"
"Do you know England well?" asked Mr. Heard.
"Very little. I have spent a few days in Liverpool and London, here and
there, on my periodical journeyings to the States. Kind friends supply
me with English books and papers; the excellent Sir Herbert Street
sends me more than I can possibly digest! I confess that much of what I
read was an enigma to me till I had studied the Bible. Its teachings
seem to have filtered, warm and fluid, through the veins of your
national and private life. Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing
the whole body into a kind of crystal. Your ethics are stereotyped in
black-letter characters. A gargoyle morality."
"It is certainly difficult," said Mr. van Koppen, "for an Anglo-Saxon
to appraise this book objectively. His mind has been saturated with it
in childhood to such an extent as to take on a definite bias."
"Like the ancients with their ILIAD. Where is a truer poet than Homer?
Yet the worship of him became a positive bane to independent creative
thought.
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