e 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!

VI

But one now sees, or seems to see, that we children did, in our
time, read the Bible a great deal, if perforce we were taught to
read it in sundry bad ways: of which perhaps the worst was that
our elders hammered in all the books, all the parts of it, as
equally inspired and therefore equivalent. Of course this meant
among other things that they hammered it all in literally: but
let us not sentimentalise over that. It really did no child any
harm to believe that the universe was cre