I
'_Read not to Contradict and Confute,_' says Bacon of Studies in
general: and you may be the better disposed, Gentlemen, to
forgive my choice of subject to-day if in my first sentence I
rule _that_ way of reading the Bible completely out of court. You
may say at once that, the Bible being so full of doctrine as it
is, and such a storehouse for exegesis as it has been, this is
more easily said than profitably done. You may grant me that the
Scriptures in our Authorised Version are part and parcel of
English Literature (and more than part and parcel); you may grant
that a Professor of English Literature has therefore a claim, if
not an obligation, to speak of them in that Version; you may--
having granted my incessant refusal to disconnect our national
literature from our national life, or to view them as
disconnected--accept the conclusion which plainly flows from it;
that no teacher of English can pardonably neglect what is at once
the most majestic thing in our literature and by all odds the most
spiritually living thing we inherit; in our courts at once superb
monument and superabundant fountain of life; and yet you may
discount beforehand what he must attempt.
For (say you) if he attempt the doctrine, he goes straight down
to buffeted waters so broad that only stout theologians can win
to shore; if, on the other hand, he ignore doctrine, the play is
"Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. He reduces our
Bible to 'mere literature,' to something 'belletristic,' pretty,
an artifice, a flimsy, a gutted thing.