If I turn from it to a passage in Bunyan, I am conversing with a man who, though he has read few other books, has imbibed and soaked the Authorised Version into his fibres so that he cannot speak but Biblically. Listen to this:
As to the situation of this town, it lieth just between the two worlds, and the first founder, and builder of it, so far as by the best, and most authentic records I can gather, was one Shaddai; and he built it for his own delight. He made it the mirror, and glory of all that he made, even the Top-piece beyond anything else that he did in that country: yea, so goodly a town was Mansoul, when first built, that it is said by some, the Gods at the setting up thereof, came down to see it, and sang for joy. …
The wall of the town was well built, yea so fast and firm was it knit and compact together, that had it not been for the townsmen themselves, they could not have been shaken, or broken forever.
Or take this:
Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy feeding his Father’s Sheep. The Boy was in very mean Clothes, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he sat by himself he Sung. … Then said their Guide, Do you hear him? I will dare to say, that this Boy lives a merrier Life, and wears more of that Herb called Heart’s-ease in his Bosom, than he that is clad in Silk and Velvet.
I choose ordinary passages, not solemn ones in which Bunyan is consciously scriptural. But you cannot miss the accent.
That is Bunyan, of course; and I am far from saying that the labouring men among whom I grew up, at the fishery or in the hayfield, talked with Bunyan’s magic. But I do assert that they had something of the accent; enough to be like, in a child’s mind, the fishermen and labourers among whom Christ found his first disciples. They had the large simplicity of speech, the cadence, the accent. But let me turn to Ireland, where, though not directly derived from our English Bible, a similar scriptural accent survives among the peasantry and is, I hope, ineradicable. I choose two sentences from a book of “Memories” recently written by the survivor of the two ladies who together wrote the incomparable Irish R.M. The first was uttered by a small cultivator who was asked why his potato-crop had failed:
“I couldn’t hardly say” was the answer. “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a boggy place.”
Is that not the accent of Isaiah?
He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country.
The other is the benediction bestowed upon the late Miss Violet Martin by a beggar-woman in Skibbereen:
Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!
VI
But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children did, in our time, read the Bible a great deal, if perforce we were taught to read it in sundry bad ways: of which perhaps the worst was that our elders hammered in all the books, all the parts of it, as equally inspired and therefore equivalent. Of course this meant among other things that they hammered it all in literally: but let us not sentimentalise over that. It really did no child any harm to believe that the universe was created in a working week of six days, and that God sat down and looked at it on Sunday, and behold it was very good. A week is quite a long while to a child, yet a definite division rounding off a square job. The bath-taps at home usually, for some unexplained reason, went wrong during the weekend: the plumber came in on Monday and carried out his tools on Saturday at midday. These little analogies really do (I believe) help the infant mind, and not at all to its later detriment. Nor shall I ask you to sentimentalise overmuch upon the harm done to a child by teaching him that the bloodthirsty jealous Jehovah of the Book of Joshua is as venerable (being one and the same unalterably, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning”) as the Father “the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy,” revealed to us in the Gospel, invoked for us at the Eucharist. I do most seriously hold it to be fatal if we grow up and are fossilised in any such belief. (Where have we better proof than in the invocations which the family of the Hohenzollerns have been putting up, any time since August 1914—and for years before—to this bloody identification of the Christian man’s God with Joshua’s?) My simple advice is that you not only read the Bible early but read it again and again: and if on the third or fifth reading it leave you just where the first left you—if you still get from it no historical sense of a race developing its concept of God—well then, the point of the advice is lost, and there is no more to be said. But over this business of teaching the Book of Joshua to children I am in some doubt. A few years ago an Education Committee, of which I happened to be Chairman, sent ministers of religion about, two by two, to test the religious instruction given in elementary schools. Of the two who worked around my immediate neighbourhood, one was a young priest
