rms instead of being
associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousand
other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are many reasons;
and one of them is that children all like the story of Jonah and the
whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations by
Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not have
fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be credible of a
whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can stand
moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case
for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction book
is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor
even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes them
sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the
authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree
reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the
picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an
adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for
a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves
the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen
and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which is
a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable
of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child,
children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the
opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad
effect of Bible stories on infants.

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion from
a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is only
by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the
whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception
of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find
this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous
or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any
particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest
of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor
desirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring
it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not s