as
the sacred text. It was the name of the butterfly--a name almost as
beautiful as herself. So I was enabled to return her book to her. There
is, of course, no need to mention a name as well-known for good works as
good looks. It will suffice to say that it was the name of the most
beautiful actress in the world.

There is a moral to this story. Morals--to stories--are once more
coming into fashion. The Bible, in my boyhood, came to us with no such
associations as I have recalled. There were no butterflies between its
pages, nor was it presented to us by fair or gracious hands. It was a
very grim and minatory book, wielded, as it seemed to one's childish
ignorance, for the purpose which that young priest of St. Sulpice had
used the pages of his copy of the _Proverbs of King Solomon_, that of
crushing out the joy of life.

My first acquaintance with it as I remember, was in a Methodist chapel
in Staffordshire, England, where three small boys, including myself,
prisoned in an old-fashioned high-back pew, were endeavouring to relieve
the apparently endless _ennui_ of the service by eating surreptitious
apples. Suddenly upon our three young heads descended what seemed like a
heavy block of wood, wielded by an ancient deacon who did not approve
of boys. We were, each of us, no more than eight years old, and the book
which had thus descended upon our heads was nothing more to us than a
very weighty book--to be dodged if possible, for we were still in that
happy time of life when we hated all books. We knew nothing of its
contents--to us it was only a schoolmaster's cane, beating us into
silence and good behaviour.

So the Bible has been for many generations of boys a book even more
terrible than Caesar's _Commentaries_ or the _Aeneid_ of Virgil--the
dull thud of a mysterious cudgel upon the shoulders of youth which you
bore as courageously as you could.

So many of us grew up with what one might call a natural prejudice
against the Bible.

Then some of us who cared for literature took it up casually and found
its poetic beauty. We read the _Book of Job_--which, by the way, Mr.
Swinburne is said to have known by heart; and as we read it even the
stars themselves seemed less wonderful than this description of their
marvel and mystery:

_Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the hands of
Orion?_

_Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide
Arcturus with his sons?_

Or we