y 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.

II

Now of all ways of dealing with literature that happens to be the
way we should least admire. By that way we disassociate
literature from life; 'what they said' from the men who said it
and meant it, not seldom at the risk of their lives. My pupils
will bear witness in their memories that when we talk together
concerning poetry, for example, by 'poetry' we mean 'that which
the poets wrote,' or (if you like) 'the stuff the poets wrote';
and their intelligence tells them, of course, that anyone who in
the simple proposition 'Poets wrote Poetry' connects an object
with a subject by a verb does not, at any rate, intend to sunder
what he has just been at pains, however slight, to join together:
he may at least have the credit, whether he be right or wrong, of
asserting his subject and his object to be interdependent. Take a
particular proposition--John Milton wrote a poem called "Paradise
Lost." You will hardly contest the truth of that: but what does
it mean? Milton wrote the story of the Fall of Man: he told it in
some thousands of lines of decasyllabic ve