r their part,
Sitting about her feet.
Hierusalem, my happy home,
Would God I were in thee!
Would God my woes were at an end,
Thy joys that I might see!

You cannot (I say) get away from these connotations accreted
through your own memories and your fathers'; as neither can you
be sure of getting free of any great literature in any tongue,
once it has been written. Let me quote you a passage from
Cardinal Newman [he is addressing the undergraduates of the
Catholic University of Dublin]:

How real a creation, how _sui generis,_ is the style of
Shakespeare, or of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book,
or of Swift, or of Pope, or of Gibbon, or of Johnson!

[I pause to mark how just this man can be to his great enemies.
Pope was a Roman Catholic, you will remember; but Gibbon was an
infidel.]

Even were the subject-matter without meaning, though in truth
the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense, still the
style would, on _that_ supposition, remain as perfect and
original a work as Euclid's "Elements" or a symphony of
Beethoven.

And, like music, it has seized upon the public mind: and the
literature of England is no longer a mere letter, printed in
books and shut up in libraries, but it is a living voice, which
has gone forth in its expressions and its sentiments into the
world of men, which daily thrills upon our ears and syllables
our thoughts, which speaks to us through our correspondents and
dictates when we put pen to paper. Whether we will or no, the
phraseology of Shakespeare, of the Protestant formularies, of
Milton, of Pope, of Johnson's Table-talk, and of Walter Scott,
have become a portion of the vernacular tongue, the household
words, of which perhaps we little guess the origin, and the
very idioms of our familiar conversation.... So tyrannous is
the literature of a nation; it is too much for us. We cannot
destroy or reverse it.... We cannot make it over again. It is a
great work of man, when it is no work of God's.... We cannot
undo the past. English Literature will ever _have been_
Protestant.

V

I am speaking, then, to hearers who would read not to contradict
and confute; who have an inherited sense of the English Bible;
and who have, even as I, a store of associated ideas, to be
evoked by any chance phrase from it; beyond this, it may be,
nothing that can be called scholarship by any stretch of the
term.

Very w