[Publib] Changing Times

[Backwage at aol.com]

Librarians of the public sort need only look at the popular selections of a 
 century ago to see how their patron base has changed over that span of  
time.  As change they have.  Also much changed are the  librarians.  
 
I have in hand a copy of a book that was pretty popular about a century  
ago.  It is Illustrative Notes on the Sunday-School Lessons (1896),  by Jesse 
Lyman Hurlbut and Robert Remington Doherty.  Briefly put, this is  one in a 
long series of guides produced to guide Sunday school teachers, most of  
whom had no formal education, being mainly members of Protestant denominations  
pressed into service.  Did you ever go to Sunday school?  I did.   By the 
time I encountered the institution it had devolved to a lame sort of  "Jesus 
is your pal" time-burner for children.  Back in the old days it  was 
practically mandatory for children and also for adults.  And you went  if you were 
a Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian or just about anything but a  Catholic or 
Hindu.  
 
Hard to believe but that was so.  Sunday school consisted then of  actual 
lessons about scripture, which lessons were complex, intricate, and  moreover 
even interesting if this book is any guide.  People took their  
Christianity seriously then.  By "seriously" I mean that it was considered  important, 
even vital that a person should know the historical, scriptural and  even 
geographical details of the main elements of the Bible.  Back then you  
actually had to be able to read to rate as a practicing Christian--but I'll let  
that rest for now.  Enough to say that this book was once as popular as  
fried chicken on Sunday.  Go see if you can find it in a library now, and  good 
luck.  
 
I was impressed by this book and also taken back to my own days of Bible  
study.  Mind you, I was encouraged in this by my atheist father, who  
produced an atheist son who loved the (lower case) holy book.  Want to know  how 
culture has changed among the educated in a century?  Okay librarians,  let's 
ask you some questions:
 
Who was Absalom and what did he have against his old man?  Not very  many 
of you would know.  It isn't that you're dumb, it's that this  particular 
literature isn't part of the canon of the educated  anymore.  Here, in this 
Sunday school primer we have a wonderful exposition  of the whole sordid affair 
between Absalom and David, right up to the moment  when the father receives 
the word of his son's death.  
 
The function of this book is explication (in that sense it acts as a  
concordance) as much as anything else, but of course you get a dose of  
inspiration along the way.  The Authorized and Revised Versions of the  Bible are 
compared briefly and the reader gets preparatory material that would  doubtless 
be used in lectures about that particular subject.  The  level of the 
discourse is pretty high, though not so high as to go over the head  of anyone 
who was fairly literate.  There are paragraphs of commentary  based on current 
events:
 
"On the day when this is penned, May 3 1895, an account in the morning  
newspaper presents another illustration of the grief of a parent over a ruined  
son in the case of the Governor of Kentucky . . . "
 
I recall reading that librarians of that time and for a long time after  
would be required to attend Sunday school in order to be considered fit  
candidates for that position of public trust.  Well, if nothing else they  would 
be able to explain where Faulkner got the title for that little stream of  
consciousness novel he wrote in 1936.  But by then, they weren't requiring  
Sunday school of either librarians or the average Joe, much less the close 
study  of the Bible.  Which is entirely too bad.  The Bible gave the ordinary  
people their own version of the Greek and Latin classics.  The Old and  New 
Testaments formed a cultural base and reference for western readers for  
centuries.  What have we now to replace that?
 
M. McGrorty
 
 
 
 
 
 
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