There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible.  “Chords of power,” he said, “are touched by this instruction which no other part of the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the single religious chord only.  The Bible is for the child in an elementary school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy.  What a course of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as part of their school programme!  All who value the Bible may rest assured that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to extend the power and efficacy of the Bible.”

The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School.  “The Bible’s application and edification belong to the Church; its literary and historical substance to the School.”  He saw clearly the manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it.  He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words, I will lay thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires, as authorizing “the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome”; and to Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; “and in these cases of application who shall decide”?  What he insisted on was the value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily accessible to all.  He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy, reverence, and, above all, “as a Literature,”—­for biblical teaching ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is composed:  the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style, but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity and the period of time to which each made its appeal.

In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report—­

“Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other.  This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view.  Some will say that what we propose