Who will say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the
Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this
country? It lives on in the ear, like a music that never can be
forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert hardly knows
how he can forgo. Its felicities seem often to be almost things rather
than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of the
national seriousness.... Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry,
in extenuation of whose grotesque fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads
availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the
dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped
in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden
beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all
that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and
penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It
is his sacred thing which doubt never dimmed and controversy never
soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant,
with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is
not his Saxon Bible.--F. W. FABER. _The Interest and Characteristics of
the Lives of the Saints._