On the suggestion of the National Educational Association that the Bible be used in the public schools “as a literary work of the highest and purest type, side by side with the prose and poetry it has inspired, and in a large part formed,” the New York Sun remarks: “The very suggestion that now the Bible should be read and taught simply as ‘a masterpiece of literature,’ wholly apart from any religious character, put forth as it is from a nominally Christian and Protestant source, is significant of a change of spirit which can not be called less than revolutionary in its significance. A suggestion from a Christian source that the Bible be degraded from its place of supreme elevation as ‘the Book and the Word of God,’ to the category of the human words of Milton and Shakespeare, as merely a masterpiece of the literary expression of a single race would once have aroused the whole English-speaking world, believing and infidel, as a momentous surrender of pivotal religious position. Now it is taken as a matter of course.”