To reveal to the pupil a new world, and to make him, without possessing knowledge, love knowledge, there is no book but the Bible. I speak even for those who do not regard the Bible as a revelation. There are no other works--at least I know none--which in so compressed and poetic a form contain all those sides of human thought which the Bible unites in itself. All the questions raised by natural phenomena are there dealt with. Of all the primitive relations of men with one another: the family, the State, and religion, we first become conscious through that book. The generalisations of thought and wisdom, with the charm given by their childlike simplicity of form, seize the pupil's mind for the first time. Not only does the lyricism of David's psalms act on the minds of the elder pupils; but more than that, from this book every one becomes conscious for the first time of the whole beauty of the epos in its incomparable simplicity and strength. Who has not wept over the story of Joseph and his meeting with his brethren? Who has not, with bated breath, told the story of the bound and shorn Samson, revenging himself on his enemies and perishing under the ruins of the palace he destroys, or received a hundred other impressions on which we were reared as on our mothers' milk? Let those who deny the educative value of the Bible and say it is out of date, invent a book and stories explaining the phenomena of Nature, either from general history or from the imagination, which will be accepted as the Bible stories are; and then we will admit that the Bible is obsolete.... Drawn though it may be from a one-sided experience, I repeat my conviction. The development of a child or a man in our society without the Bible, is as inconceivable as that of an ancient Greek would have been without Homer. The Bible is the only book to begin with, for a child's reading. The Bible, both in its form and in its contents, should serve as a model for all children's primers and all reading books. A translation of the Bible into the language of the common folk, would be the best book for the people. When pupils came from other schools where they had had to learn Scripture by heart, or had been inoculated with the abbreviated school-primer versions, Tolstoy found that the Bible had nothing like as strong an effect as it had on boys who came fresh to it. Such pupils do not experience what is felt by fresh pupils, who listen to the Bible with beating heart, seizing every word, thinking that now, now at last, all the wisdom of the world is about to be revealed to them. In reading the above passages, it should be borne in mind that in Russian usage 'The Bible' means the Old Testament only.