Our Aim

“If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be; if God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his work will gain the ascendancy; if the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will; if the power of the Gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of the land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness, will reign without mitigation or end.”

—Daniel Webster, American statesman (1782-1852)

When he said the above, Daniel Webster was talking about the more pernicious influences of Bible ignorance, namely, the loss of freedom through corruption of morals. Webster was convinced that the Bible had a definite moral influence on the heart and will of men, and being a political man, addressed the political effects of Bible ignorance: anarchy and misrule. There are other effects certainly, perhaps less dire, but no less lamentable. To a literary man, the loss of the Bible in the culture is worth sorrowing about, for Bible ignorance means in a large part the demise of the traditional canon of English literature. Already in American public schools, books like A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, and ALA Book list books have completely replaced the once standard works by Longfellow and Hawthorne, authors who used the Bible and American history as their main sources of inspiration. In colleges and universities, too, the classics are moribund, for few students can understand and appreciate them, and it would be reasonable to expect their nearly complete disappearance, in this country at least, sometime this century. About a hundred years ago Virgil, Ovid, and Dante boarded Charon’s ferry and crossed the River Lethe, to the land of utter forgetfulness. It appears that the English classics have bought their fare and are waiting for their ship to come in.

.

Bad ideas, found in bad books, lead to corrupt individuals and a corrupt society. It's that simple. Paul says in his second letter to Timothy, Avoid godless chatter because those who indulge in it will become more and more ungodly. Here is a truth to be considered: we are what we believe, and we believe what we are taught—by our teachers and by the books that we read. Ideas have an influence on us, to a greater or lesser extent according to how firmly they take hold of our minds. And when they take hold of our minds completely, they take hold of our actions completely. That great conservative commentator William F. Buckley was once seated next to a European figure that he said was “so august that ladies curtsied when they were presented to him.” Apparently this august noble was a Marxist and he criticized the missionaries who had entered Venezuela, saying that they were doing great mischief by breaking down their cultural order. Buckley cleared his throat and asked which of the Ten Commandments was wreaking this great havoc. Buckley understood that teaching morals through exposure to Scripture cannot but have a positive influence over people. So it is with children and books. If we wonder why there is such unmitigated violence committed by mere children, we just need to look at what they have been reading in their schools. It isn't John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners." (1 Corinthians 15:33)

​

What we need to do in our schools today is to put good books into the hands of children—books that will stimulate them intellectually, improve their thinking skills, elevate their thoughts and spiritual affections, and lift them from the mire of this world's culture. In our homeschool literature classes, our aim is to do just that.

​