—­permeating the house, subtly instilled by the very accent of his father’s and his mother’s speech.  For the grown man ...  I happen to come from a part of England [Ed.:  Cornwall] where men, in all my days, have been curiously concerned with religion and are yet so concerned; so much that you can scarce take up a local paper and turn to the correspondence column but you will find some heated controversy raging over Free Will and Predestination, the Validity of Holy Orders, Original Sin, Redemption of the many or the few: 

     Go it Justice, go it Mercy! 
     Go it Douglas, go it Percy!

But the contestants do not write in the language their fathers used.  They seem to have lost the vocabulary, and to have picked up, in place of it, the jargon of the Yellow Press, which does not tend to clear definition on points of theology.  The mass of all this controversial stuff is no more absurd, no more frantic, than it used to be:  but in language it has lost its dignity with its homeliness.  It has lost the colouring of the Scriptures, the intonation of the Scriptures, the Scriptural habit.

If I turn from it to a passage in Bunyan, I am conversing with a man who, though he has read few other books, has imbibed and soaked the Authorised Version into his fibres so that he cannot speak but Biblically.  Listen to this: 

As to the situation of this town, it lieth just between the two worlds, and the first founder, and builder of it, so far as by the best, and most authentic records I can gather, was one Shaddai; and he built it for his own delight.  He made it the mirror, and glory of all that he made, even the Top-piece beyond anything else that he did in that country:  yea, so goodly a town was Mansoul, when first built, that it is said by some, the Gods at the setting up thereof, came down to see it, and sang for joy....

The wall of the town was well built, yea so fast and firm was it knit and compact together, that had it not been for the townsmen themselves, they could not have been shaken, or broken for ever.

Or take this: 

Now as they were going along and talking, they espied a Boy feeding his Father’s Sheep.  The Boy was in very mean Cloaths, but of a very fresh and well-favoured Countenance, and as he sate by himself he Sung....  Then said their Guide, Do you hear him?  I will dare to say, that this Boy lives a merrier Life, and wears more of that Herb called Heart’s-ease in his Bosom, than he that is clad in Silk and Velvet.

I choose ordinary passages, not solemn ones in which Bunyan is consciously scriptural.  But you cannot miss the accent.