The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions, saw suddenly expunged--"remorselessly expunged"--from literature "every text, every phrase, which had been quoted from the Bible, not only in the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction." "Never before," he says, "had I any adequate idea of the extent to which the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with the habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of genius. A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and was transformed into so much waste paper. It was almost impossible to look into any book of merit, and read ten pages together, without coming to some provoking erasures and mutilations, which made whole passages perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest passages of Shakespeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with lacunae. I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought. Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon's Aphorisms were reduced to enigmatical nonsense." A scholarly article upon Homeric Characters in and out of Homer, published in The London Quarterly, 1857, opens with this passage: "To one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines of such force and vigor that they have become from his day to our own the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since his time, besides finding his way even into the impenetrable East, he has found literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within the limits of the western world. Like the sun, which furnishes with its light the courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their inhabitants, he has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions of minds never brought into direct contact with his works, and even millions hardly aware of his existence."