The story of the Gospels would, of course, have been incorporated in our Historical Book, but in addition as part of our first canon, each of the four gospels—with the possible omission of the genealogies—would have a place, for the sake of their matchless directness, simplicity and beauty. They give a picture, they convey an atmosphere of supreme value to us all, incommunicable in any other form or language. Again there is a great wealth of material in the Epistles. It is, for example, inconceivable that such a passage as that of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians—"Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal"—the whole of that wonderful chapter—should ever pass out of the common heritage of mankind.
So much from the Ancient Bible for our modern Bible, all its inspiration and beauty and fire. And now what else?
Speaking in English to an English-speaking audience one name comes close upon the Bible, Shakespear. What are we going to do about Shakespear? If you were to waylay almost any Englishman or American and put this project of a modern Bible before him, and then begin your list of ingredients with the Bible and the whole of Shakespear, he would almost certainly say, "Yes, Yes."
But would he be right?
On reflection he might perhaps recede and say "Not the whole of Shakespear," but well, Hamlet, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer-Night's Dream. But even these! Are they "generally necessary to salvation"? We run our minds through the treasures of Shakespear as we might run our fingers through the contents of a box of very precious and beautiful jewels—before equipping a youth for battle.
No. These things are for ornament and joy. I doubt if we could have a single play—a single scene of Shakespear's in our Canon. He goes altogether into the Great Books, all of him; he joins the aristocracy of the Apocrypha. And, I believe, nearly all the great plays of the world would have to join him there. Euripides and Sophocles, Schiller and Ibsen. Perhaps some speeches and such-like passages might be quoted in the Canon, but that is all.
Our Canon, remember, is to be the essential cementing stuff of our community and nothing more. If once we admit merely beautiful and delightful things, then I see an overwhelming inrush of jewels and flowers. If we admit A Midsummer-Night's Dream, then I must insist that we also admit such lovely nonsense as
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph the sacred river ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea....
Our Canon I am afraid cannot take in such things, and with the plays we must banish also all the novels; the greater books of such writers as Cervantes, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Tolstoi, Hardy, Hamsun, that great succession of writers—they are all good for "example of life and instruction of manners," and to the Apocrypha they must go. And so it is that since I would banish Romeo and Juliet, I would also banish the Song of Songs, and since I must put away Vanity Fair and the Shabby Genteel Story, I would also put away Esther and Ruth. And I find myself most reluctant to exclude not any novels written in English, but one or two great sweeping books by non-English writers. It seems to me that Tolstoi's War and Peace and Hamsun's Growth of the Soil are books on an almost Biblical scale, that they deal with life so greatly as to come nearest to the idea of a universally inspiring and illuminating literature which underlies the idea of our Canon. If we put in any whole novels into the Canon I would plead for these. But I will not plead now even for these. I do not think any novels at all can go into our modern Bible, as whole works. The possibility of long passages going in, is of course, quite a different matter.
And passing now from great plays and great novels and romances, we come to the still more difficult problem of great philosophical and critical works. Take Gulliver's Travels—an intense, dark, stirring criticism of life and social order—and the Dialogues of Plato, full of light and inspiration. In these latter we might quarry for beautiful passages for our Canon, but I do not think we could take them in as wholes, and if we do not take them in as complete books, then I think that Semitic parallel to these Greek dialogues, The Book of Job, must stand not in our Canon, but in the Great Book section of our Apocrypha.
And next we have to consider all the great Epics in the world. There again I am for exclusion. This Bible we are considering must be universally available. If it is too bulky for universal use it loses its primary function of a moral cement. We cannot include the Iliad, the Norse Sagas, the Æneid or Paradise Lost in our Canon. Let them swell the great sack of our Apocrypha, and let the children read them if they will.
When one glances in this fashion over the accumulated literary resources of mankind it becomes plain that our canonical books of literature in this modern Bible of ours can be little more than an Anthology or a group of Anthologies. Perhaps they might be gathered under separate heads, as the 'Book of Freedom,' the 'Book of Justice,' the 'Book of Charity.' And now having done nothing as yet but reject, let me begin to accept. Let me quote a few samples of the kind of thing that I imagine would best serve the purpose of our Bible and that should certainly be included.
Here are words that every American knows by heart already—I would like every man in the world to know them by heart and to repeat them. It is Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and I will not spare you a word of it:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."