“What is interesting is not Tyndale’s negation of the allegories but his positive attitude towards the literal sense. He loves it for its ‘grossness’ . . . Tyndale’s fame as an English writer has been most unjustly overshadowed both by the greater fame of More and by his own reputation as a translator. He seems …
With An Absolutely Delicious Aside
“Part of the unpleasant side of The Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the extreme narrowness and exclusiveness of Bunyan’s religious outlook. The faith is limited ‘to one small sect and all are damned beside’. But I suppose that all who read old books have learned somehow or other to make historical allowances for that sort of …
An Ear for Natural Cadence
“We must attribute Bunyan’s style to a perfect natural ear, a great sensibility for the idiom and cadence of popular speech, a long experience in addressing unlettered audiences, and a freedom from bad models” (C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, p. 150).
An Ear for Dialogue
“But this fault is rare in Bunyan — far rarer than in Piers Plowman. If such dead wood were removed from The Pilgrim’s Progress the book would not be very much shorter than it is. The greater part of it is enthralling narrative or genuinely dramatic dialogue. Bunyan stands with Malory and Trollope as a …
And Not the Rhymey-Dimey Stuff Either
“At all events, Milton was a Puritan born, and bred at the Puritan University, Cambridge, one of those Puritans out of whom came the civilization of our New England, and by that token essentially the prevailing civilization of our whole American Commonwealth” (Osgood, Poetry as a Means of Grace, p. 82). Although there are a …
The Greatest Wedding Song in the World . . . and by a Puritan
[Speaking of Edmund Spenser] “The point is that in those particular sonnets which all agree were addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, and supremely in his Epithalamion, the greatest wedding song in the world, he sings with the same full-throated ease, the same happy assurance that we hear in the contemporary and mature Hymn of Heavenly Love …
Original Puritanism
[Elizabeth I] “released their creative power. She was a Queen, not a King, and all that was left of medieval chivalry idealized her into an incarnation of England, a militant heroine inseparable in imagination from the brave, young new nation who was saving herself from those proud old foes, the Papacy, Spain, and France, that …
Recovering Its Acids and Spices
“The Reformers not only revered their biblical heritage, but recovered its energies, its acids, its spices, its ‘red wine and cheese’, the sting and zing of the Magnificat. We should therefore be chary of assuming that a more verbal spirituality, which Protestantism undoubtedly was, was necessarily more bookish or intellectual. It commuted between the lofty …
Reformational Rap
“The Psalms, which Luther loved so much as peerles barometers of the human heart, leapt out of his translations in sparkling, associative, direct, venacular language, as urgent in their rhythms as rap, his reverent irreverence rediscovering them as the wild poetry and lyrical yearning which they are” (Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation, pp. …
Sometimes They Argue
“The Reformers did not dredge Scripture for prooftexts. The Bible’s light and clarity were not so much a doctrinal source or a blueprint for structural change. Rather, when we read their sermons and pamphlets we find biblical personalities and images swimming up to the surface of their minds. An irruption, explosion, eruption of the biblical …