How real a creation, how sui generis, is the style of Shakespeare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson!
(I pause to mark how just this man can be to his great enemies. Pope was a Roman Catholic, you will remember; but Gibbon was an infidel.)
Even were the subject-matter without meaning, though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid’s Elements or a symphony of Beethoven.
And, like music, it has seized upon the public mind: and the literature of England is no longer a mere letter, printed in books and shut up in libraries, but it is a living voice, which has gone forth in its expressions and its sentiments into the world of men, which daily thrills upon our ears and syllables our thoughts, which speaks to us through our correspondents and dictates when we put pen to paper. Whether we will or no, the phraseology of Shakespeare, of the Protestant formularies, of Milton, of Pope, of Johnson’s Table-Talk, and of Walter Scott, have become a portion of the vernacular tongue, the household words, of which perhaps we little guess the origin, and the very idioms of our familiar conversation. … So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; it is too much for us. We cannot destroy or reverse it. … We cannot make it over again. It is a great work of man, when it is no work of God’s. … We cannot undo the past. English Literature will ever have been Protestant.
V
I am speaking, then, to hearers who would read not to contradict and confute; who have an inherited sense of the English Bible; and who have, even as I, a store of associated ideas, to be evoked by any chance phrase from it; beyond this, it may be, nothing that can be called scholarship by any stretch of the term.
Very well, then: my first piece of advice on reading the Bible is that you do it.
I have, of course, no reason at all to suppose or suggest that any member of this present audience omits to do it. But some general observations are permitted to an occupant of this Chair: and, speaking generally, and as one not constitutionally disposed to lamentation (in the book we are discussing, for example, I find Jeremiah the contributor least to my mind), I do believe that the young read the Bible less, and enjoy it less—probably read it less, because they enjoy it less—than their fathers did.
The Education Act of 1870, often in these days too sweepingly denounced, did a vast deal of good along with no small amount of definite harm. At the head of the harmful effects must (I think) be set its discouragement of Bible reading; and this chiefly through its encouraging parents to believe that they could henceforth hand over the training of their children to the State, lock, stock and barrel. You all remember the picture in Burns of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”:
The chearfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace,
The big ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride.
His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,
His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare;
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a portion with judicious care,
And “Let us worship God!” he says, with solemn air.
But you know that the sire bred on the tradition of 1870, and now growing grey, does nothing of that sort on a Saturday night: that, Saturday being tub-night, he inclines rather to order the children into the back-kitchen to get washed; that on Sunday morning, having seen them off to a place of worship, he inclines to sit down and read, in place of the Bible, his Sunday newspaper: that in the afternoon he again shunts them off to Sunday-school. Now—to speak first of the children—it is good for them to be tubbed on Saturday night; good for them also, I dare say, to attend Sunday-school on the following afternoon; but not good in so far as they miss to hear the Bible read by their parents and
Pure religion breathing household laws.
“Pure religion”?—Well perhaps that begs the question: and I dare say Burns’ cotter when he waled “a portion with judicious care,” waled it as often as not—perhaps oftener than not—to contradict and confute; that often he contradicted and confuted very crudely, very ignorantly. But we may call it simple religion anyhow, sincere religion, parental religion, household religion: and for a certainty no “lessons” in day-school or Sunday-school have, for tingeing a child’s mind, an effect comparable with that of a religion pervading the child’s home, present at bedside and board:—
Here a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand;
Cold as paddocks the they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee;
For a benison to fall
On our meat and on us all. Amen.
—permeating the house, subtly instilled by the very accent of his father’s and his mother’s speech. For the grown man … I happen to come from a part of England10 where men, in all my days, have been curiously concerned with religion and are yet so concerned; so much that you can scarce take up a local paper and turn to the correspondence column but you will find some heated controversy raging over Free Will and Predestination, the Validity of Holy Orders, Original Sin, Redemption of the many or the few:
Go it Justice, go it Mercy!
Go it Douglas, go it Percy!
But the contestants do not write in the language their fathers used. They seem to have lost the vocabulary, and to have picked
