have thought and expressed themselves, and some flexibility of spirit, are necessary; and this is culture. Much fruit may be got out of the Bible without it, and with those narrow and materialised schemes of God and of a future state which we have mentioned; that we do not deny, but it is not the important point at present. The important point is, that the diffusion everywhere of some notion of the processes of the experimental sciences, processes falling in, too, very well with the hard and positive character of the life of 'the people,'—the point is that this diffusion does lead 'the people' to ask for the ground and authority for those precise schemes of God and a future state which are presented to them, and to see clearly and scornfully the failure to give it. The failure to give it is inevitable, because given it cannot be; but whereas in the training, life, and sentiment of the well-to-do classes there is much to make them disguise the failure to themselves and not insist upon it, in the training, life, and sentiment of the people there is next to nothing. So that, as far as the people are concerned, the old traditional scheme of the Bible is gone; while neither they nor the so-called educated classes have yet anything to put in its place.
And thus we come back to our old remedy of culture,—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world; which turns out to be, in another shape, and in particular relation to the Bible, getting the power, through reading, to estimate the proportion and relation in what we read. If we read but a very little, we naturally want to press it all; if we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole
