CHILDREN AND THE BOOK OF PROVERBS.
ACORRESPONDENT whose feeling and judgment we sincerely respect, has written us an earnest bat private remonstrance against the article on the "Chicago Bible" in our last week's issue. We are not at liberty to publish the letter, but there can be no harm in giving a resume of
its general line of protest. Our correspondent regards the use of the words " sententious " and " cynical " as applied to the author or authors of the Book of Proverbs, as very derogatory to one of the inspired writers, and conjectures that the author of the article was not really familiar with the Book he was speaking of ; and considers that the comparative neglect of the Book of Proverbs is due to the emotional and highly strung temper of the present generation ; further, that children do not share this emotional and highly strong temperament, and are very much impressed by plain, practical, pithy wisdom ; and again, that such sentences as "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord," "The righteous man regardeth the life of his beast," "A. whisperer separateth chief friends," " Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker," "He that ruleth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city," and hundreds of other weighty sentences of the same kind, are calculated to make a very power- al impression on children's minds. We cannot conceive how the word " sententious " can be regarded as in any sense disre- spectful. Surely we usually regard sententious wisdom as wis- dom of a very taking kind ; nor can we conceive how it can be more objectionable to speak of an inspired writer as showing a very cynical vein of thought running through his mind, than it
ii to speak of one of the noblest of the Psalms,—.say the 137th Psalm beginning "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and
wept," as penetrated, as it certainly is, by a thread of vindictive feeling. Surely these human elements in the inspired writers are matters of fact, not matters of opinion.
For the rest we may reply that the writer of the article wrote from his own experience. He was brought up to enter- tain the greatest respect for the Book of Proverbs, but he can remember vividly, even to the present day, the disappointment he always felt when the book of Scripture from which the daily chapter was selected, fell to the lot of the Book of Proverbs. Even the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its still darker and more dreary wisdom, impressed him more,—on account of the singular grandeur of the description of decay and the approach of death with which it closes. We are far from supposing that every child's impressions of different kinds of spiritual teaching are the same ; and the writer is perfectly willing to admit that there may be children, though he never met with them, who are more profoundly affected by the apophthegms of weary experience, than by the flashes of prophetic insight in the teachers of the Bible. The present writer makes no pretence to very close study of the feelings of children on the subject. And so far as his own experience is contradicted by the experience of men of larger range, he is perfectly willing to admit that the Chicago selection may have been better than it seems to him. But we should certainly say that as regards not only the inspiration of the Bible, but also the impressiveness of more ordinary human efforts to write for children, the didactic style often fails of its purpose. Miss Edgeworth's books for children, for instance, which are very clever of their kind, seem to us to have excited as much revolt in children's minds by their appeals to utilitarian
considerations as they excited interest by their liveliness, in- genuity, and discriminating pictures of children's characters.
We are disposed to think that books of warning like those attributed to Solomon and the other Proverb-writers of the Hebrews, impress chiefly those who have lived long enough to verify those warnings by their own memories of life; in other words, the parents and guardians of children, not the children themselves. And we are quite sure that the picturesque lessons which virtually add to a child's experience of life without im- pressing on him any such sanctions as those of utilitarian wisdom, live far more vividly in his memory than those which merely tell him what miserable consequences will result from his ignoring the lessons of his elders, and what safety he will glean from his observance of them. It is certainly not the sentimentalism of the modern age which renders the pithy sententiousness of the Book of Proverbs unimpressive to children. But children are acute reasoners, and if they are told that the chief reason for avoiding a wrong action is that they will suffer for it, and the chief reason for their denying themselves now, is that they will gather the most delightful fruits from that self-denial hereafter, they will take leave to make such calculations for themselves, will balance their eager wish for a particular enjoyment against any estimate they can form of the suffering which they may have ultimately to pay for it, and will abide by their own computation of the result. On the other hand, if they are thrilled by the pictures of a prophetic imagination, such as we find in the poetical traditions of Israel, or the songs of the exiles, or the heroic deeds of men who walked arough the valley of the shadow of death, fearing no evil because the staff of divine help had upheld them, and the rod of divine displeasure had humiliated them, they accept that divine story with eagerness because it seems to lift them to a higher level of action and passion, and to make for that larger life to which they are always reaching forward. It is chiefly by the aid of their imaginative sympathy with the lives of others that children's experience is enlarged. And it is not enlarged by the mere dried fruit of abstract reflec- tions such as old men set store by. Tell a child the story of the Shunamite woman's passionate confidence in Elisha, of her laying her dead son upon the Prophet's bed, and borrow- ing one of her husband's asses that she may "run to the man of God and come again," without even telling her husband the misfortune that had befallen them, and he will follow her steps with the most eager interest, watch her refusing to stir from the Prophet's side, when Elisha sends his servant to do for him what she felt assured that he only could do in his own person; and will finally rejoice in the restoration of the child to life as if that great victory of faith had taken place before his own eyes. But the compressed wisdom of venerable maxims takes little hold upon him. It needs the illustration which life gives it to impress him, and cannot enter into his heart till it has been furnished with a living form and body of its own. No doubt it is per- fectly true that the Proverbs of Scripture do not in any way confine themselves to utilitarian considerations, though that is their leading vein of thought. They have fine gleams of generous instinct in them, and not unfrequently place God before the eyes as a vision far more impressive and command- ing than any vision of good or evil consequences. But even so they are seldom great additions to the child's field of living experience. They are like pemmican, food too concentrated for the natural nourishment of his mind, generalisations to which he has not the key, short summaries such as we get in books of reference, instead of vivid delineations of living action and suffering.
We hold that the Bible is never really understood until we regard its inspirations as thoroughly penetrating the human life it depicts, and not in any sense excluding human defects from' it. We regard the different books as human creations, but human creations more or less knitted together and overruled by the divine spirit. And there is to us no more irreverence in considering the Books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as in the main the compositions of men who had had a great experience of the evil side of life, and who summed up that experience in sentences often deeply scarred by a certain bitterness of mixed ennui and remorse, than there is in recognising plainly the sins as wel as the faith of Abraham and Moses and David. The wisdom of Solomon and of the other proverbial writers of the Bible is as distinctly marked by the special moral failings of the writer as the patriotic Psalms of the exile are by the vindictiveness of the singer when he imprecates vengeance on the daughter of Babylon. What raises such writers above their human im- perfections is the faith in God which springs clear and sweet above all these failings, and makes itself heard above the human passion with which it battles. All we maintain is that, in such books as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, you see a good deal of the limitations and defects which characterise men of the world who have turned to God, as well as a good deal of the higher wisdom which has only narrowly escaped the suffoca- tion of a calculating prudence. And though this may be very impressive to men of the same class, it is hardly well fitted to possess the imagination of childhood, which naturally craves a very different kind of food,—the food of high traditions of personal heroism, or the pathetic poetry of youth and hope. There is divine overruling in both kinds of literature, but the one is not as well suited to children as the other.
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