Charlotte Mason's Approach to Reading the Bible and the Context and Purpose of Her Saviour of the World,

Mason published six volumes of poetry, The Saviour of the World, between 1908 and 1914 (1908b; 1909; 1910; 1911;1914). It was dedicated to the idea that the Christian Gospel could be communicated afresh in her own time through poetic means. The higher critical approach to the Bible (Hays & Ansberry, 2013; Klein et al., 2017, pp. 99–102; Neill & Wright, 1988; Orr, 1907) became the dominant academic discourse during the last decades of the 19th century in both Church and intellectual contexts (Rogerson, 1984): not all members of the clergy, and indeed not all members of the laity, felt comfortable, and there was strong opposition (e.g. Orr, 1907). Mason could not and did not ignore these scientific advances. On the one hand, Mason and like‑minded people were dealing with the threats to public confidence in biblical authority caused by the higher criticism, whilst on the other, they were quite aware that if the biblical texts were to be heard in the contemporary context, the way of presenting them and engaging with them needed to draw on new approaches. Mixed in with both of these issues was the perennial concern with ‘safeguarding’ child readers from those parts of the Bible that seemed ‘scandalous’ to the reader and teacher (Luckock, 1905). Mason speaks of only reading ‘suitable’ parts of the Old Testament (Mason, 1904/2017b, p. 111). It is most important to place her treatment of the New Testament in The Saviour of the World in the context of her own principles of education and her discussions of Bible reading as found in her book Home Education (1905/2017a) and the other five volumes that followed in the Home Education series.(1) (1) The six volumes are: Home Education, (4th edition 1905); Parents and Children (1st edition 1897; 3rd edition 1904); School Education (4th edition 1904); Ourselves (1905); Formation of Character (1906); and A Philosophy of Education (1925). We have used The Home Education Series, published by the Living Book Press in 2017. Home Education began as A Course of Lectures to Ladies, etc and was published by Routledge in 1886, with a second edition in 1896.