Charles Kingsley is grouped hardly fairly in this list, because he was himself a preacher, and naturally all his work would feel the power of the Book, which he chiefly studied.Professor Masson says that "there is not one of his novels which has not the power of Christianity for its theme."No voice was raised more effectively for the beginning of the new social era in England than his.Alton Locke and Yeast are epoch- making books in the life of the common people of England.Even Hypatia, which is supposed to have been written to represent entirely pagan surroundings, is full of Bible phrases and ideas.
Lord Macaulay had been held up for many a day as one of the masters of style.Such great writing is not to be traced to any one influence.It could not have been easy to write as Macaulay wrote.Thackeray may have exaggerated in saying that Macaulay read twenty books to write a sentence, and traveled a hundred miles to make a description; but all his writing shows the power of taking infinite pains.It becomes the more important, therefore, that Macaulay held the Bible in such estimate as he did."In calling upon Lady Holland one day, Lord Macaulay was led to bring the attention of his fair hostess to the fact that the use of the word 'talent' to mean gifts or powers of the mind, as when we speak of men of talent, came from the use of the word in Christ's parable of the talents.In a letter to his sister Hannah he describes the incident, and says that Lady Holland was evidently ignorant of the parable.'I did not tell her,' he adds, 'though I might have done so, that a person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible at his fingers' ends.' " That Macaulay practised his own preaching you would quickly find by referring to his essays.Take three sentences from the Essay on Milton: "The principles of liberty were the scoff of every growing courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean.In every high place worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch, and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and brightest children.Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, until the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth to wander on the face of the earth and to be a by- word and a shaking of the head to the nations." In three sentences here are six allusions to Scripture.In that same essay, in the paragraphs on the Puritans, the allusions are a multitude.They are not even quoted.They are taken for granted.In his Essay on Machiavelli, though the subject does not suggest it, he falls into Scriptural phrases over and over.Listen to this, "Atime was at hand when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries"; or this, "All the curses pronounced of old against Tyre seemed to have fallen on Venice.Her merchants already stood afar off lamenting for their great city"; or this, "In the energetic language of the prophet, Machiavelli was mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw."And if Macaulay is baffling in the abundance of material, surely John Ruskin is worse.Carlyle's English style ran into excess of roughness; Macaulay's ran into excess of balance and delicacy.John Ruskin's continued to be the smoothest, easiest style in our English literature.He also was a Hebraic spirit, but of the gentler type.Mr.Chapman calls him the Elisha to Carlyle's, Elijah, a capital comparison.[1] Ruskin is one of the few writers who have told us what formed their style.In the first chapter of Praeterita he pays tribute to his mother.He himself chose to read Walter Scott and Pope's Homer; but he says: "My mother forced me by steady daily toil to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart, as well as to read it, every syllable aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse about once a year; and to that discipline-- patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe not only a knowledge of the Book which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains and the best part of my taste in literature." He thinks reading Scott might have led to other novels of a poorer sort.Reading Pope might have led to Johnson's or Gibbon's English; but "it was impossible to write entirely superficial and formal English" while he knew "by heart the thirty- second of Deuteronomy, the fifteenth of I Corinthians, the One hundred and nineteenth Psalm, or the Sermon on the Mount." In the second chapter of Praeterita he is even more explicit."I have next with deeper gratitude to chronicle what I owed to my mother for the resolute persistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scripture, as to make every word of them familiar in my ear as habitual music, yet in that familiarity reverenced as transcending all thought and ordering all conduct." He tells how his mother drilled him.As soon as he could read she began a course of Bible work with him.They read alternate verses from the Genesis to the Revelation, names and all.Daily he had to commit verses of the Scripture.
He hated the One hundred and nineteenth Psalm most; but he lived to cherish it most.In his old Bible he found the list of twenty-six chapters taught by his mother.
[1] English Literature in Account with Religion.
