§ 5 Today
Let me with this Book of Forecasts round off my fantasy. I would picture to you this modern Bible, perhaps two or three times as bulky as the old Bible, and consisting first of The Historical Books with maps and the like;
The Books of Conduct and Wisdom;
The Anthologies of Poetry and Literature; and finally the Book of Forecasts, taking the place of the Prophets and Revelations.
I would picture this revivified Bible to you as most carefully done and printed and made accessible to all, the basis of education in every school, the common platform of all discussion—just as in the past the old Bible used to be. I would ask you to imagine it translated into every language, a common material of understanding throughout all the world.
And furthermore, I imagine something else about this—quite unlike the old Bible—I imagine all of it periodically revised. The historical books would need to be revised and brought up to date, there would be new lights on health and conduct, there would be fresh additions to the anthologies, and there would be Forecasts that would have to be struck out because they were realized or because they were shown to be hopeless or undesirable, and fresh Forecasts would be added to replace them. It would be a Bible moving forward and changing and gaining with human experience and human destiny....
Well, that is my dream of a Bible of Civilization. Have I in any way carried my vision out to you of this little row of four or five volumes in every house, in every life, throughout the world, holding the lives and ideas and imaginations of men together in a net of common familiar phrases and common established hopes?
And is this a mere fantastic talk, or is this a thing that could be done and that ought to be done?
I do not know how it will appear to you, but to me it seems that this book I have been talking about, the Bible of to-day’s civilization, is not simply a conceivable possibility, it is a great and urgent need. Our education is, I think, pointless without it, a shell without a core. Our social life is aimless without it, we are a crowd without a common understanding. Only by means of some such unifying instrument, I believe, can we hope to lift human life out of its present dangerous drift towards confusion and disaster.
It is, I think therefore, an urgently desirable undertaking.
It is also a very practicable one. The creation of such a Bible, its printing and its translation, and a propaganda that would carry it into the homes and schools of most of the world, could I think all be achieved by a few hundred resolute and capable people at a cost of thirty or forty million dollars. That is a less sum than that the United States—in a time when they have no enemy to fear in all the world—are prepared to spend upon the building of what is for them an entirely superfluous and extravagant toy, a great navy.
You may, you probably will, differ very widely upon much that I have here put before you. Let me ask you not to let any of the details of my sketching set you against the fundamental idea, that old creative idea of the Bohemian educationist who was the pupil of Bacon and the friend of Milton, the idea of Komensky, the idea of creating and using a common book, a book of knowledge and wisdom, as the necessary foundation for any enduring human unanimity.