used
all the people to go through the mills where knowledge was ground out;
they learned to read and write. The only consequence was that they
became the victims of every charlatan. They turned their arithmetic
into roguery and their literature into lust. They became the victims
of the gamblers and the betting touts. They pursued the missing words
and became the disciples of demagogues. And salvation has tarried
though the brain has been nurtured. Yes! there has come a vast
progress! London in the next war can be completely destroyed by
spraying it with gas bombs--in eight hours! Education, with God left
out, will, then, have come to its fruition!

V

National education will only become a means of deliverance from evil
when our schools shall have been transformed into the nurseries of
goodness. For after all, what we need is good men and women. Clever
men are as common as berries; what the world cries for is men who can
be trusted, men whose motive will be the welfare of others and not
their own. 'His fame was immense,' was the verdict on a Roman patriot;
'his private property was so scanty that there was not enough to pay
the expenses of his funeral. He was buried at the public cost. The
matrons mourned him as they mourned Brutus.' Ah! the terrible thing is
not to die poor but to die with a character no man honours. To train
our children to love and desire goodness is our need. The history of
the ages is the proof that goodness cannot flourish apart from
religion. And the Bible tells the story of the dealing of God with
men--of the evolution of religion. It is that which constitutes the
supreme value of the book.

But no book has suffered more at the hands of its friends than has the
Bible. The Bible is an Eastern book, and it is filled with glowing
metaphors and parables. Dull, unimaginative Western minds said: 'These
are literally true, and unless you believe them so you are lost.' The
writer of the beautiful book of Jonah wrote a story rebuking the narrow
spirit of the Jews, and his book has become the citadel of all the
narrow souls who see nothing in it but the whale. Children should be
taught that science and religion cannot contradict each other, because
they both are revelations of the one God; that the Bible is full of
poetry and parables which the writers never meant that any should
mistake for treatises; that the slaughter of the Canaanites and the
psalms of cursing are no more of