Melius est reprehendant nos grammatici quam non intelligant populi. (It’s better that the grammarians should chide us than that the people should not understand us.)
And if Bible-reading is not accompanied by constraint and solemnity, as if it were a sacramental operation, I do not believe there is anything in which children take more pleasure. At least I know that some of the pleasantest recollections of my childhood are connected with the voluntary study of an ancient Bible which belonged to my grandmother. There were splendid pictures in it, to be sure; but I recollect little or nothing about them save a portrait of the high priest in his vestments. What come vividly back on my mind are remembrances of my delight in the histories of Joseph and of David; and of my keen appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealing with Lot. Like a sudden flash there returns back upon me, my utter scorn of the pettifogging meanness of Jacob, and my sympathetic grief over the heartbreaking lamentation of the cheated Esau, “Hast thou not a blessing for me also, O my father?” And I see, as in a cloud, pictures of the grand phantasmagoria of the Book of Revelation.
I enumerate, as they issue, the childish impressions which come crowding out of the pigeon-holes in my brain, in which they have lain almost undisturbed for forty years. I prize them as an evidence that a child of five or six years old, left to his own devices, may be deeply interested in the Bible, and draw sound moral sustenance from it. And I rejoice that I was left to deal with the Bible alone; for if I had had some theological “explainer” at my side, he might have tried, as such do, to lessen my indignation against Jacob, and thereby have warped my moral sense for ever; while the great apocalyptic spectacle of the ultimate triumph of right and justice might have been turned to the base purposes of a pious lampooner of the Papacy.
Have you ever seen a man when some neighbors who are unpopular drop in for an evening call? After they are gone, his wife says:
“I do wish you wouldn’t bite the Andersons when they come in, Joe!”
“Bite them! I was civil, wasn’t I?”
“Well, you can call it that.”
He is ready to examine the window locks, but he turns and surveys her, and he is honestly puzzled.
“What I can’t make out,” he says, “is how you can fall all over yourself to those people, when you know you detest them. Thank heavens, I’m no hypocrite.”
Then he locks the windows and stalks up-stairs, and the hypocrite of the family smiles a little to herself. Because she knows that without her there would be no society and no neighborhood calls, and that honesty can be a vice, and hypocrisy a virtue.
We naturally lose illusions as we get older, like teeth, but there is no one to fit a new set into our understandings. I have, alas! only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call blessed! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,—something as if he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom” every acquaintance he met,—that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don’t doubt he would cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?