to ask the great political
personages of America, the president and so forth, for example: whether
they think the United States will stand alone in twenty-five years'
time as they stand alone now? Or whether they think that there will be a
greater United States--of all America--or of all the world? They must
know their own will about that. And it is equally reasonable to ask the
great political personages of the British Empire: what will Ireland be
in twenty-five years' time? What will India be? There must be a plan, an
intended thing. Otherwise these men have no intentions; otherwise they
must be, in two words, dangerous fools. The sooner we substitute a type
of man with a sufficient foresight and capable of articulate speech in
the matter, the better for our race.
And again every statesman and every politician throughout the world says
that the relations of industrial enterprise to the labour it employs are
unsatisfactory. Yes. But how are those relations going to develop? How
do they mean them to develop?
Are we just drifting into an unknown darkness in all these matters with
blind leaders of our blindness? Or cannot a lot of these things be
figured out by able and intelligent people? I put it to you that they
can. That it is a reasonable and proper thing to ask our statesmen and
politicians: what is going to happen to the world? What sort of better
social order are you making for? What sort of world order are you
creating? Let them open their minds to us, let them put upon permanent
record the significance of all their intrigues and manoeuvres. Then as
they go on we can check their capacity and good faith. We can establish
a control at last that will rule presidents and kings.
Now the answer to these questions for statesmen is what I mean by a
_Book of Forecasts_. Such a book I believe is urgently needed to help
our civilization. It is a book we ought all to possess and read. I know
you will say that such a _Book of Forecasts_ will be at first a
preposterously insufficient book--that every year will show it up and
make it more absurd. I quite agree. The first _Book of Forecasts_ will
be a poor thing. Miserably poor. So poor that people will presently
clamour to have it thoroughly revised.
The revised _Book of Forecasts_ will not be quite so bad. It will have
been tested against realities. It will form the basis of a vast amount
of criticism and discussion.
When again it comes to be revised, it will be much nearer possible
realities.
I put it to you that the psychology, the mentality of a community that
has a _Book of Forecasts_ in hand and under watchful revision will be
altogether steadier and stronger and clearer than that of a community
which lives as we do to-day, mere adventurers, without foresight, in a
world of catastrophies and accidents and unexpected things. We shall be
living again in a plan. Our lives will be shaped to certain defined
ends. We shall fall into place in a great scheme of activities. We shall
recover again some or all of the steadfastness and dignity of the old
religious life.
Sec. 5 Today
Let me with this _Book of Forecasts_ round off my fantasy. I would
picture to you this modern Bible, perhaps two or three times as bulky as
the old Bible, and consisting first of
The Historical Books with maps and the like;
The Books of Conduct and Wisdom;
The Anthologies of Poetry and Literature; and finally the
Book of Forecasts, taking the place of the Prophets and Revelations.
I would picture this revivified Bible to you as most carefully done and
printed and made accessible to all, the basis of education in every
school, the common platform of all discussion--just as in the past the
old Bible used to be. I would ask you to imagine it translated into
every language, a common material of understanding throughout all the
world.
And furthermore, I imagine something else about this--quite unlike the
old Bible--I imagine all of it periodically revised. The historical
books would need to be revised and brought up to date, there would be
new lights on health and conduct, there would be fresh additions to the
anthologies, and there would be Forecasts that would have to be struck
out because they were realized or because they were shown to be hopeless
or undesirable, and fresh Forecasts would be added to replace them. It
would be a Bible moving forward and changing and gaining with human
experience and human destiny....