Let Trevelyan tell the story: "While other literary movements, however noble in quality, affect only a few, the study of the Bible was becoming the national education.Recommended by the king, translated by the Bishops, yet in chief request with the Puritans, without the rivalry of books andnewspapers, the Bible told to the unscholarly the story of another age and race, not in bald generalization and doctrinal harangue, but with such wealth of simple narrative and lyrical force that each man recognized his own dim strivings after a new spirit, written clear in words two thousand years old.A deep and splendid effect was wrought by the monopoly of this Book as the sole reading of common households, in an age when men's minds were instinct with natural poetry and open to receive the light of imagination.A new religion arose, of which the mythus was the Bible stories and the pervading spirit the direct relations of man with God, exemplified in the human life.And while imagination was kindled, the intellect was freed by this private study of the Bible.For its private study involved its private interpretation.Each reader, even if a Churchman, became in some sort a church to himself.Hence the hundred sects and thousand doctrines that astonished foreigners and opened England's strange path to intellectual liberty.The Bible cultivated here, more than in any other land, the growth of intellectual thought and practice."[1]
[1] England under the Stuarts.
All that has seemed to refer only to England, but the same essential democracy of the Bible came to America and founded the new nation.It was a handful of Puritans turned Pilgrims who set out in the Mayflower to give their Bible ideas free field.In a dozen years (1628-40), under Laud's persecution, twenty thousand Englishmen fled to join those Pilgrims.And how much turned on that! Suppose it had not happened.Then the French of the North and the cavaliers of Virginia, with the Spanish of the South, would have had only the Dutch between them.And of the four, only the Dutch had free access to the Bible.The new land would not have been English.It is an English writer who says that North America is now preparing the future of the world, and English speech is the mold in which the folk of all the world are being poured for their final shaping.[1] It is the democracy of the Bible which is the fundamental democracy of America, in which every man has it accented to him that he is so much a child of God that his rights are inalienable.They cover life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.And though we have held that principle of democracy inconsistently at times, and have paid a terrible price for ourinconsistency in the past, and may pay it in the future again, it is still true that the fundamental democracy of our American life is only that essential democracy of the Bible, where every man is made the equal of his fellow by being lifted into the same relation with Almighty God.
[1] Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, p.174.
The Bible makes its moral appeal on the same basis.If a man is a child of God, then he is shut up to duties which cannot be avoided.Some one else may tell a man his duty in a true monarchy.In a democracy each man stands alone at the most solemn point of his duty.There is no safe democracry where men refuse to stand alone there.In Jefferson's great speech, replying to the forebodings of Patrick Henry, he insisted that if men were not competent to govern themselves they were not competent to govern other people.The first duty of any man is to take his independent place before God.Democracy is the social privilege that grows out of the meeting of these personal obligations.
Several facts strengthen this persistent moral appeal.For one thing, the Book is absolutely fair to humanity.It leaves out no line or wrinkle; but it adds none.The men with whom it deals are typical men.The facts it presents are typical facts.There are books which flatter men, make them out all good, prattle on about the essential goodness of humanity, while men who know themselves (and these are the only ones who do things) know that the story is not true.On the other hand, there are books which are depressing.Their pigments are all black.They move from the dignity of Schopenhauer's pessimism to the bedlam of Nietzsche's contempt for life and goodness.But here, also, the sane common sense of humanity comes to the rescue.The picture is not true if it is all white or all black.The Bible is absolutely fair to humanity.It moves within the circle of man's experience; and, while it deals with men, it results in a treatment of man.
That is how it comes about that the Bible inspires men, and puts them at their best.No moral appeal can be successful if it fails to reach the better part of a man, and lays hold on him there.Just that it did for the English people."No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England during the years that parted the middle of the reign ofElizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament.England became the people of a Book, and that Book was the Bible."[1]
[1] Green, Short History of the English People.
Add to that personal appeal and that absolute fairness to humanity the constant challenge of the Bible to the nobler elements of humanity.It never trifles.It is in deadly earnest.And it makes earnest men.Probably we cannot illustrate that earnestness more clearly than by a study of one element in Puritan history, which is confused in many minds.It is the matter of the three great antagonisms of Puritanism in England and America.They can never be understood by moral triflers.They may not be approved by all the morally serious, but they will be understood by them.What are those three marked antagonisms? The antagonism to the stage, to popular frivolity, and to the pleasure Sabbath.
