_It is a wrong use of the Bible to set it in its entirety before all
classes and all ages._
On the old view of the Bible no man might dare to omit portions of it in
public reading or home instruction. The horrible atrocities and brutal
lusts of the early Hebrews, and the coarsenesses of their later days, as
unbearable by modern ears as the rough talk of Shakespeare's ladies, had
all to be read to mixed assemblies of young men and maidens; and be read
with blushing face by the pure mother to the purer children at her knees.
For us, who see the Bible in its true light, there is no necessity for a
minister to offend against the taste of a refined age, or for a mother to
introduce the unsoiled soul of her child to evil, by reading straight
through the successive chapters of the Bible. It has been left for
Protestant piety to excel Romanists and Jews in superstition. The Church
of Rome, as you know, discourages the use of the Bible by her laity,
erring in the other extreme. The Jewish rabbis had a saying that no one
should read the Canticles before he was thirty years of age. If you follow
the public readings of the Bible in this church from your own Bibles, you
must often appreciate the relief this liberty of omission brings. Use the
Bible in this way with your children at home. Who would think of an
indiscriminate use of the original Shakespeare? Stage managers cut him so
freely for rendering before grown up folk as to have made another
Shakespeare. He who cares for his children's innocence will set before
them an expurgated edition like that of Rolfe. So we should use at home
such an expurgated edition of the Scriptures as "The Child's Bible,"
published by Cassel, Petter & Galpin, of London. No timid soul need fear
that imprecation in the last chapter of the Revelation:
If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy
God shall take away his part out of the book of life.
That sounds like the ruling passion, strong in death, of the Son of
Thunder; who in youth asked if he should call down fire from heaven upon a
hamlet which did not welcome Jesus, and was well rebuked for his zeal by
the gracious Master. It is part of the human weakness through which the
voice of God speaks, taking its tone from the defects of the instrument.
This imprecation had reference, in all probability, solely to the
copyists, against whose carelessness the author sought to guard himself by
an awful threat. It certainly had reference to this book alone. Not until
long afterwards did the Church determine what books were to enter the
canon of the New Testament, and in what order they were to stand. That
order placed the Revelation as the last book in the canon, and thus made
this threat appear to cover the whole Bible.[26]