BIBLICAL PREJUDICES

The breathless cramming rush of Divisional examinations which is forced to the attention of most Seniors, and many who soon hope to be, is not without certain compensations. And one of these is a sudden accurate knowledge of the Bible. It would be absurd to bring this matter to the attention of Harvard men for any high-flung religious motives, nor is it necessary to do so. The Bible is well worth a face value treatment without the psalm-singing hypocrisy that often goes with it.

And yet since childhood the minds of college men have been poisoned against the Bible by those very people who most believed in it. They have held it up as a good holy book filled with deep moral lessons. They have advertised it in a way certain to fill any normal boy with the bitterest loathing. Soft handed ministers have spoken of it in hushed, strained voices, Sunday school teachers have branded its messages among the unpleasant memories in the minds of their young disciples. Its simple, powerful legends have been darkened by the smoke of wordy sermons, while the listeners watched the moving sun patches on the heavy glass windows of the church. And so it has become to the normal young American more or less of a curse. It is hard at that age to dissociate the subject matter from the circumstances under which it is absorbed.

Thus in the undergraduate mind the Bible has passed to an unfortunate oblivion along with Latin grammars and first primers. In a great many cases it is saved from such a fate by the timely, if unpleasant, arrival of divisional requirements. True enough the student is still forced to pore over the carefully worded pages of the Bible, but this time he is able to give it a fair hearing. College, if it teaches anything, teaches a young man to judge of things for himself. If then he finds gold in these pages, where all seemed dross before, he is very apt to appreciate and remember. There are certain qualities in its simple beautiful style and plain old English which are very hard to duplicate.

But it is not the purpose of this editorial to explain the value of a work whose merits are decidedly plain. It is rather to comment on the happy system by which such an appreciation is tendered to every Senior in certain departments of concentration. There are however, a great many fields which ignore such a requirement altogether. It may not be the duty of a civil engineer or an export botanist to be fully acquainted with the Bible. There may be other things that are more important in his preparation for future success. But such a requirement, if it were carried through every department, could not fail to aid in that rounding out and broadening which is essential to every man of vision, no matter what his profession. People have been making fun of the Bible too long.