Faith & Spirit Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

There is a polite trapdoor in Hearn's sentence: it sounds like a mild curricular suggestion, but it smuggles in a hard standard for what counts as "educated". By framing biblical literacy as merely "some general knowledge", he avoids sectarian thunder while still insisting that English literature is structurally entangled with Scripture. The phrasing does two things at once: it reassures the modern reader that he is not demanding belief, only competence; it also implies that skipping the Bible isn't a neutral choice but a self-inflicted handicap.

The intent is practical, almost diagnostic. Hearn is pointing to the Bible not as holy text but as a shared codebase: narrative templates (fall, exile, redemption), archetypes (the prodigal, the tempter), a storehouse of aphoristic rhythms, and a thick web of allusions that writers from Milton to Morrison either inherit, resist, or remix. His subtext is about power and access. If you can't hear the biblical echo, you will misread tone, miss irony, and flatten moral argument into plot. Your "literary education" becomes incomplete not because you lack piety, but because you're locked out of a long conversation conducted in references.

Context sharpens the claim. Writing in the late 19th century, Hearn sits in an era when the Bible saturated schooling, public speech, and print culture, even as higher criticism and secular modernity were destabilizing religious authority. His line is a bridge: keep the Bible on the syllabus, not as doctrine, but as cultural infrastructure. It’s a defense of close reading disguised as common sense.