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 of
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.
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