at 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 th