THE CO-ORDINATION OF THE BIBLE WITH OTHER

SUBJECTS OF STUDY

PRESIDENT WILLIAM H. P. FAUNCE, D.D.,

BROWN UNIVERSITY, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

When a new idea enters the mind, its power to work permanent changes in character and life depends chiefly on the intimacy of its relations to ideas already there. If it comes as a stranger and remains unrelated and alien, it is powerless to mold life, and it either soon vanishes or remains as a foreign substance constituting an impediment and danger. When a meteorite falls to the earth, it forms no relation to anything here. It can only be labeled and placed in a museum. When a seed falls into the same soil, it begins to put forth tentacles, to reach upward and downward, to absorb and assimilate, and makes itself a part of its environment. The new becomes efficient only by establishing relations with the old.

The same thing is true in the case of any system of ideas such as is presented in a definite course of study. The best students of education have been largely occupied in recent years with the problem of the correlation of studies. They are agreed that the study of any subject which is regarded as an end in itself, which is isolated from the rest of the pupil's life, involves much waste of time. The injury done by the old memory drill was not that it exercised the memory, but that it exercised nothing else. To spend years in memorizing isolated facts and dates regarding royal families or famous battles is not to study history, and is devoid of any result. The isolated data were inserted in the mind as dead branches thrust into the boughs of a living tree, soon to drop out again. If a student acquires by patient drill a foreign language, and then fails to relate it by daily use to his daily occupation, it speedily slips from him as a temporary attachment. Facts are useless except as we perceive their relations. It is their relations that constitute their value.

Worse yet, the isolation of any study leads inevitably to a divided personality in the student. To produce strong character we must have a unified harmonious personality. Mind is not a mere aggregation of insights or knowledges, and character is never built up by the agglutinative method. A superintendent of schools in a western city has said that he has found many pupils who have never connected in their own minds the Mississippi River of the school geography with the great

stream forever flowing past their very doors. Many a boy has hated trigonometry until he has discovered that it would help him in sailing a ship. To regard geography and mathematics as belonging to the hated tasks of school, and rivers and ships as belonging to the fascinating realm of action, is to live intellectually a double life with dubious results.

Indeed, without such correlation there is a constant sense of unreality which may end in insincerity. Under the spur of the schoolmaster's rod, or the marking system, or the offer of rewards and prizes, the pupil may perform feats of acquisition; but the play of great motives is wanting, the great deeps of personality are stagnant, and the will is unstirred.

All these considerations apply with peculiar force to Bible study. If Paul could say that some of the early Christians so misused the Lord's Supper as "to eat and drink condemnation to themselves," it surely may be true that some students so use the Bible as to produce mental disorder and moral insincerity. Bible study may damage the harmony and efficiency of the personality, and lead to pronounced religious reactions. It may result in a mere series of inhibitions, paralyzing native strength and will. It may be so separated in time, place, method, aim, and point of view from all other studies as practically to compel the student to choose between the intellectual attitude of the public school or the college, and the intellectual attitude generated, if not demanded, by the church. This painful opposition produces restiveness, if not revolt, in some of the best minds of our day. Thousands of students are now hesitating between the attitude of the pulpit and that of the professor's chair. If on Sunday the appeal is to authority, but on Monday to experiment; if on Sunday the appeal is to the receptive powers, but on Monday to the motor and constructive faculties; if on Sunday the appeal is to fear, on Monday to hope and love; if in the church we point to the supernatural and other-worldly, but in the school to the natural and the tangible; if in the church we address the sense of sin, in the school the sense of self-respect; if the church addresses the feelings, while the public school addresses the intelligence-the fault may lie on both sides, but the result is lamentable. It is this sad choice of imaginary alternatives that sent Francis W. Newman into the ranks of the rationalists, and John Henry Newman into the priesthood.

Our Puritan fathers faced no such problem, because for them the Bible was the norm and goal of all study. They had achieved what the Herbartians call the concentration of studies, and the Bible was the center. They learned to read that they might read the literature of Israel; their writing was heavy with noble Old Testament phrases; the names of Old Testament heroes they gave to their children; its words

of immortal hope they inscribed on their tombstones; its Mosaic commonwealth they sought to realize in England and America; its decalogue was the foundation of their laws, and its prophecies were a light shining in a dark place. Such a unification of knowledge produced a unified character, simple, stalwart, invincible. They spoke, planted, builded, sailed, governed from one center, saved by their education from the desultory disjointed activity of those educated under a mass of heterogeneous impulses. The Greeks achieved marvelous results through the unity of their education, though using slender materials. They had only the elements of science, no language save their own, no music that we dare to repeat. But out of Homer they got training in language, music, rhetoric, history, geography, cosmogony, theology; and their life was well proportioned, strong, and serene. So the Puritan, drawing his science and literature, his philosophy and political economy, his law and gospel out of the Bible, achieved a co-ordination of studies which, however narrow, was most effective.

We can never return to the Puritan point of view in education. Our thoughts have widened with the process of the suns. We can no longer regard the laws of Deuteronomy as binding on us, or the morality of the Old Testament as complete. We no longer look to the Bible for our astronomy, our geology, or even our psychology. The center of studies is for us the nature of the child, made in the image of God, and revealing God at every stage of its growth. But because we believe that the word of God as revealed in the Bible is absolutely essential to the education of every human being, we ask for a close and constant co-ordination of Bible study with all the studies of the schools. The uniqueness of the Bible does not mean the isolation of the Bible. Because it is unique it is needed at every stage of the child's growth, and needed in vital contact with all the subjects of study. Religious education is simply education at its best, education developed to its full meaning and possibility, just as a religious man is simply man at his noblest attainment. Religion is not brought to the school as a new piece of furniture, to be thrust into a room already crowded. It comes into the crowded room as the sunlight, revealing the meaning and value of all that was there before. The study of the Bible is not to be laid as a new burden on an overloaded curriculum; it is to be welcomed as a supreme help in realizing the present aim of every true school and every teacher who has learned to echo the primeval cry, "Let us make man." If the principle of graded instruction is valid in the study of American history, it is just as valid in the study of the history of Israel. The principle of uniformity has the same value and the same defects in the study of

English literature as in the study of Biblical literature. The personal contact, the touch of soul on soul, which has been so strong a feature of our Bible schools, is equally needed in the teaching of physical science in the public schools. The Bible comes as the ally of all other study, and the interpreter of all mental and moral growth.

In the earlier years of childhood it is universally agreed that the story should be the main vehicle of instruction. The child needs not the proposition or the lecture, but the vivid, concrete, objective fact; the "truth embodied in a tale." So we go to the great storehouses of classic and mediæval stories. We make the children acquainted with Ulysses and Hector and Priam, with the heroes of the Norse mythology, with the Knights of the Round Table, or with the folklore and fairy-stories common to all civilized peoples. But the best material of this kind in the world is to be found in the stories of the Old Testament. The stories of the garden of Eden, of the tower of Babel, of the flood, of Jacob's dream, of David's struggles and victories, of Samuel's call, are bright with color, free from complex detail, moving in the realm of large and simple motives, packed with moral purpose. While in the public school the children are learning of Hiawatha and Sir Launfal, they may learn at home of Goliath and Daniel and Isaiah. I know at least one boy that longs for Sunday to come that he may hear the Bible stories, reserved for that day only. Yet it may be questioned whether they should be reserved for one day only. It would be a base concession to sectarian prejudice if we should exclude from the public school the lives of heroes, simply because they happen to be the heroes of Israel. If we may recount the wanderings of Ulysses, why not those of Abraham ? If we may include the temptations of Parsifal, why not those of Joseph ? It is impossible that a Christian people should discriminate against their own heroes, on the ground that somebody might misuse the story for sectarian purposes. Such narrowness must be transient. The stories of the Old Testament, with those of Greece and Rome and Scandinavia, form the best possible pabulum for developing the imagination, conscience, and will of childhood. Not all of the Bible is good for all ages. The attempt to teach children the Pauline epistles or the minor prophets is futile. But the material furnished in the Biblical stories is surpassingly vivid, and for childhood indispensable.

A little later in the child's life comes the study of language. But there can be no adequate study of English apart from our English Bible. The preference of the common people for the King James version is not the result of ignorance. It is the preference for a great English classic, rather than for a diluted version which has gained in accuracy, but

has lost in courage, resonance, and power. If two writers of so opposite temperament as John Ruskin and Charles A. Dana can direct all wouldbe masters of our English speech to the Bible, we may well believe their witness. Burke and Webster, Wordsworth and Tennyson, are unintelligible apart from knowledge of the Bible, and no child brought up in the atmosphere of the Bible can fail to get command of his mothertongue.

When the growing child comes to the serious study of literature, he ought to realize that no nobler literature exists than that of Israel. Side by side with the development of the literatures of modern Europe should go the study of the growth of the poetry and prophecy of the Old Testament. Job is as worthy of study as Eschylus or Goethe. The exquisite letter of Paul to Philemon cannot be matched by anything in the correspondence of Cicero or Seneca, and the proverbs of Solomon deserve at least as much attention as the maxims of poor Richard.

I should like to see the Religious Education Association appoint a committee of representative men from various churches to compile a book of selections from the Bible, suited for use in our schools. It would be easy for Protestant, Catholic, Jew, and agnostic to agree on certain historical and ethical selections from the Bible, which, if I mistake not, would speedily find their way into general use in the public schools of America.

When the boy comes to the study of history, he needs to realize that Semitic history is quite as valuable to us as that of Greece or Rome. The student of the development of laws and institutions cannot ignore the laws of ancient Israel or the origin of the Christian church. If these things cannot be taught in the public school, they certainly can be in the home and private school and the Christian college. Thirty years ago there was not a college in New England where a student could get any instruction in the Bible. Yet every one of these colleges was founded deep in Christian faith. This surprising omission of a former generation is now remedied, and we are offering courses in Biblical history and literature in every institution of the highest collegiate grade. Surely no study of ethics is worthy of college men which deals with Aristotle and Kant, but ignores the epistles to the Corinthians, or the Sermon on the Mount. The ethical content of the Pauline world-view is quite as important for us as the system of Schopenhauer or of Nietzsche. The organization of the New England town-meeting is no more weighty for the American boy than the organization of the early Christian church. John Adams and John Hancock and Abraham Lincoln are only the natural successors of the great Hebrew champions of liberty and right