There is in fact, Gentlemen, no such thing as 'mere literature.' Pedants have coined that contemptuous term to express a figmentary concept of their own imagination or--to be more accurate, an hallucination of wrath--having about as much likeness to a _vera causa_ as had the doll which (if you remember) Maggie Tulliver used to beat in the garret whenever, poor child, the world went wrong with her somehow. The thoughts, actions and passions of men became literature by the simple but difficult process of being recorded in memorable speech; but in that process neither the real thing recorded nor the author is evacuated. _Belles lettres, Fine Art_ are odious terms, for which no clean-thinking man has any use. There is no such thing in the world as _belles lettres_; if there were, it would deserve the name. As for _Fine Art,_ the late Professor Butcher bequeathed to us a translation of Aristotle's "Poetics" with some admirable appendixes--the whole entitled "Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art." Aristotle never in his life had a theory of Fine Art as distinct from other art: nor (I wager) can you find in his discovered works a word for any such thing. Now if Aristotle had a concept of `fine' art as distinguished from other art, he was man enough to find a name for it. His omission to do anything of the sort speaks for itself. So you should beware of any teacher who would treat the Bible or any part of it as 'fine writing,' mere literature. IV Let me, having said this, at once enter a _caveat,_ a qualification. Although men do not go to the stake for the cadences, the phrases of our Authorised Version, it remains true that these cadences, these phrases, have for three hundred years exercised a most powerful effect upon their emotions. They do so by association of ideas by the accreted memories of our race enwrapping connotation around a word, a name--say the name _Jerusalem,_ or the name _Sion_: And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Sion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. It must be known to you, Gentlemen, that these words can affect men to tears who never connect them in thought with the actual geographical Jerusalem; who connect it in thought merely with a quite different native home from which they are exiles. Here and there some one man may feel a similar emotion over Landor's Tanagra, think not I forget....