Our Canon I am afraid cannot take in such things, and with the plays we must banish also all the novels; the greater books of such writers as Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi, Hardy, Hamsun, that great succession of writers--they are all good for "example of life and instruction of manners," and to the Apocrypha they must go. And so it is that since I would banish _Romeo and Juliet_, I would also banish the Song of Songs, and since I must put away _Vanity Fair_ and the _Shabby Genteel Story_, I would also put away _Esther_ and _Ruth_. And I find myself most reluctant to exclude not any novels written in English, but one or two great sweeping books by non-English writers. It seems to me that Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ and Hamsun's _Growth of the Soil_ are books on an almost Biblical scale, that they deal with life so greatly as to come nearest to the idea of a universally inspiring and illuminating literature which underlies the idea of our Canon. If we put in any whole novels into the Canon I would plead for these. But I will not plead now even for these. I do not think any novels at all can go into our modern Bible, as whole works. The possibility of long passages going in, is of course, quite a different matter. And passing now from great plays and great novels and romances, we come to the still more difficult problem of great philosophical and critical works. Take _Gulliver's Travels_--an intense, dark, stirring criticism of life and social order--and the _Dialogues of Plato_, full of light and inspiration. In these latter we might quarry for beautiful passages for our Canon, but I do not think we could take them in as wholes, and if we do not take them in as complete books, then I think that Semitic parallel to these Greek dialogues, The Book of Job, must stand not in our Canon, but in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha. And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world. There again I am for exclusion. This Bible we are considering must be universally available. If it is too bulky for universal use it loses its primary function of a moral cement. We cannot include the _Iliad_, the Norse Sagas, the _Æneid_ or _Paradise Lost_ in our Canon. Let them swell the great sack of our Apocrypha, and let the children read them if they will. When one glances in this fashion over the accumulated literary resources of mankind it becomes plain that our canonical books of literature in this modern Bible of ours can be little more than an Anthology or a group of Anthologies. Perhaps they might be gathered under separate heads, as the 'Book of Freedom,' the 'Book of Justice,' the 'Book of Charity.' And now having done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to accept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of thing that I imagine would best serve the purpose of our Bible and that should certainly be included.