"An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes." ~Atheist Horror Writer H.P. Lovecraft
The Authorized Version of the Bible is the finest work of literature in the English language, and perhaps in any language. It includes nearly every known literary form; it abounds in passion and pathos, in humor, sarcasm, playfulness, proverb, by-word; it pictures early manners and customs with a fidelity which admits of no question; its thoughts are incomparably noble, its diction of a grand simplicity and naturalness, its ruling idea an idea almost inconceivably great. A nation that has the Bible in every hotel bedroom, in the saloon of every steamer, ought to be the most cultivated nation in the world.
All men of great literary achievement have been students of the Bible. The free-thinking Shelley's poetry and prose are full of it. One short paragraph in his Defence of Poetry has no less than seven biblical allusions. Shakespeare and Raleigh, Burke and Southey, Newman and Saintsbury, Longfellow and Browning, Thomas Hardy and Stevenson, are fairly saturated with the language, the thoughts, the tropes and figures of the Bible. Ruskin attributes all the warmth and color of his style to his having been obliged in his boyhood to read aloud with his mother once every year the entire Bible, and to commit to memory many of its noblest chapters. The statesman Bright made striking use of the death of the first-born of Egypt in a memorable speech in the House of Commons during the Crimean War. Southey makes fine use of Elijah's chariot of fire in his passage on the death of Nelson. And who can read without a thrill the use by Dickens, at the death of Sydney Carton, of the passage, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord"?
The Bible has molded the style of all our greatest writers, and it is even yet the strongest counteracting force against the degenerating influence upon English style of the rapid writing and careless reading of the present day. One can hardly take up a book or serious magazine article without finding allusions to the Bible on every page. An interesting article on the political situation in England, written not by a literary man, but by a professional statesman, contained more than a dozen biblical allusions, and the article owed its fine literary character almost entirely to the writer's familiarity with the Old Testament. The same discovery may be made in almost any work of literature, if the reader is sufficiently familiar with the Bible to detect the allusions to it. But precisely here is the difficulty. Few young people of today have a verbal acquaintance with the Old Testament, and it will soon become necessary to edit all our greatest writers, even such novelists as Hardy and Stevenson, with explanations of the biblical allusions.
We consider it a point of education to make our children familiar with the mythology of Greece and Rome, of the Norse folk and the old Germans, chiefly that they may understand what they read. We deem that man uncultured who does not recognize quotations from the classics, or is not able to make them at need. Here is the greatest classic of all time. Let us study it as we would study any classic, that we may be able to wring from it its fullest meaning. Goethe says:
I am convinced that the Bible becomes ever more beautiful the more one understands it; that is, the more one gets insight to see that every word which we take generally and make special application of to our own wants has had, in connection with certain circumstances, with certain relations of time and place, a peculiar direct individual reference of its own.
And if, indeed, this classic is, as most of us believe, inspired by God in a sense in which no other book is inspired, if in it we find the history of his converse with the sons of men in the form in which he has chosen to give it to us, then no study is amiss which gives the clue to its half-hints, which brings light to its obscurities, and shows its true character, as the diary of the converse of heaven with earth, the day-book of the Eternal God.
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