READING OF THE BIBLE.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 26, Issue 4, 1 April 1936, Page 6

READING OF THE BIBLE.

The Bible is to be read. The people are to hear. But. what if, as, alas! so often happens, the Bible-reading is inaudible and the people cannot hear, or the Bible-reading is slipshod and unintelligent, and the people hear but cannot understand? The Bible is the Word of God. To read the Bible aloud is to. deliver the message vi God, a tremendous privilege and an awful responsibility, and the man selected for the privilege and the complementary responsibility should surely train himself for the satisfactory fulfilment of his task.

The Bible, too, is glorious literature, the book, as Macaulay says, "which, if everything else m our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and its power." It is obviously the business of the reader to make clear the beauty and the power. The hard-worked curate may not have time for elaborate rehearsal, but it is not impossible for him to recite to .himself the twenty verses or so of the appointed Lessons, endeavouring by inflection and the right use of pauses to convey the glory and the full significance of the words.

Every craft has its technique. It is deplorable nonsense to . suggest that sincerity and good intentions are enough. A would-be surgeon, eager to serve his fellows, will slay and not save, unless he learns his trade. The man, with music m his hearf, will make a horrible noise if he tries to play the piano, never having had a lesson. To be artless is far worse than to be artful. Generally, it is sheer laziness that permits a man to go into the pulpit without careful and prayerful thought as to what he is to say, or permits him to go to the lectern without consideration of the passage of Holy Scripture that he has to read.

There is now an adolescent generation m this country that is almost entirely ignorant of the Bible. The generation m the nursery may be

more ignorant still. Young people are attracted by the music of words, by picturesque imagery, by great stories. Read the Bible well to them, and they will be fascinated by the Bible. Read it badly to them, and they are robbed of a great Christian and a great English heritage. It should be the business of the theological colleges to teach voice production and some of the art of reading.

And if an object lesson is desired as to how the Bible should be read, we commend listening to the Dean of Westminster. — (From the Church Times.)