THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION
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alone, would put the people of the world upon an absolutely new footing with regard to social and international affairs. They would be told a history coming right up to the daily newspapers. They would see themselves and the news of to-day as part of one great development. It would give their lives significance and dignity. It would give the events of the current day significance and dignity. It would lift their imaginations up to a new level. I say lift, but I mean restore, their imaginations to a former level. Because if you look back into the lives of the Pilgrim Fathers, let us say, or into those of the great soldiers and statesmen of Cromwellian England, you will find that these men had a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.
They were still in touch with the old Bible. To-day if life seems adventurous and fragmentary and generally aimless it is largely because of this one thing. We have lost touch with history. We have ceased to see human affairs as one great epic unfolding. And only by the universal teaching of universal history can that epic quality be restored.
You see, then, the first part of my project for a Bible of Civilization, a rewriting of Genesis and Exodus and Judges and Chronicles in terms of world history. It would be a quite possible thing to do.
Is it worth doing?
And let me add here that when we do get our new Genesis and our new historical books they will have a great number of illustrations as a living and necessary part of them. For nowadays we can not only have a canonical text but canonical maps and illustrations. The old Hebrew Bible was merely the written word. Indeed, it was not even that, for it was written without vowels. That was not a merit, nor a precedent for us; it was an unavoidable limitation in those days; but under modern conditions there is no reason whatever why we should confine our Bible to words when a drawing or a map can better express the thing we wish to convey. It is one of the great advantages of the modern book over the ancient book that because of printing it can use pictures as well as words. When books had to be reproduced by copyists the use of pictures was impossible. They would have varied with each copying until they became hopelessly distorted.
A Standard Guide to Health
But the cosmological and historical part of the old Bible was merely the opening, the groundwork upon which the rest was built. Let us now consider what else the Bible gave a man and a community, and what would be the modern form of the things it gave.
The next thing in order that the Bible gave a man and the community to which he belonged was the law—rules of life; rules of health; prescriptions, often very detailed and intimate, of permissible and unpermissible conduct.
This also the modern citizen needs and should have; he and she need a book of personal wisdom.
First as to health. One of the first duties of a citizen is to keep himself in mental and bodily health in order to be fit for the rest of his duties. Now the real Bible, our model, is extremely explicit upon what constitutes cleanness or uncleanness, upon ablutions, upon what a man or woman may eat and what may not be eaten, upon a number of such points. It was for its times and circumstances a directory of healthful practice. Well, I do not see why the Bible of a modern civilization should not contain a book of similarly clear injunction and warnings—why we should not tell every one of our people what is to be known about self-care.
And closely connected with the care of one's mental and bodily health is sexual morality, upon which again Deuteronomy and Leviticus are most explicit—leaving very little to the imagination. I am all for imitating the wholesome frankness of the ancient Book. Where there are no dark corners there is very little fermentation, there is very little foulness or infection. But in nearly every detail and in method and manner, the Bible of our civilization needs to be fuller and different from its prototype upon these matters. The real Bible dealt with an Oriental population living under much cruder conditions than our own, engaged mainly in agriculture, and with a far less various dietary than ours.
They had fermented, but not distilled, liquors; they had no preserved or refrigerated foods; they married at adolescence; many grave diseases that prevail to-day were unknown to them, and their sanitary problems were entirely different. Generally our new Leviticus will have to be much fuller. It must deal with exercise—which came naturally to those Hebrew shepherds. It must deal with the preservation of energy under conditions of enervation of which the prophets knew nothing. On the other hand our new Leviticus can afford to give much less attention to leprosy—which almost dominates the health instructions of the ancient lawgiver.
Modern Problems
I do not know anything very much about the movements in America that aim at the improvement of the public health and at the removal of public ignorance upon vital things. In Britain we have a number of powerful organizations active in disseminating knowledge to counteract the spread of this or that infectious or contagious disease.
The war has made us in Europe much more outspoken and more fearless in dealing with lurking, hideous evils. We believe much more than we did in the curative value of light and knowledge. And we have a very considerable literature of books on—what shall I call it?—on sex wisdom, which aim to prevent some of that great volume of misery, deprivation and nervous disease due to the prevailing ignorance and secrecy in these matters. For in these matters great multitudes of modern people still live in an ignorance that would have been inconceivable to an ancient Hebrew. Now I believe that it would be possible to compile a modern Leviticus and Deuteronomy to tell our whole modern community decently and plainly—just as plainly as the old Hebrew Bible instructed its Hebrew population—what is to be known and what has to be done and what has not to be done in these intimate matters.
But health and sex do not exhaust the problems of conduct.
There are also the problems of property and trade and labor.
Upon these the Bible did not hesitate to be explicit. For example, it insisted meticulously upon the right of labor to glean, and upon the seller's giving a full measure brimming over, and it prohibited usury. But here again the Bible rules and regulations were framed for a community and for an economic system altogether cruder, more limited and less complicated than our own. Much of the Old Testament, we have to remember, was already in existence before the free use of coined metal. The vast credit system of our days, joint-stock enterprise and the like were beyond the imagination of that time. So, too, was any anticipation
