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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: of torture, can read a school book. The reason is that a school book
is not a work of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a
sermon unless the teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot
read the Bible if you have no sense of literary art. The reason why
the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so
surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English
version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions
are comparatively artless. To read a dull book; to listen to a
tedious play or prosy sermon or lecture; to stare at uninteresting
pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, short of disease, is more
dreadful than this. The violence done to our souls by it leaves
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