is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty.  There was no Greek school in which Homer was not read; cannot our popular schools, with their narrow range and their jejune alimentation in secular literature, do as much for the Bible as the Greek schools did for Homer?”

In 1870 he wrote about a book[20] by two young Jewish ladies:  “I am sure it will be found, as I told them, that their book meets a real want; there were good books about the Bible for the learned, and there were bad books about it—­that is to say, bad resumes of its history and literature—­for the general public; but anything like a good and sound resume for the general public did not exist till this book came.”

It is interesting to observe that to his deep conviction of the ethical and educational value of the Bible is due his only direct and constructive effort to enrich the apparatus of the schools which he inspected.  Of improvement by way of criticism and suggestion he gave them enough and to spare, but to supply them with a new reading-book was a departure from his usual method.  Nevertheless in 1872 he wrote:  “An ounce of practice, they say, is better than a pound of theory; and certainly one may talk for ever about the wonder-working power of Letters, and yet produce no good at all, unless one really puts people in the way of feeling their power.  The friends of Physics do not content themselves with extolling Physics; they put forth school-books by which the study of Physics may be with proper advantage brought near to those who before were strangers to it; and they do wisely.  For any one who believes in the civilizing power of Letters, and often talks of this belief, to think that he has for more than twenty years got his living by inspecting schools for the people, has gone in and out among them, has seen that the power of Letters never reaches them at all, and that the whole study of Letters is thereby discredited, and its power called in question, and yet has attempted nothing to remedy this state of things, cannot but be vexing and disquieting.  He may truly say, like the Israel of the prophet, ’We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth’! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can, in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he began saying this twenty years ago.  Even if what he does cannot be of service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the work may be of service hereafter.”