always one. Simple men--holy and humble men
of heart like Isaak Walton and Bunyan--have their lips
touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars
--Milton, Sir Thomas Browne--practise the rolling Latin
sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall
back--'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may
be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the
Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but
immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable
in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's
antithesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to
the sound of a trump; with the sound of a trump our Lord has
gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it
haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It
is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in
our blood.

If that be true, or less than gravely overstated: if the English
Bible hold this unique place in our literature; if it be at once
a monument, an example and (best of all) a well of English
undefiled, no stagnant water, but quick, running, curative,
refreshing, vivifying; may we not agree, Gentlemen, to require
the weightiest reason why our instructors should continue to
hedge in the temple and pipe the fountain off in professional
conduits, forbidding it to irrigate freely our ground of study?

It is done so complacently that I do not remember to have met one
single argument put up in defence of it; and so I am reduced to
guess-work. What can be the justifying reason for an embargo on
the face of it so silly and arbitrary, if not senseless?

III

Does it reside perchance in some primitive instinct of _taboo_;
of a superstition of fetish-worship fencing off sacred things as
unmentionable, and reinforced by the bad Puritan notion that holy
things are by no means to be enjoyed?

If so, I begin by referring you to the Greeks and their attitude
towards the Homeric poems. We, of course, hold the Old Testament
more sacred than Homer. But I very much doubt if it be more
sacred to us than the Iliad and the Odyssey were to an old
Athenian, in his day. To the Greeks--and to forget this is the
fruitfullest source of error in dealing with the Tragedians or
even with Aristophanes--to the Greeks, their religion, such as it
was, mattered enormously. They built their Theatre upon it, as we
most certainly do not; whic