Greek and the Beauty of Holiness

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House:

“The only moments in which I seem to have approximated in my own experience to a faint realization of the ‘beauty of holiness,’ as I conceived it, was each Sunday morning between the hours of nine and ten, when I went into the exquisitely neat room of the teacher of Greek and read with her from a Greek testament. We did this every Sunday morning for two years. It was not exactly a lesson, for I never prepared for it, and while I was held within reasonable bounds of syntax, I was allowed much more freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I read Homer; neither did we discuss doctrines, for although it was with this same teacher that in our junior year we studied Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to memory and analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of our lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise to appear at these blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the disputatious Paul had not yet been, for we always read from the Gospels.”

Jane Addams

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