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!