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Show IS IT TOO MUCH ROUTINE? Writer Complains That Too Few Are Properly Familiar With the Pages of the Bible. Bible-quoting is all the more effective effec-tive nowadays, as an influence in literature lit-erature or oratory at least when it is rat and clever for the fact that fewer people know the book than formerly. In spite of the Sunday schools and the International In-ternational Lessons, familiarity with the Bible is becoming rarer. Boys and girls go to Sunday school all through their childhood and somehow some-how come out of it unable to quote a line from the Bible. And yet they are sufficiently familiar with it to be able to feel the force of a quotation or an Illustration, and the rare individual who knows his way through the pages of the book can easily catch their sympathy. sym-pathy. Why should almost universal instruction instruc-tion in the Bible result in a generation genera-tion that does not know the book? Why should rote lessons on "Hamlet" and "The Tempest" make the same generation genera-tion hate Shakespeare? Why does everything that is "required" to go in at one ear and out at the other? Why are the set words of the wise as odious goads, as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, while bread eaten in secret is pleasant? Much study is now, as in the days of Solomon, a weariness weari-ness of the flesh. It thwarts its own purpose. Exchn nge. |