The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
We need spend little time in discussing the influence of the English Bible
on Thomas Carlyle. He does not often use the Scripture for his main
theme; but he is constantly making Biblical allusions. On a railway
journey when I was rereading Carlyle's _Historical Sketches_, I found a
direct Biblical reference for every five pages, and almost numberless
allusions beside.
The "Everlasting Yea," of which he says much, he gets, as you at once
recognize, from the Scripture. His "Heroes and Hero Worship" is based on
an idea of heroism which he learned from the Bible. He is an Old Testament
prophet of present times; and, while he degenerated into a scold before he
was through with it, he yet spoke with the thunderous voice of a true
prophet, and much of the time in the language of the prophets. Some one
said once that the only real reverence Carlyle ever had was for the person
of Christ. Certainly there is no note of sneer, but of the profoundest
regard for the teaching, the ideas and the history of the Scripture.
The name of Charles Dickens suggests a different atmosphere. He is a New
Testament prophet. Where Carlyle has caught the spirit of rugged power in
the Old Testament, Dickens has caught the sense of kindly love in the New
Testament. Dickens's love for the child, the fact that he could draw
children as he could draw no one else and make them lovable, suggests the
value to him of those frequent references which he makes to Christ setting
a child in the midst of the disciples. It is notable, too, how often
Dickens uses the great Scripture phrases for his most dramatic climaxes.
There are not in literature many finer uses of Scripture than the scene in
_Bleak House_, where the poor waif Joe is dying, and while his friend
teaches him the Lord's Prayer he sees the light coming. A Christmas season
without Dickens's _Christmas Carol_ would be incomplete; but there again
is the Scripture idea pressed forward.
George Eliot surely, if any writer, was under the spell of the Scripture.
One of her critics calls her the historian of conscience. All of her
heroes and heroines know the lash of the law. She knows very little about
the New Testament, one would judge; but the one thing about which she has
no doubt is certainly the reign of moral law. If a man will not yield to
its power, it will break him. There is no such thing as breaking the moral
law; there is nothing but being broken by it. Her characters are always
quoting the Bible. They preach a great deal. She tells that she herself
wrote Dinah Morris's sermon on the green with tears in her eyes. She meant
it all. While her own religious faith was clouded, her finest characters
are never clouded in their religious faith, and she grounds their faith
quite invariably on their early training in the Scripture. It is an
interesting fact that George Eliot has no principal story which has not in
it a church, and a priest or a preacher, with all that they involve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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