But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children did, in our
time, read the Bible a great deal, if perforce we were taught to
read it in sundry bad ways: of which perhaps the worst was that
our elders hammered in all the books, all the parts of it, as
equally inspired and therefore equivalent. Of course this meant
among other things that they hammered it all in literally: but
let us not sentimentalise over that. It really did no child any
harm to believe that the universe was created in a working week
of six days, and that God sat down and looked at it on Sunday,
and behold it was very good. A week is quite a long while to a
child, yet a definite division rounding off a square job. The
bath-taps at home usually, for some unexplained reason, went
wrong during the week-end: the plumber came in on Monday and
carried out his tools on Saturday at mid-day. These little
analogies really do (I believe) help the infant mind, and not at
all to its later detriment. Nor shall I ask you to sentimentalise
overmuch upon the harm done to a child by teaching him that the
bloodthirsty jealous Jehovah of the Book of Joshua is as
venerable (being one and the same unalterably, 'with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning') as the Father 'the same
Lord, whose property is always to have mercy,' revealed to us in
the Gospel, invoked for us at the Eucharist. I do most seriously
hold it to be fatal if we grow up and are fossilised in any such
belief. (Where have we better proof than in the invocations which
the family of the Hohenzollerns have been putting up, any time
since August 1914--and for years before--to this bloody
identification of the Christian man's God with Joshua's?) My
simple advice is that you not only read the Bible early but read
it again and again: and if on the third or fifth reading it leave
you just where the first left you--if you still get from it no
historical sense of a race _developing_ its concept of God--well
then, the point of the advice is lost, and there is no more to be
said. But over this business of teaching the Book of Joshua to
children I am in some doubt. A few years ago an Education
Committee, of which I happened to be Chairman, sent ministers of
religion about, two by two, to test the religious instruction
given in Elementary Schools. Of the two who worked around my
immediate neighbourhood, one was a young priest of the Church of
England, a medievalist with an ardent passion for ritual; the
other a gentle Congregational minister, a mere holy and humble
man of heart. They became great friends in the course of these
expeditions, and they brought back this report--'It is positively
wicked to let these children grow up being taught that there is
no difference in value between Joshua and St Matthew: that the
God of the Lord's Prayer is the same who commanded the massacre
of Ai.' Well, perhaps it is. Seeing how bloodthirsty old men can
be in these days, one is tempted to think that they can hardly be
caught too young and taught decency, if not mansuetude. But I do
not remember, as a child, feeling any horror about it, or any
difficulty in reconciling the two concepts. Children _are_ a bit
bloodthirsty, and I observe that two volumes of the late Captain
Mayne Reid--"The Rifle Rangers," and "The Scalp Hunters"--have
just found their way into The World's Classics and are advertised
alongside of Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" and the "De Imitatione
Christi." I leave you to think this out; adding but this for a
suggestion: that as the Hebrew outgrew his primitive tribal
beliefs, so the bettering mind of man casts off the old clouts of
primitive doctrine, he being in fact better than his religion.
You have all heard preachers trying to show that Jacob was a
better fellow than Esau somehow. You have all, I hope, rejected
every such explanation. Esau was a gentleman: Jacob was not. The
instinct of a young man meets that wall, and there is no passing
it. Later, the mind of the youth perceives that the writer of
Jacob's history has a tribal mind and supposes throughout that
for the advancement of his tribe many things are permissible and
even admirable which a later and urbaner mind rejects as
detestably sharp practice. And the story of Jacob becomes the
more valuable to us historically as we realise what a hero he is
to the bland chronicler.