Let me, having said this, at once enter a _caveat,_ a
qualification. Although men do not go to the stake for the
cadences, the phrases of our Authorised Version, it remains true
that these cadences, these phrases, have for three hundred years
exercised a most powerful effect upon their emotions. They do so
by association of ideas by the accreted memories of our race
enwrapping connotation around a word, a name--say the name
_Jerusalem,_ or the name _Sion_:
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning.
It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect
men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual
geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a
quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and
there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor's
Tanagra, think not I forget....
But the word Jerusalem will strike twenty men twentyfold more
poignantly: for to each it names the city familiar in spirit to
his parents when they knelt, and to their fathers before them:
not only the city which was his nursery and yet lay just beyond
the landscape seen from its window; its connotation includes not
only what the word 'Rome' has meant, and ever must mean, to
thousands on thousands setting eyes for the first time on _The
City_: but it holds, too, some hint of the New Jerusalem, the
city of twelve gates before the vision of which St John fell
prone:
Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem,
Would God I were in thee!
Thy Gardens and thy gallant walks
Continually are green:
There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
Quite through the streets with pleasant sound
The flood of Life doth flow;
Upon whose banks on every side
The wood of Life doth grow....
Our Lady sings Magnificat
With tones surpassing sweet:
And all the virgins bear their part,
Sitting about her feet.
Hierusalem, my happy home,
Would God I were in thee!
Would God my woes were at an end,
Thy joys that I might see!
You cannot (I say) get away from these connotations accreted
through your own memories and your fathers'; as neither can you
be sure of getting free of any great literature in any tongue,
once it has been written. Let me quote you a passage from
Cardinal Newman [he is addressing the undergraduates of the
Catholic University of Dublin]:
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 England [Ed.: Cornwall] 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
up, in place of it, the jargon of the Yellow Press, which does
not tend to clear definition on points of theology. The mass of
all this controversial stuff is no more absurd, no more frantic,
than it used to be: but in language it has lost its dignity with
its homeliness. It has lost the colouring of the Scriptures, the
intonation of the Scriptures, the Scriptural _habit._
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 for ever.
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
Cloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance,
and as he sate 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!