Bible

Professor T.H. Huxley had such men in mind in his great panegyric on the Bible, when, after bidding us consider that, “This book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history”, he concludes, “And finally that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations in the world, and of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession, fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the intervals between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they are also earning their payment for their work.

T. H. Huxley Collected Essays Volume 3, Science and Education,
quoted by Victor Murray, Education into Religion