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BIBLE STORIES AND RELIGIOUS CLASSICS
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANSON PHELPS STOKES, JR.
ILLUSTRATED BY BEATRICE STEVENS
1903
INTRODUCTION
There never was a time when the demand for books for young people was sogreat as it is to-day or when so much was being done to meet the demand."Children's Counter," "Boys' Books," are signs which, especially at theChristmas season, attract the eye in every large book shop. Tales ofadventure, manuals about various branches of nature study, historicalromances, lives of heroes—in fact, almost every kind of book—is to befound in abundance, beautifully illustrated, attractively bound, wellprinted, all designed and written especially for the youth of our land.It is indeed an encouraging sign. It means that the child of to-day isbeing introduced to the world's best in literature and science andhistory and art in simple and gradual ways.
In the Middle Ages stories of the martyrs and legends of the Church,along with some simple form of catechetical instruction, formed thebasis of a child's mental and religious training. Later, during andafter the Crusades, the stories of war and the mysteries of the Eastincreased the stock in trade for the homes of Europe; but still thehorizon remained a narrow one. Even the invention of printing did notbring to the young as many direct advantages as would naturally beexpected. To-day, when Christian missionaries set up a printing press insome distant island of the sea, the first books which they print in thevernacular are almost invariably those parts of the Bible, such as theGospels and the stories of Genesis, which most appeal to the young, and,what is of special importance, they have the young directly and mainlyin mind in their publishing work. This was not true a few centuries ago.The presses were, perhaps naturally and inevitably, almost exclusivelyoccupied with books for the learned world. To be sure, the LegendaAurea, of which I shall speak later, although not intended primarily forchildren, proved a great boon to them. So did the Chap Books of England.But it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century, when JohnNewbery set up his book shop at St. Paul's Churchyard, London, that anyspecial attention was given by printers to the publication, inattractive form, of juvenile books. Newbery's children's books made himfamous in his day, but the world seems to have forgotten him. Yet hedeserves a monument along with Æsop, and La Fontaine, and KateGreenaway, and Andersen, and Scott and Henty, and all the other greaterand lesser lights who have done so much to gladden the heart and enlargethe mind of childhood and youth.
But from Newbery's day to this year of our Lord nineteen hundred andthree is a very long jump in what we may call the evolution of juvenileliterature, for the preparation of reading matter for young people seemsnow almost to have reached its climax. There is one field, however, andthat the one which this volume tries to cover, which strangely enoughseems to have been almost neglected. Of "goody-goody" Sunday Schoollibrary books of an old-fashioned type, which are insipid and lackingboth in virility of thought and literary form, there are, alas, alreadytoo many. What we need is something to take their place, something whichwill furnish real literature, and yet which from subject matter andmanner of handling is specially adapted to what I still like to callSunday reading, a phrase which unfortunately seems to mean little