Imagine for a moment that the Bible did not exist, that no Englishman had ever read one line of it, that the religious notions which it inculcates were without expression in any such established standard. Our way of looking at life and at things suprasensual, our maxims of conduct, our ideals of feeling, would obviously be something widely unlike those which we now entertain. A nation’s literature is the expression of a nation’s soul. Give us a different soul, and the expression will convey that difference. We cannot separate literature from moral conceptions and moral tone, and therefore, in a sense, the Hebrews have determined our literature more than all other influences combined. And there is this manifest and vastly important difference between the influence of the Bible and the influence of any other work. The Biblical thoughts have become part of our earliest, youngest, and most plastic selves. We are born into them, and brought up in them, as something natural to ourselves. The English heart and mind are now partly made of Hebrew thoughts and ideals. This fact is so obvious that we need not pursue it further. To other literatures we have looked for models to imitate and notions to borrow; to the Biblical literature we have looked for a transfusion of all our thinking. But there is also a purely literary effect of the Bible, concerning which a few words must be said. Who can estimate the immense extent to which Biblical imagery and Biblical phrase—what one may call Biblical style and Hebrew style—have determined the style of English writers? Remember that the average English child is brought up on the Bible, that he reads, marks, learns, and inwardly digests it; that its diction and its figures of speech persist, however loosely, in his memory. What is the result? Is it not that, though in a less degree than with the Puritans, there remains, consciously or unconsciously, a habit of imitating those figures and further developing them; of imitating that diction, and carrying it into his higher forms of speech and his writings? Take the great preachers and religious prose writers from Jeremy Taylor to Cardinal Newman, and observe how their language unconsciously follows the rhythm, clothes itself in the dignity, and repeats the very phraseology, of the authorized version of the scriptures. Take poets like Milton, or mere verse-writers like Akenside, and see how their language seems to echo the language of the Testaments, Old and New.