The Man of Letters as a Man of Business

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eglected idea, an idea that was first broached I believe about the time when the State of Conn

of Milton. He travelled from one European country to another with his political and educational ideas. For a time he thought of coming to America. It is a great pity that he never came. And his idea, the particula

nce of their circumstances. Between 1640 and 1650, just as in our present age, the world was tremendously unsettled and distressed. A century and more of expansion and prosperity had given place to a phase of conflict, exhaustion and entire political unsettlement. Britain was involved in the bitter political struggle that culminated in the execution of King Charles I. Ireland was a land of massacre and counter-massacre. The Thirty Years War in Central Europe was in its closing, most dreadful

s most of us have been distressed and dismayed-by a rapid development of violence, by a great release of cruelty and suffering in human affairs. He felt none of the security that was felt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the certainty of progress. He realized as we do that the outlook for humanity is a very dark and uncertain one unless human effort is stimulated and organized. He traced the evils of his time to human discords and divisions, to our political divisions, and t

modern states reaches everyone-whether our education can include and ought to include such a Book of Necessary Knowledge

Testament together-it has formed a culture, and unified and kept together through many generations great masses of people. It has been the basis of the Jewish and Christian civilizations alike. And even in the New World the State of Connecticut did, I believe, in its earliest beginnings take the Bible as its only law. Nevertheless, I hope I shall not offend any reader if I point out that the Bible is not all that we need to-day, a

d sacrificial procedure. There is again, so far as the latter day citizen is concerned, an excess of information about the minor Kings of Israel and Judah. And there is more light than most of us feel we require nowadays upon the foreign

ing fortunes for four centuries. That is much more important to our modern world than the ancient conflict of Assyria and Egypt which plays so large a part in the old Bible record. And there are all sorts of moral problems arising out of modern conditions on which the Bible sheds little or no direct lig

he facts that the history of Judah and Israel is told twice over and that the gospel narrative is repeated four times over for example, do not seem at all odd to us. How

s on to a fairly detailed account of the beginnings and early politics of the Christian Church. It gives the opening literature of theological exposition. And then, with that strange and doubtful book, the Revelation of St. John the Divine, it comes to an end. As I say, it leaves off. It leav

ess could not have come into existence and could not have been sustained without it. It has explained the world to the mass of our people, and it has given them moral standards and a form into which their consciences could work. But does it do that to-day? Frankly, I do not think it does. I think that during the last century the Bible has lost

of what I am driving at-our modern communities are no longer cemented, they lack organized solidarity, they are not prepared to stand shocks and strains, they have become dangerously loose mentally and morally. That, I believe, is the clue to a great proportion of the present social and political troubles of the world. We need to get back to a cement. We want a Bible. We want a Bible s

mpossible to restore and reconstruct a Bible for the needs of these great and dangerous days in which we are living. Can we re-cem

but as a moving and interesting story into which he himself finally came, a story of promises made and destinies to be fulfilled. It gave him a dramatic relationship to the schemes of things. It linked him to all mankind with a conception of relationships an

of all right education; it is the fundamental purpose of the school, and I do not believe an individual can be happy or a community be prosperous without it. The Bible and the religions based on it gave that idea of a place in the world to the people it taug

o-day. Nothing has been done to fill up these widening gaps. We have so great a respect for the letter of the Bible that we ignore its spirit and its proper use. We do not rewrite and retell Genesis in the light and l

itizen and afterwards a gentleman out of the crude, vulgar, self-seeking individual. Does education even pretend to do as much to-day? It does nothing of the sort. Our young people are taught to read and write. They are taught bookkeeping and language

t education exists for the individual. Education exists for the community and the race; i

ation. Men will not co-operate except to raise prices on the consumer or wages on the employer, and everyone scrambles for a front place and a good time. And they do so, partly no doubt by virtue of an ineradicable factor in them known as Ori

our world, the vast ages of its making and the astounding unfolding, age after age, of Life. We shall tell of the changing climates of this spinning globe and the coming and going of great floras and faunas, mighty races of living things, until out of the vast, slow process our own kind emerged. And we shall tell the story of our race. How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently

y, only robbed of ancient trappings and symbols, and made real and fresh again for our present ideas. It will still be a story of conditional promises, the promises of human possibility, a record of sins and blunders and lost oppor

lish Translation of the Bible, and the Prayer Book of the English Church are all the productions of committees, and they are all fine and inspiring compilations. For the last three years I have been experimenting with this particular task, and, with the help of six other people, I have sketched out and published an outline of our world's origins and history to show the sort of thing I mean. That Outline is, of course, a corrupting mass of faults and minor inaccura

rld by Mr. Oscar Browning published in 1913. But there are several educationists in America who have been at work on the same task. In this matter of a more generalized

al and Modern Times, which together make a very complete history of civilized man. They do not, however, give a history of life before man, nor very much of human pre-history. Another admira

ength of Dickens' novel of Bleak House. So there you have it. There is the thing shown to be possible. If it is possible for us isolated workers to do as much then why should not the thing be done in a big and authoritative manner? Why should we not have a great educational conference of teachers, scientific men and historians from all the

ised, and it could be revised and br

y significance and dignity. It would lift their imaginations up to a new level. I say lift, but I mean restore their imaginations to a former level. Because if you look back into the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers, let us say, or into those of the great soldiers and statesmen of Cromwellian England, you will find that these men had a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no o

on, a rewriting of Genesis and Exodus and Judges and Chronicles in

worth

Indeed it was not even that, for it was written without vowels. That was not a merit, nor a precedent for us; it was an unavoidable limitation in those days; but under modern conditions there is no reason whatever why we should confine our Bible to words when a drawing or a map can better express the thing we wi

e groundwork upon which the rest was built. Let us now consider what else the Bible

es of Life. Rules of Health. Prescriptions-often very detailed and intimate-of permissible and unpermissi

oints, upon what constitutes cleanness or uncleanness, upon ablutions, upon what a man or woman may eat and what may not be eaten, upon a number of such points. It was for its times and circumstances a directory of healthy

zation needs to be fuller and different from its prototype upon these matters. The real Bible dealt with an oriental population living under much cruder conditions than our own, engaged mainly in agriculture, and with a far less various dietary than ours. They had fermented but not distilled liquors; they had no preserved nor refrigerated foods; they married at adolescence; many grave diseases that prevail to-day were unknown to them, and thei

ive value of light and knowledge. And we have a very considerable literature of books on-what shall I call it? on Sex Wisdom, which aim to prevent some of that great volume of misery, deprivation and nervous disease due to the prevailing ignorance and secrecy in these matters. For in these matters great multitudes of modern people still live in an ignorance that would have been inconceivable to an ancient Hebrew. In England now the books of such a writer as Dr. Marie Stopes ar

the Bible is extraordinarily unhelpful when we come to modern issues, because its rules and regulations were framed for a community and for an economic system altogether cruder, more limited and less complicated than our own. Much of the Old Testament we have to remember was already in existence before the free use of coined metal. The vast credit sys

in its responsibilities with the nature of the property. The property one has in one's toothbrush is different from the property one has in ten thousand acres of land; the property one has in a photogr

that everything belongs to somebody else or that one is entitled to exercise proprietary rights over everything that does not belong to oneself. (I confess that communistic practice is a little difficult to formulate.) Between these extremists you can find every variety of idea about what one may do and about what one may not do with money and credit and property generally. Is it an offence to gamble? Is it an offence to speculate? Is it an offence to hold fertile fields and not cultivate them? Is it an offence to hold fertile f

e freedom that is claimed for all sorts of property and exercised by all sorts of property to waste or withhold is the clue to t

other part of the modern Bible. I want to see it at work in the schools and in the law-courts. I admit that it would be a most difficult book to write and that we should raise controversial storms over every verse. But what an excellent thing to have it out, once for all, with some of these ran

ification of property and the restraints upon each class of property, systematic and world-wide? If we could so moralize the use of property, if we could arrive at a clear idea of just what use an owner could make of his machinery, or a financier could make of his credit, would there be much left