Every one knew the Bible. The buirdly farmer read it night and morning regularly, summer and winter, to his family and servants; and the lone old woman stopped her wheel to read it in her thatched cot miles away on the moor among the peats, the heather, and the pee-wheets. They were familiar with Moses who had never heard of Robert Peel, and they were intimate with the Siege of Jericho who knew nothing of the Siege of Badajos. David was not only King of Israel; he was, practically, King of rural Scotland. Never by the Waters of Babel were the Songs of Zion sung more devoutly than by the Nith and the Cairn.
A remnant of Covenanting times, the phraseology of the Bible entered into the parlance of ordinary life, always solemnly, never irreverently. This custom sank deep into my childhood's speech, and subsequently into my literary style. I have read many, many books now besides the Bible; but its English and its forms of expression are even yet the bed-rock upon which the edifice of my diction stands. Those who know me know that I am neither irreverent nor ungrateful. The book that inspired my earliest awe does not lightly provoke my most recent scoff. A book from which I learnt so much—from which, at my mother's knee, I learnt how to read, does not find me an ungrateful recipient of its blessings and benefits. I know its antique nooks of familiar quaintness; I know its glimpses into the simple heart of the olden world; I know its curious tales and fascinating incidents; I know how the comet of its history trails its tail through a chaos of legendary mist; I know the magnificent fervour of its devotional passages; I know the artless simplicity of its prose; I know the lurid thunder-light of its poetry; I know its piping times of peace by the Jordan or the Kedron; I know its fury of fire and sword, the army of the Lord of Hosts, the rush of the chariot, the thrust of the spear; the buckler, the javelin, and garments rolled in blood.
It is not the Bible and the pretensions it makes for itself that I assail; it is the Bible and the pretensions in regard to it put forth by Protestant Christianity. Taken for what it really is—a collection of more or less connected tracts belonging to times more or less remote,
