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IGNORANCE OF THE BIBLE

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 36.

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IGNORANCE OF THE BIBLE.

(From the Literary Digest, June 23, 1900.)
THE prevalent ignorance of the Bible among many classes to-day, often commented upon of late, has led Dr. Charles F. Thwing, president of the Western Reserve University, to examine college students on the subject. The result of his work he has given in an article in The Century for May, entitled “Significant Ignorance about the ‘Bible.”
Dr. Thwing selected from Tennyson’s works a number of passages containing Bible allusions, and submitted these in an English examination to members of the Freshman class. Later on he gave the same questions to fifty-one young ladies in the Freshman class at a woman’s college in the East. The young men were from Central New York, Northern Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania, and the young women generally from New England. Their fathers were lawyers, doctors, preachers, business men, farmers. All the students were from communities where intelligence prevailed, and all without exception had some church affiliation. Both the young men and the young women were of the average college age of twenty. While one young woman answered every question correctly, another made one mistake, and a third but two mistakes, the percentage of correct answers was less than forty-three for the men, and a little more than forty-nine for the women. Dr. Thwing’s selections were as follows:—
1. “My sin was a thorn Among the thorns that girt Thy brow.”
2. “As manna on my wilderness.”
3. “That God would move And strike the hard, hard rock, and thence, Sweet in their utmost bitterness, Would issue tears of penitence.”
4. “Like that strange angel which of old, Until the breaking of the light, Wrestled with wandering Israel.”
5. “Like Hezekiah’s, backward runs The shadow of my days.”
6. “Joshua’s moon in Ajalon.”
7. “A heart as rough as Esau’s hand.”
8. “Gash thyself, priest, and honor thy brute Baal.”
9. “Ruth among the fields of corn.”
10. “Pharaoh’s darkness.”
11. “A Jonah’s gourd, Up in one night and due to sudden sun.”
12. “Stiff as Lot’s wife.”
13. “Arimathean Joseph.”
14. a “For I have flung thee pearls, and find thee swine.”
14. b “Not red like Iscariot’s.”
15. “Perhaps, like him of Cana in Holy Writ, Our Arthur kept his best until the last.”
16. “And marked me even as Cain.”
17. “The church on Peter’s rock.”
18. “Let her eat it like the serpent, and be driven out of her paradise.”
19. “A whole Peter’s sheet.”
20. “The godless Jephtha vows his child To one cast of the dice.”
21. “A Jacob’s ladder falls.”
22. “Till you find the deathless angel seated in the vacant tomb.”
The New York Sun makes the following study of the answers:—
Of the 85 students to whom the examination paper was submitted, a quarter knew nothing of the crown of thorns or of the manna; about 30—Dr. Thwing gives the exact numbers in each case—could not explain the striking of the rock, or the angel that wrestled with Israel, or Jacob’s ladder; about 40 could not recall the story of Esau, or that of Ruth, or the mark of Cain, or the angel seated in the vacant tomb. Curiously enough, all of the girls but three could tell about Lot’s wife, and all but ten about the serpent; while 22 men out of 34 knew nothing of either. Hezekiah’s shadow floored 75 of the 85. Jonah’s gourd stumped 67, while Joshua’s moon and Peter’s sheet numbered 60 victims each.
Some amazing examples of wrong answers are given: “Iscariot means the cross on which Christ was crucified;” “Arimathean Joseph was Christ’s father,” and several tell of his coat of many colors; Ruth was “grieving for her children,” and Jonah’s gourd is an “allusion to the emesis of Jonah by the ‘whale,’” one of many ingenious efforts to make the whale story, with which all seemed familiar, fit in with the unknown gourd.
Dr. Thwing draws the conclusion from these results that the Bible is not read or taught as it used to be, and casts about for causes. He finds one in “the fact that the world has become a world of ‘books, and a world of magazines, and a world of ‘newspapers. The world is no longer Puritan England, or Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony—a people of one book.” He finds others in the decline of family life with the development of the individuality of its members, in the elimination of the Bible from the public schools, and in the decline in attendance at church on Sunday. Family prayers, he asserts, are less common than formerly, the Bible is in many homes opened only once a week, and the Sabbath-school has not taken the place of the family in teaching the facts and truths of the Bible.