First, a Child’s Bible. The only real _essentials_ of this would be,
carefully selected passages, suitable for a child’s reading, and
pictures. One principle of selection, which I would adopt, would be that
Religion should be put before a child as a revelation of _love_—no need
to pain and puzzle the young mind with the history of crime and
punishment. (On such a principle I should, for example, omit the history
of the Flood.) The supplying of the pictures would involve no great
difficulty: no new ones would be needed: hundreds of excellent pictures
already exist, the copyright of which has long ago expired, and which
simply need photo-zincography, or some similar process, for their
successful reproduction. The book should be handy in size—with a pretty
attractive-looking cover—in a clear legible type—and, above all, with
abundance of pictures, pictures, pictures!
Secondly, a book of pieces selected from the Bible—not single texts, but
passages of from 10 to 20 verses each—to be committed to memory. Such
passages would be found useful, to repeat to one’s-self and to ponder
over, on many occasions when reading is difficult, if not impossible:
for instance, when lying awake at night—on a railway-journey—when taking
a solitary walk—in old age, when eye-sight is failing or wholly
lost—and, best of all, when illness, while incapacitating us for reading
or any other occupation, condemns us to lie awake through many weary
silent hours: at such a time how keenly one may realise the truth of
David’s rapturous cry ‘_O how sweet are thy words unto my throat: yea,
sweeter than honey unto my mouth!_’
I have said ‘passages,’ rather than single texts, because we have no
means of _recalling_ single texts: memory needs _links_, and here are
none: one may have a hundred texts stored in the memory, and not be able
to recall, at will, more than half-a-dozen—and those by mere chance:
whereas, once get hold of any portion of a _chapter_ that has been
committed to memory, and the whole can be recovered: all hangs together.
Thirdly, a collection of passages, both prose and verse, from books
other than the Bible. There is not perhaps much, in what is called
‘un-inspired’ literature (a misnomer, I hold: if Shakespeare was not
inspired, one may well doubt if any man ever was), that will bear the
process of being pondered over, a hundred times: still there _are_ such
passages—enough, I think, to make a goodly store for the memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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